Lives of Girls and Women (20 page)

Talk along these lines was irresistible, and yet, walking on down River Street, I often wished I had kept my secret to myself, as we all do wish we had kept our secrets to ourselves. “Frank Wales can't get hard-ons yet because his voice hasn't changed,” Naomi told me—no doubt relaying another piece of information from her mother—and I was interested but disturbed, as if I had got my feelings about him wrongly labelled, directed into an entirely unexpected channel. What I wanted from Frank Wales I did not really know. I had a daydream about him, often repeated. I imagined he walked home with me after
a performance of the operetta. (It was becoming known that boys— some boys—would walk home with girls—some girls—on that night, but Naomi and I did not even discuss this possibility; we were chary of voicing real hopes.) We walked through the absolutely silent streets of Jubilee, walked under the street lights with our shadows whirling and sinking on the snow, and there in the beautiful, dark, depopulated town Frank would surround me, either with real, implausible, but cool and tender, singing, or, in the more realistic versions of the dream, simply with the unheard music of his presence. He would be wearing the pointed cap, almost a fool's cap, and the cloak patched with various colours, predominantly blue, that Miss Farris had made for him. I would often invent this dream for myself at the edge of sleep, and then it was strange how content it would make me, how it would make peace and consolation flow, and I would close my eyes and float on it into my real dreams which were never so kind, but full of gritty small problems, lost socks, not being able to find the Grade Eight classroom, or terrors, such as dancing on the hall stage and finding I had forgotten to put my headdress on.

At the Dress Rehearsal Miss Farris cried for all to hear, “I might as well leap off the Town Hall! I might as well leap now! Are you all prepared to take the responsibility?” She pulled her spread fingers down her cheeks so hard it looked as if they might leave furrows. “Back-back-back, forget the last fifteen minutes! Forget the last half-hour! Begin again from the beginning!” Mr. Boyce smiled quite comfortably and struck the notes of the opening chorus.

T
HEN THE NIGHT ITSELF
. The Time come, the audience packed in, all that shuffling coughing dressed-up expectancy where we were used to having darkness and echoes. The stage was so much brighter and so much more crowded, with cardboard house-fronts and a cardboard fountain, than we had ever known it to be. Everything happened too quickly, and then it was over, gone; it did not matter how it was done, it had to do, could not be retrieved. Nothing could be retrieved. After all the practising it was almost unbelievable that the operetta was really happening. Mr. Boyce wore tails, which people would say looked ridiculous.

The Council Chambers directly below the stage—and connected to it by a back staircase—were divided into dressing rooms with sheets hung on cords, and Miss Farris with an apron over her new, peplumed, cerise pink dress was painting eyebrows and mouths, putting red dots at the corners of eyes, dabbing ochre on earlobes, dousing hair with cornstarch. There was a terrible uproar. Vital parts of costumes were lost; somebody had stepped on the hem of the Mayor's wife's dress, ripping it out at the waist. Alma Cody claimed she had taken four aspirins for her nerves and now was dizzy and in a cold sweat, sitting on the floor, saying she was going to faint. Some of the sheets fell down. Girls were seen in their underwear by boys, and vice versa. Members of the chorus who were not supposed to enter the Council Chambers at all, got in and lined up boldly in their dark skirts and white blouses, and Miss Farris, past noticing, went ahead and painted their faces too.

She was past noticing much. We expected her to be wild, as she had been all week. Nothing of the sort. “I wonder if she's drunk,” said Naomi, applecheeked in her motherly kirtle. “I smelled a smell on her.” I had not smelled a thing but Wild Roses Toilet Water and a whiff of that peppery sweat. However she glittered—sequins outlining the jacket of her dress in circus-military style—and she glided, unlike herself, speaking softly, moving through all this turmoil with bountiful acceptance.

“Pin up your skirt, Louise,” she said to the Mayor's wife, “there isn't a thing you can do about it now. From the audience it won't be noticed.”

Won't be noticed! She who had been so hard-to-suit about the smallest details, had forced mothers to rip things out and do them three times over!

