Lives of Girls and Women (21 page)

Miss Farris in her velvet skating costume, her jaunty fur hat bobbing among the skaters, always marking her out, Miss Farris
con brio,
Miss Farris painting faces in the Council Chambers, Miss Farris floating face down, unprotesting, in the Wawanash river, six days before she was found. Though there is no plausible way of hanging those pictures together—if the last one is true then must it not alter the others?—they are going to have to stay together now.

The Pied Piper; The Gypsy Princess; The Stolen Crown; The Arabian Knight; The Kerry Dancers; The Woodcutter's Daughter.

She sent those operettas up like bubbles, shaped with quivering, exhausting effort, then almost casually set free, to fade and fade but hold trapped forever our transformed childish selves, her undefeated, unrequited love.

As for Mr. Boyce, he had already left Jubilee, where as people said he never did seem to feel at home, and got a job playing a church organ and teaching music in London—which is not the real London, I feel obliged to explain, but a medium-sized city in western Ontario. Word filtered back that he managed to get along quite well there, where there were some people like himself.

Lives of Girls and Women

The snowbanks along the main street got to be so high that an archway was cut in one of them, between the street and the sidewalk, in front of the Post Office. A picture was taken of this and published in the Jubilee
Herald-Advance,
so that people could cut it out and send it to relatives and acquaintances living in less heroic climates, in England or Australia or Toronto. The redbrick Clocktower of the Post office was sticking up above the snow and two women were standing in the archway, to show it was no trick. Both these women worked in the Post Office, had put their coats on without buttoning them. One was Fern Dogherty, my mother's boarder.

My mother cut this picture out, because it had Fern in it, and because she said I should keep it, to show to my children.

“They will never see a thing like that,” she said. “By then the snow will all be collected in machines and—dissipated. Or people will be living under transparent domes, with a controlled temperature. There will be no such thing as seasons anymore.”

How did she collect all her unsettling information about the future? She looked forward to a time when towns like Jubilee would be replaced by domes and mushrooms of concrete, with moving skyways to carry you from one to the other, when the countryside would be bound and tamed forever under broad sweeping ribbons of pavement. Nothing would be the same as we knew it today, no frying pans or bobby pins or printed pages or fountain pens would remain. My mother would not miss a thing.

Her speaking of my children amazed me too, for I never meant to have any. It was glory I was after, walking the streets of Jubilee like an exile or a spy, not sure from which direction fame would strike, or
when, only convinced from my bones out that it had to. In this conviction my mother had shared, she had been my ally, but now I would no longer discuss it with her; she was indiscreet, and her expectations took too blatant a form.

Fern Dogherty. There she was in the paper, both hands coquettishly holding up the full collar of her good winter coat, which through pure luck she had worn to work that day. “I look the size of a watermelon,” she said. “In that coat.”

Mr. Chamberlain, looking with her, pinched her arm above the bracelet-wrinkle of the wrist.

“Tough rind, tough old watermelon.”

“Don't get vicious,” said Fern. “I mean it.” Her voice was small for such a big woman, plaintive, putupon, but in the end good-humoured, yielding. All those qualities my mother had developed for her assault on life—sharpness, smartness, determination, selectiveness—seemed to have their opposites in Fern, with her diffuse complaints, lazy movements, indifferent agreeableness. She had a dark skin, not olive but dusty-looking, dim, with brown-pigmented spots as large as coins; it was like the dappled ground under a tree on a sunny day. Her teeth were square, white, slightly protruding, with little spaces between them. These two characteristics, neither of which sounds particularly attractive in itself, did give her a roguish, sensual look.

She had a ruby-coloured satin dressing gown, a gorgeous garment, fruitily moulding, when she sat down, the bulges of her stomach and thighs. She wore it Sunday mornings, when she sat in our dining room smoking, drinking tea, until it was time to get ready for church. It parted at the knees to show some pale clinging rayon—a nightgown. Nightgowns were garments I could not bear, because of the way they twisted around and worked up on you while you slept and also because they left you uncovered between the legs. Naomi and I when we were younger used to draw pictures of men and women with startling gross genitals, the women's fat, bristling with needley hair, like a porcupine's back. Wearing a nightgown one could not help being aware of this vile bundle, which pajamas could decently shroud and contain. My mother at the same Sunday breakfast table wore
large striped pajamas, a faded rust-coloured kimona with a tasselled tie, the sort of slippers that are woolly socks, with a sole sewn in.

