Annabel (30 page)

It was hard to find something as small as a hand mirror among the multitudes of products in the drugstore. As he searched he came across the hosiery rack, and decided to buy a pair of extra-sheer stockings for a five-foot-nine person weighing between 145 and 160 pounds. The shoes might feel more comfortable with stockings instead of the socks. As he carried the stockings past an island stacked with pots of makeup, a man spoke. The man was bigger than Wayne, with hair that came to his shoulders. He had a kind face. He held a brush with a gold handle.

“Would you like to have a consultation?”

“What?”

“I am here for Lancôme. If you would like, I can show you how to apply colours that are best for your face. You have no obligation to buy anything. If you do not have time I understand completely.”

The man had the kind face of Robin Williams. He looked like the kind of man who would be riding on a motorcycle through the hills with a little boy, his son, in a movie. The movie would be all about how he tried to take care of his son through heartbreaking circumstances. He was looking at Wayne now and offering him a makeup consultation with no trace of irony. There was nothing quizzical in his face. Either he believed Wayne was a woman or he had chosen to treat him with dignity. Wayne could not tell which. There was a stool under a lamp and Wayne sat on it.

“Women’s beauty goes beyond appearances,” said the man who looked like Robin Williams. “It is an emotion on the very surface of your skin.”

“I’ve never worn makeup.”

“We believe every woman is beautiful. I am not going to do anything to your face that will be harsh or look unnatural.”

“I wouldn’t know the first place to start.”

“We start with a coat of foundation.” The makeup artist dabbed a dot on Wayne’s face. It was hard for Wayne not to laugh at the idea of foundation coated on his face. The procedure reminded him of painting walls. But the makeup artist had such a sympathetic face, and was so careful with his touch, Wayne did not want to hurt him.

“I am going to blend the foundation on one half of your face and show you.” Wayne closed his eyes and let the makeup artist brush the paint on his cheek and eyelid, his forehead and chin. He wondered what the artist’s real name was. He was afraid he might accidentally call him Robin. There was something incredibly relaxing about sitting in the stool under the white light and having your face brushed so gently. Wayne wondered if the makeup artist had any idea how it felt to receive his work.

“If you go out,” the artist said, “and it rains, even if you swim, it will be all right. It will not run or smear. Even if you cry. Life is life after all, and maybe you will cry.”

He said this with kindness, and Wayne had a sense of the world being a place where everyone had the sorrows he had, whereas, before sitting here with Robin Williams, the world had been a place where most people coped much better than Wayne did. Wayne pictured everyone in the rain with their sorrows, which were quiet, personal sorrows of every kind, and Robin Williams had studied them all. Did every woman feel this way once she had accepted the offer of a makeup consultation, or was this artist unique? Wayne had no idea. He thought of the name Robin, how blue the egg of a robin was in spring and how a robin meant certain hope.

The artist told Wayne that you wear colours on your face that are the opposite of the colours in your eyes. He showed him how to create a lifetime supply of lipstick by using a pot of face powder for pigment and mixing it with any clear lip gloss.

“If you take this face powder meant for women with dark skin, you can push it into your lash line with a brush and one pot will last you for years.”

“Thank you,” Wayne said when Robin Williams showed him his new face in the mirror. He wondered if the colour around his eyes made him look harrowed. He was not sure. He decided to have faith for now, and bought the pots. He did not feel that Robin Williams was unscrupulous, or that he was there purely to sell.

“I applied these with a Lancôme brush, but you can use any brush. You do not have to buy Lancôme brushes, which are twenty-four dollars.”

The makeup artist was there to sell pots of makeup, to be sure, but Wayne felt he cared about what he did. Robin Williams felt that life was something in which maybe you would cry, and he gave every woman dignity by tracing her mouth, her eyes, her skin, with kind hands.

When he went back out into the mall, Wayne was glad there were crowds. He thought he might like to come back here in future and just walk or sit in the food court and know no one was interested in him. There was no Frank King, and no Derek Warford. He did not like the mall or find anything in it beautiful. It was ugly, really, as featureless and anonymous as any mall in North America, but this gave him a feeling that he was hiding, just for a while, from daylight and from scrutiny. St. John’s had a hard daylight sharpened by the shale of Signal Hill and the Southside hills. There was no retreating from it downtown or in the Battery. But here in the mall you were anonymous, and you could rest.

But he was sitting in the food court with a hot chocolate in a paper cup, thinking about whether to get noodles from China Hut or some teriyaki chicken from Koya Japan, when he saw someone he knew. At first he hoped it was not the person he thought it was. He did not want that person to see him in the clothes he had bought from Fairweather. Several times now he had thought he saw people he knew from Labrador. It was a thing that happened when you went to a new place. People from your old home seemed to appear, but it was an illusion of place, and when you got close to them, you realized they were not that person at all. This had happened to Wayne a few times. Once he even thought he saw his father, but of course he had not. But this woman looked more and more, the closer she got to Wayne, like his old school principal, Victoria Huskins, the woman who had berated a child in kindergarten for having an accident in the school washroom. The woman responsible for suspending Thomasina Baikie the time she took Wayne to the hospital when he was in grade seven. She had come out of the drugstore where he had just had his face made up by Robin Williams, and she had entered the food court and was now looking around at the different stalls as he had done, trying to decide what she was going to eat, and he was still waiting for the moment when he could tell himself it was certainly not Victoria Huskins, but a stranger, when she recognized him.