“A big strong healthy girl like you could take six aspirins and never blink an eye,” she said to Alma Cody. “Up on your feet, my lady!”

The dancers were dressed in bright cotton skirts, red, yellow, green, blue, and white embroidered drawstring blouses. Alma had loosened the drawstring of her blouse to show the impudent beginnings of her bust. Even that, Miss Farris just smiled at, and floated by. Anything that wanted to, it seemed, might happen now.

Near the beginning of the dance my headdress, a tall medieval cone of cardboard wrapped in yellow net, with a bit of limp veil, began to slide slightly, disastrously to the side of my head. I had to tilt my head as if I had a wry neck, and go all through the dance like that, teeth clenched, glassily smiling.

After “God Save the King,” after the last curtain, we ran up the street to the photographer's, all in our costumes still, without coats, to have our pictures taken. We were all crushed together, waiting, among the sepia waterfalls and Italian gardens of his discarded backdrops. Dale McLaughlin found a chair, the kind in which fathers of families used to sit for their pictures, wife and children clustered round them. He sat down, and Alma Cody sat boldly on his knee. She flopped against his neck.

“I'm so weak. I'm a wreck. Did you know I took four aspirins?”

I was standing in front of them. “Sit down, sit down,” said Dale jovially, and pulled me down on top of Alma, who screamed. He opened his long legs and dumped both of us on the floor. Everybody was laughing. My hat and veil had fallen right off, and Dale picked it up and set it on my head backwards so the veil fell over my face.

“You look gorgeous like that. Can't see a thing.”

I tried to dust it off and get it on the right way. Frank Wales appeared suddenly between the curtains, after having his picture taken, alone, in his lordly, beggarly costume.

“Dancers! Next!” called the photographer's wife, angrily, sticking her head through the curtains. I was the last to go in, because I was still trying to get my headdress on properly. “Look in my glasses,” Dale said, so I did, though it was distracting seeing his lonely, crossed eye behind my reflection. He was making leering faces.

“You ought to walk her home,” he said to Frank Wales.

Frank Wales said, “Who?”

“Her,” said Dale, nodding at me. My head bobbed in his glasses. “Don't you know her? She sits in front of you.”

I was afraid it would turn out to be a joke. I felt sweat start out of my armpits, always the first sign of fear of humiliation. My face swam in Dale's foolish eyes. It was too much, too dangerous, to be flung like this into the very text of my dream.

However Frank Wales said consideringly, and as gallantly as anybody could, “I would too. If she didn't live such a long ways out.”

He was thinking of when I lived out on the Flats Road, and was famous in the class for my long walk to school. Didn't he know I lived in town now? No time to tell him; no way, either, and there was still the smallest risk, that I would never take, of having him laugh at me, his quiet, reflectively snorting laugh, and say he was only kidding.

“All dancers!”
cried the photographer's wife, and I turned blindly and followed her through the curtains. My disappointment was after a moment drowned in gratitude. The words he had said kept repeating themselves in my mind, as if they were words of praise and pardon, the intonation so mild, matter-of-fact, acknowledging and lovely. A feeling of rare peacefulness like that of my daydream settled on me during the picture-taking and carried me back through the cold to the Council Chambers and stayed with me while we changed, even with Naomi saying, “Everybody was killing themselves laughing, the way you held your head when you were dancing. You looked like a puppet with its neck broken. You couldn't help it, though.” She was in a bad, and worsening, mood. She whispered in my ear, “You know all that stuff I told you about Dale McLaughlin? That was all a lie. That was all an act I put on to get your secrets out of you, ha ha.”

Miss Farris was automatically picking up and folding costumes. She had cornstarch spilled down the front of her cerise-pink dress, and her chest actually looked concave, as if something had collapsed inside it. She hardly bothered to notice us, except to say, “Leave the rosettes off your shoes, girls, leave those too. Everything will have its use another day.”

I walked around to the front of the hall and there was my mother waiting with Fern Dogherty, and my brother Owen in his flag drill outfit (the younger grades had got to do inconsequential things, like flag drill, rhythm band numbers, before the curtain went up on the operetta), poking his flag, which he had been allowed to keep, into a snowdrift.