Fern Dogherty and my mother were friends in spite of differences. My mother valued in people experience of the world, contact with any life of learning or culture, and finally any suggestion of being dubiously received in Jubilee. And Fern had not always worked for the Post Office. No; at one time she had studied singing, she had studied at the Royal Conservatory of Music. Now she sang in the United Church choir, sang “I Know That My Redeemer Liveth” on Easter Sunday, and at weddings she sang “Because” and “O Promise Me” and “The Voice That Breathed O'er Eden.” On Saturday afternoons, the Post Office being closed, she and my mother would listen to the broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera. My mother had a book of operas. She would get it out and follow the story, identifying the arias, for which translations were provided. She had questions for Fern, but Fern did not know as much about operas as you would think she might; she would even get mixed up about which one it was they were listening to. But sometimes she would lean forward with her elbows on the table, not now relaxed, but alertly supported, and sing, scorning the foreign words. “
Do
—daa—do, da,
do,
da do-do—” The force, the seriousness of her singing voice always came as a surprise. It didn't embarrass her, letting loose those grand, inflated emotions she paid no attention to, in life.

“Did you plan to be an opera singer?” I asked.

“No. I just planned to be the lady working in the Post Office. Well, I did and I didn't. The work, the
training
. I just didn't have the ambition for it, I guess that was my trouble. I always preferred having a good time.” She wore slacks on Saturday afternoons, and sandals that showed her pudgy, painted toes. She was dropping ashes on her stomach, which, ungirdled, popped out in a pregnant curve. “Smoking is ruining my voice,” she said meditatively.

Fern's style of singing, though admired, was regarded in Jubilee as being just a hair's-breadth from showing-off, and sometimes children did screech or warble after her, in the street. My mother could take this for persecution. She would construct such cases out of the flimsiest evidence, seeking out the Jewish couple who ran the Army
Surplus Store, or the shrunken silent Chinese in the Laundry, with bewildering compassion, loud slow-spoken overtures of friendship. They did not know what to make of her. Fern was not persecuted, that I could see. Though my old aunts, my father's aunts, would say her name in a peculiar way, as if it had a stone in it, that they would have to suck, and spit out. And Naomi did tell me, “That Fern Dogherty had a baby.”

“She never did,” I said, automatically defensive.

“She did so. She had it when she was nineteen years old. That's why she got kicked out of the Conservatory.”

“How do you know?”

“My mother knows.”

Naomi's mother had spies everywhere, old childbed cases, deathbed companions, keeping her informed. In her nursing job, going from one house to another, she was able to operate like an underwater vacuum tube, sucking up what nobody else could get at. I felt I had to argue with Naomi about it because Fern was our boarder, and Naomi was always saying things about people in our house. (“Your mother's an atheist,” she would say with black relish, and I would say, “No she isn't, she's an agnostic,” and all through my reasoned hopeful explanation Naomi would chant,
Same difference, same difference
.) I was not able to retaliate, either out of delicacy or cowardice, though Naomi's own father belonged to some odd and discredited religious sect, and wandered all over town talking prophecies without putting his false teeth in.

I took to noticing pictures of babies in the paper, or in magazines, when Fern was around, saying, “Aw, isn't it
cute
?” and then watching her closely for a flicker of remorse, maternal longing, as if someday she might actually be persuaded to burst into tears, fling out her empty arms, struck to the heart by an ad for talcum powder or strained meat.

Furthermore Naomi said Fern did everything with Mr. Chamberlain, just the same as if they were married.

It was Mr. Chamberlain who got Fern boarding with us in the first place. We rented the house from his mother, now in her third year blind and bedridden in the Wawanash County Hospital. Fern's
mother was in the same place; it was there, in fact, on a visiting day, that they had met. She was working in the Blue River Post Office at that time. Mr. Chamberlain worked at the Jubilee Radio Station and lived in a small apartment in the same building, not wanting the trouble of a house. My mother spoke of him as “Fern's friend,” in a clarifying tone of voice, as if to insist that the word friend in this case meant not more than it was supposed to mean.

