Lives of Girls and Women (23 page)

cometh
. She was so offended by all this that she could not even enjoy the word
virgins
.

His toothless mouth shut. Sly and proper as a baby's.

“No more for now. Think about it when the time comes. There's a lesson for young girls.”

“Stupid old bugger,” said Naomi, on the stairs.

“I feel—sorry for him.”

She jabbed me in the kidney.

“Hurry up, let's get out of here. He's liable to find something else.

Reads the Bible till his eyes fall out. Serve him right.”

We ran out outside, up Mason Street. These long light evenings we visited every part of town. We loitered past the Lyceum Theatre, the Blue Owl Cafe, the Poolroom. We sat on the benches by the Cenotaph, and if any car honked at us we waved. Dismayed by our greenness, our leggy foolishness, they drove on by; they laughed out their windows. We went into the Ladies Toilet in the Town Hall—wet floor, sweating cement walls, harsh ammoniac smell—and there on the toilet door where only bad brainless girls wrote up their names, we wrote the names of the two reigning queens of our class— Marjory Coutts, Gwen Mundy. We wrote in lipstick and drew tiny obscene figures underneath. Why did we do this? Did we hate those girls, to whom we were unfailingly obsequiously pleasant? No. Yes. We hated their immunity, well-bred lack of curiosity, whatever kept them floating, charitable and pleased, on the surface of life in Jubilee, and would float them on to sororities, engagements, marriages to doctors or lawyers in more prosperous places far away. We hated them just because they could never be imagined entering the Town Hall toilets.

Having done this, we ran away, not sure whether or not we had committed a criminal act.

We dared each other. Walking under street lights still as pale as flowers cut out of tissue paper, walking past unlighted windows from which we hoped the world watched, we did dares.

“Be like you have cerebral palsy.
Dare
.”

At once I came unjointed, lolled my head, rolled my eyes, began to talk incomprehensibly, in a cross insistent babble.

“Do it for a block. Never mind who we meet. Don't stop.
Dare
.” We met old Dr. Comber, spindly and stately, beautifully dressed.

He stopped, and tapped his stick, and objected.

“What is this performance?”

“A fit, sir,” said Naomi plaintively. “She's always having these fits.” Making fun of poor helpless afflicted people. The bad taste, the heartlessness, the joy of it.

We went to the Park, which was neglected, deserted, a triangle of land made too gloomy, by its big cedar trees, for children's play, and not attracting people who went for walks. Why should anybody in Jubilee walk to see more grass and dirt and trees, the same thing that pushed in on the town from every side? They would walk downtown, to look at stores, meet on the double sidewalks, feel the hope of activity. Naomi and I all by ourselves climbed the big cedar trees, scraped our knees on the bark, screamed as we never needed to when we were younger, seeing the branches part, revealing the tilted earth. We hung from the branches by our locked hands, by our ankles; we pretended to be baboons, prattling and gibbering. We felt the whole town lying beneath us, gaping, ready to be astounded.

There were noises peculiar to the season. Children on the sidewalks skipping, and singing in their dear, devout voices.

On the mountain stands a lady Who she is I do not know.

All she wears is gold and silver.

All she needs is a new pair of shoes!

And the peacocks crying. We dropped from the trees and set off to look at them, down past the park, down a poor unnamed street running to the river. The peacocks belonged to a man named Pork Childs who drove the town garbage truck. The street had no sidewalks. We walked around puddles, gleaming in the soft mud. Pork Childs had a barn behind his house for his fowl. Neither barn nor house was painted.

There were the peacocks, walking around under the bare oak trees. How could we forget them, from one spring to the next?

The hens were easily forgotten, the sullen colours of their yard. But the males were never disappointing. Their astonishing, essential
colour, blue of breasts and throats and necks, darker feathers showing there like ink blots, or soft vegetation under tropical water. One had his tail spread, to show the blind eyes, painted satin. The little kingly, idiotic heads. Glory in the cold spring, a wonder of Jubilee.

The noise beginning again did not come from any of them. It pulled eyes up to what it was hard to believe we had not seen immediately—the one white peacock up in a tree, his tail full out, falling down through the branches like water over rock. Pure white, pure blessing. And hidden up above, his head gave out these frantic and upbraiding and disorderly cries.

“It's sex makes them scream,” said Naomi.

“Cats scream,” I said, remembering something from the farm.