“Whatever kept you so long?” my mother said. “It was lovely, did you have a crick in your neck? That Wales boy was the only one on
the entire stage who forgot to take his cap off for “God Save the King.” My mother had these various odd little pockets of conventionality.

What happened, after the operetta? In one week it had sunk from sight. Seeing some part of a costume, meant to be returned, hanging in the cloakroom was like seeing the Christmas tree, leaning against the back porch in January, browning, bits of tinsel stuck to it, reminder of a time whose hectic expectations, and effort, seem now to have been somewhat misplaced. Mr. McKenna's solid ground was reassuring under our feet. Every day we did eighteen arithmetic problems, to catch up, and listened securely to such statements as, “And now because of the time we have lost we are all going to have to put our noses to the grindstone.”
Noses to the grindstone, shoulders to the wheel, feet on the pedals
—all these favourite expressions of Mr. McKenna's, their triteness and predictability, seemed now oddly satisfying. We carried home large piles of books, and spent our time drawing maps of Ontario and the Great Lakes—the hardest map in the world to draw—and learning “The Vision of Sir Launfall.”

Everybody's seat was moved; the housecleaning of desks and change of neighbours turned out to be stimulating. Frank Wales now sat across the room. And one day the janitor came with his long ladder and removed an object which had been visible in one of the hanging lights since Hallowe'en. We had all believed this to be a French safe, and Dale McLaughlin's name had been connected with it; less scandalously, though just as mysteriously, it was discovered to be an old sock. It seemed to be a time for dispelling illusions.
Getting down to brass tacks,
Mr. McKenna would have said.

My love did not of course melt away altogether as the season changed. My daydreams continued, but were derived from the past. They had nothing new to feed on. And the change of season did make a difference. It seemed to me that winter was the time for love, not spring. In winter the habitable world was so much contracted; out of that little shut-in space we lived in, fantastic hopes might bloom. But spring revealed the ordinary geography of the place; the long brown roads, the old cracked sidewalks underfoot, all the tree branches broken off in winter storms, that had to be cleared out of the yards. Spring revealed distances, exactly as they were.

Frank Wales did not go on to high school as most of the others in the class did, but got a job working for Jubilee Dry Cleaners. At this time the dry cleaners did not have a truck. Most people picked up their clothes but a few things were delivered. It was Frank Wales's job to carry them through town, and we would meet him sometimes doing this when we were coming from school. He would say hello in the quick, serious, courteous way of a business man or working man speaking to those who have not yet entered the responsible world. He always held the clothes shoulder-high, with a dutifully crooked elbow; when he started working he had not yet reached his full height.

For a while—about six months, I think—I would go into Jubilee Dry Cleaners with a vestigial flutter of excitement, a hope of seeing him, but he was never in the front shop; it was always the man who owned the place, or his wife—both small, exhausted, bluish-looking people, who looked as if dry-cleaning fluids had stained them, or got into their blood.

Miss Farris was drowned in the Wawanash River. This happened when I was in high school, so it was only three or four years since
The Pied Piper,
yet when I heard the news I felt as if Miss Farris existed away back in time, and on a level of the most naive and primitive feelings, and mistaken perceptions. I thought her imprisoned in that time, and was amazed that she had broken out to commit this act. If it was an act.

It was possible, though not at all likely, that Miss Farris would have gone walking along the river bank north of town, near the cement bridge, and that she might have slipped and fallen into the water and not been able to save herself. Neither was it impossible, the Jubilee
Herald-Advance
pointed out, that she had been taken from her house by person or persons unknown, and forced into the river. She had left her house in the evening, without locking the door, and all the lights were on. Some people who were excited by the thought of marvellous silent crimes happening in the night always believed it was murder. Others out of kindness or fearfulness held it to be an accident. These were the two possibilities that were argued and discussed. Those who believed that it was suicide, and most people, finally, did, were not so
anxious to talk about it, and why should they be? Because there was nothing to say. It was a mystery presented without explanation and without hope of explanation, in all insolence, like a clear blue sky. No revelation here.