31

My Dear Companion

W
HAT HAPPENED, WAYNE WONDERED,
to make a person like Victoria Huskins appear younger after her retirement? Without saying anything about his appearance, she greeted him with what felt like genuine warmth, asked if he was free to chat with her while she had her lunch, and left her bags at his table while she went to get herself a Dairy Queen cheeseburger and a caramel sundae. When she came back to the table, she did not unwrap the burger but began eating the sundae.

“I’m having dessert first.” Her hair was straight instead of being held in a controlled helmet style as it had been when she was his principal, and she had grown it so that it framed her face in a way that was pretty. “How are you, Wayne?”

He felt exposed and had to tell himself it was not like it had been when she was his principal. He had left grade seven long ago. She had faded out of his life, and in senior high there was a new principal. But he felt now that if he did not control his feelings, he would turn into thirteen-year-old Wayne Blake here in front of her, and she would have a principal’s authority over him.

He told himself silently that he had grown up and had left school, had in fact left Croydon Harbour behind, and did not need to feel ashamed that he now sat before Victoria Huskins looking like a young woman instead of a young man. Did he even look feminine? The lights in the food court were not bright. And even if they were, did he look like Annabel or did he look like Wayne? The only people who had given him any idea had been the man he saw earlier in the washroom, who had looked at him strangely, but had Wayne imagined that look? That man, and the makeup artist who looked like Robin Williams, and he had been so kind, so non-judgemental that Wayne still did not know how he appeared, at this moment, to someone like Victoria Huskins. And even if he did look more like Annabel than like Wayne, why should he feel ashamed in front of Victoria Huskins? He wished at that moment that his whole life had not been a secret, that lots of people were like him, instead of his being alone in a world where everyone was secure in their place as either woman or man. His aloneness was what made him feel ashamed, and he did not know why it had to be so. Now he looked at Victoria Huskins as she collected the last of her caramel sauce on the end of a plastic spoon, and he knew she was not what he had thought. There was nothing in her face that matched the idea he had of her when he was younger. She appeared to him to be much more human.

“I’m all right,” Wayne said. “How about you?”

“Retirement is wonderful. I spent most of June in the vegetable garden, and I come down here to see my sisters and my old friends from university and we cackle a lot and talk about living wills and planning for when we get old and feeble, and between that and some painting I’ve always wanted to do, there’s hardly any time left for belly dancing or getting on my stationary bike. In fact I think I might have to sell the bike and just concentrate on the dancing.”

Wayne remembered that Joanne, the waitress in Shelley’s All-Day Breakfast, had told him that women all over the world danced. They danced by themselves, in ways no one knew about. He wanted to ask Victoria Huskins now, Where was the belly dancing when you were the principal of grades kindergarten through seven in Croydon Harbour? But he did not. He could see in her face that she had found a freedom he did not have. Somehow this inflexible woman had become flexible, and she was beautiful in a way that he could not attain, though she was old. He wondered if he was imagining her new flexibility. He wondered if she was the same hard person she had appeared to be in his childhood, and if he was the one who had frozen or petrified, so that even Victoria Huskins was now softer and more human than he was. He did not know who he had become, and now here was Victoria Huskins asking him to tell her what he was doing in St. John’s.

“Are you in university, Wayne? Are you up at Memorial? Tell me what you’re studying. You were always so good at math and science, and art too. I remember when we put the class diagrams of ocean life up on the walls, you had the best drawing in the school. Some kind of anemone, wasn’t it?”

“It was a Tealia anemone.” Wayne was surprised Victoria Huskins remembered his drawing. He had spent a lot of time working out the symmetry of it.

“I always loved the grade six science projects. Are you studying any science now?”

“No.”

“Really? I thought for sure you would do something in science or engineering. But you were good at art too. Are you doing some kind of design or drafting?”

“I’m not at Memorial.”

“Are you at one of the technical colleges?”

“I’m not at any kind of college. I’m working.”

Victoria Huskins had unwrapped her burger but now she looked at it, wrapped it again, and put it in her purse. “People don’t know this,” she said, “but you can reheat a burger and it is every bit as good as it was fresh. What kind of work, Wayne?”

“I’m working for one of the wholesalers on Thorburn Road.”

“What kind of wholesaler?”

“Food. I have my own refrigerated van. I make deliveries all over St. John’s and part of Mount Pearl.”

“What do you deliver, Wayne?”