“They enjoy each other's company,” she said. “They don't bother about any nonsense.”

Nonsense meant romance; it meant vulgarity; it meant sex.

I tried out on my mother what Naomi said.

“Fern and Mr. Chamberlain might just as well be married.”

“What? What do you mean? Who said that?”

“Everybody knows it.”

“I don't. Everybody does not. Nobody ever said such a thing in my hearing. It's that Naomi said it, isn't?”

Naomi was not popular in my house, nor I in hers. Each of us was suspected of carrying the seeds of contamination—in my case, of atheism, in Naomi's, of sexual preoccupation.

“It's dirty-mindedness that is just rampant in this town, and will never let people alone.”

“If Fern Dogherty was not a good woman,” my mother concluded, with a spacious air of logic, “do you think I would have her living in my house?”

This year, our first year in high school, Naomi and I held almost daily discussions on the subject of sex, but took one tone, so that there were degrees of candour we could never reach. This tone was ribald, scornful, fanatically curious. A year ago we had liked to imagine ourselves victims of passion; now we were established as onlookers, or at most cold and gleeful experimenters. We had a book Naomi had found in her mother's old hopechest, under the moth-balled best blankets.

Care should be taken during the initial connection,
we read aloud,
particularly if the male organ is of an unusual size. Vaseline may prove a helpful lubricant
.

“I prefer butter myself. Tastier.”

Intercourse between the thighs is often resorted to in the final stages of pregnancy.

“You mean they still do it
then
?”

The rear-entry position is sometimes indicated in cases where the
female is considerably obese.

“Fern,” Naomi said. “That's how he does it to Fern. She's considerably obese.”

“Aggh! This book makes me sick.”

The male sexual organ in erection, we read, had been known to reach a length of fourteen inches. Naomi spat out her chewing gum and rolled it between her palms, stretching it longer and longer, then picked it up by one end and dangled it in the air.

“Mr. Chamberlain the record-breaker!”

Thereafter whenever she came to my place, and Mr. Chamberlain was there, one of us, or both, if we were chewing gum, would take in out and roll it this way and dangle it innocently, till even the adults noticed and Mr. Chamberlain said, “That's quite a game you got there,” and my mother said, “Stop that, its filthy.” (She meant the gum.) We watched Mr. Chamberlain and Fern for signs of passion, wantonness, lustful looks or hands up the skirt. We were not rewarded, my defence of them turning out to be truer than I wished it to be. For I as much as Naomi liked to entertain myself with thoughts of their grunting indecencies, their wallowing in jingly beds (in tourist cabins, Naomi said, every time they drove to Tupperton
to have a look at the lake
). Disgust did not rule out enjoyment, in my thoughts; indeed they were inseparable.

Mr. Chamberlain, Art Chamberlain, read the news on the Jubilee radio. He also did all the more serious and careful announcing. He had a fine professional voice, welcome as dark chocolate flowing in and out of the organ music on the Sunday afternoon program “In Memoriam,” sponsored by a local funeral parlour. He sometimes got Fern singing on this program, sacred songs—“I Wonder as I Wander”—and non-sacred but mournful songs—“The End of a Perfect Day.” It was not hard to get on the Jubilee radio; I myself had recited a comic poem, on the Saturday Morning Young Folks Party, and Naomi had played “The Bells of St. Mary's” on the piano. Every
time you turned it on there was a good chance of hearing someone you knew, or at least of hearing the names of people you knew mentioned in the dedications. (“We are going to play this piece also for Mr. and Mrs. Carl Otis on the occasion of their twenty-eighth wedding anniversary, requested by their son George and wife Etta, and their three grandchildren Lorraine, Mark and Lois also by Mrs. Otis's sister Mrs. Bill Townley of the Porterfield Road.”) I had phoned up myself and dedicated a song to Uncle Benny on his fortieth birthday; my mother would not have her name mentioned. She preferred listening to the Toronto station, which brought us the Metropolitan Opera, and news with no commercials, and a quiz program in which she competed with four gentlemen who, to judge from their voices, would all have little, pointed, beards.