“Meat. Fish. Different kinds of sausages.”

Victoria Huskins looked him in the eye. She did not linger on his hair or his clothing or his makeup. “So you are selling meat from a van.”

She had not asked him about his appearance. They were a thousand miles from Croydon Harbour. She waited for him to tell her more but did not appear to be curious about his maleness or femaleness.

“I never thought of going to Memorial,” he said. “I’m working on figuring out a lot of other things.”

Now her face changed. “What kind of things?”

Wayne felt his own story amass as a cloud. He could not be coherent about it. He wanted to talk to someone but he did not know how, because somehow the facts, with their tidy labels and medical terms, reduced his whole being to something that he did not want it to be. How could he sit here and tell Victoria Huskins what the doctors had labelled him without reducing himself to the status of a diagram like the one she had mentioned: his grade six diagram of the North Atlantic Tealia anemone? He could not begin to explain, so he sat without words. He did not know if he could trust her, and even if he could have trusted her he could not explain his whole being with words. The cloud rose in him and reached his throat, where it amassed as a blockage that felt leaden and sorrowful. He felt it as a lump that threatened to silence him.

“You are sitting here,” Victoria Huskins said, “the picture of misery. I know what happened at the hospital, Wayne. When you were with me in junior high. Did you know that?”

Wayne had not thought of himself as “with” Victoria Huskins in junior high. He had not thought of her as knowing anything. His father had always made it plain that he should not say a word about his condition to anyone in Croydon Harbour.

“I know everything that happened that day and night, because I made it my business to know. My job meant I needed to be on top of what was going on. It was all confidential, but I do know what happened and I know how it has led to where you are now.”

“How did you know?”

“I asked a friend, Wayne. A friend who had a long history of working at the hospital. I asked Kate Davis. She was the nursing administrator there her whole life, and a very close friend before she died last winter. Kate was my dear companion, and I asked her to get a copy of your file because I needed to know what was going on. I needed it to help me know how to deal with you as a student, and with Thomasina Baikie too.”

“But you fired Thomasina.”

“I didn’t fire her, Wayne. The Labrador East School Board wanted to fire her, because someone saw her in the hospital with you during school hours and she had not notified your parents or followed any of the correct procedures.”

The lip gloss that had been applied by the man who resembled Robin Williams had begun to bother Wayne.

“I convinced them to temporarily suspend her. I told them that while she had broken rules she had done it because it was an emergency situation, and I couldn’t have told them that if I had not believed it in my own mind.”

The lip gloss felt gooey on his mouth. He took a napkin and wiped it off, and he thought about the other makeup that the artist had applied to his face and his eyes. He could feel it on his skin.

“That’s the reason I needed to see your file. But Wayne, that’s not important now. What’s important now is why you aren’t at the university, or at college, or doing anything at all with your mind and your talents.”

Over Wayne’s face were two layers of makeup: the foundation and the daubed powder. He began to feel as if his face was smothering under the paint.

“Youth has carried you so far. That’s what I say about all the children passing through my school.”

Wayne remembered how he had not been sure what to think about the eye makeup when the artist had shown it to him in the mirror. He had wondered if it gave him a harrowed look, a kind of false vulnerability that invited people to look at his face in a way different than anyone had looked at it when he presented himself as male. He had these thoughts now as Victoria Huskins questioned him about his mind and his talents, and he did not know what to tell her or what to tell himself. All he knew was that he had to get to a sink and some water and wash the makeup off his face. Why was it called makeup? Did it claim to make up for some deep failing inside a person, and if it did claim to do so, how could the claim be anything other than a façade and a lie? The makeup exaggerated something. Wayne was not sure what it exaggerated. It exaggerated something and diminished something at the same time, and the green shoes had begun to pinch his feet. He felt as if his feet were growing larger with every moment, and his body too, pressed against the seams of the new pants. He knew his body was not really growing, but he knew too that it did not want to be confined in the new outer casing he had found for it at this mall, and it did not want to listen any more to Victoria Huskins, whose voice surrounded him like a third layer of something clammy and alien, on top of the makeup and the clothes. He knew she meant him no harm, and neither had the makeup artist or the salesgirl at Fairweather. But he remembered a cotton shirt and his favourite jeans at home, if you could call it a home, on Forest Road, and he ached to go there and wash the mask off his face and put cotton next to his skin and let it breathe.

“You start out with all the potential,” Victoria Huskins said, “and you’re young. But what happens is, one day you wake up, Wayne, and potential is a thing of the past.”

He did not want to hear this because he already knew it. What was more, he felt that if potential had existed in Victoria Huskins’s other students, it had perhaps not had a chance to exist in himself. Had it? He felt his father had never believed in him. His mother had hoped but had lived under a layer of sorrow throughout his childhood. The only person who knew whether he had ever had potential of any kind, the only one who had ever told him the truth, was Thomasina Baikie. He did not want to sit here talking to Victoria Huskins. He wanted to see Thomasina.