“They will scream like anything when a tomcat is doing it to them.”

“Wouldn't you?” said Naomi.

Then we had to go, because Pork Childs appeared among his peacocks, walking quickly, rocking forward. All his toes had been amputated, we knew, after being frozen when he lay in a ditch long ago, too drunk to get home, before he joined the Baptist Church. “Good evening, Boys!” he hollered at us, his old greeting, his old joke.
Hello, boys! Hello, girls!
yelled from the cab of the garbage truck, yelled down all streets bleak or summery, never getting any answer. We ran.

Mr. Chamberlain's car was parked in front of our house.

“Let's go in,” said Naomi. “I want to see what he's doing to old Fern.” Nothing. In the dining room Fern was trying on the flowered chiffon dress my mother was helping her to make for Donna Carling's wedding, at which she would be the soloist. My mother was sitting sideways on the chair in front of the sewing machine, while Fern revolved, like a big half-opened parasol, in front of her.

Mr. Chamberlain was drinking a real drink, whisky and water. He drove to Porterfield to buy his whisky, Jubilee being dry. I was both proud and ashamed to have Naomi see the bottle on the sideboard, a thing that would never appear in her house. My mother excused his drinking, because he had been through the war.

“Here come these two lovely young ladies,” said Mr. Chamberlain with great insincerity. “Full of springtime and grace. All fresh from the out-of-doors.”

“Give us a drink,” I said, showing off in front of Naomi. But he laughed and put a hand over his glass.

“Not until you tell us where you've been.”

“We went down to Pork Childs' to look at the peacocks.”

“Down to see the pea-cocks. To see the pretty pea-cocks,” sang

Mr. Chamberlain.

“Give us a drink.”

“Del, behave yourself,” said my mother with a mouth full of pins. “All I want is to find out what it tastes like.”

“Well I can't give you a drink for nothing. I don't see you doing any tricks for me. I don't see you sitting up and begging like a good doggie.”

“I can be a seal. Do you want to see me be a seal?”

This was one thing I loved to do. I never felt worried that it might

not be perfect, that I might not be able to manage it; I was never afraid that anybody would think me a fool. I had even done it at school, for the Junior Red Cross Amateur Hour, and everyone laughed; this marvelling laughter was so comforting, so absolving that I could have gone on being a seal forever.

I went down on my knees and held my elbows at my sides and worked my hands like flippers, meanwhile barking, my wonderful braying bark. I had copied from an old Mary Martin movie where Mary Martin sings a song beside a turquoise pool and the seals bark in a chorus.

Mr. Chamberlain gradually lowered his glass and brought it close to my lips, withdrawing it, however, every time I stopped barking. I was kneeling by his chair. Fern had her back to me, her arms raised; my mother's head was hidden, as she pinned the material at Fern's waist. Naomi who had seen the seal often enough before and had an interest in dressmaking was looking at Fern and my mother. Mr. Chamberlain at last allowed my lips to touch the rim of the glass which he held in one hand. Then with the other hand he did something nobody could see. He rubbed against the damp underarm of my blouse and then inside the loose armhole of the jumper I was wearing. He rubbed quick, hard against the cotton over my breast. So hard he pushed the yielding flesh up, flattened it. And at once withdrew. It was like a slap, to leave me stung.

“Well, what does it taste like?” Naomi asked me afterwards.

“Like piss.”

“You never tasted piss.” She gave me a shrewd baffled look; she could always sense secrets.

I meant to tell her, but I did not, I held it back. If I told her, it would have to be reenacted.

“How? How did he have his hand when he started? How did he get it under your jumper? Did he rub or squeeze, or both? With his fingers of his palm? Like this?”

There was a dentist in town, Dr. Phippen, brother of the deaf Librarian, who was supposed to have put his hand up a girl's leg while looking at her back teeth. Naomi and I passing under his window would say loudly, “Don't you wish you had an appointment with Dr. Phippen? Dr. Feely Phippen. He's a thorough man!” It would be like that with Mr. Chamberlain; we would turn it into a joke, and hope for scandal, and make up schemes to entrap him, and that was not what I wanted.

“It was beautiful,” said Naomi, sounding tired.

“What?”

“That peacock. In the tree.”

I was surprised, and a little annoyed, to hear her use the word
beautiful,
about something like that, and to have her remember it, because I was used to have her act in a certain way, be aware of certain things, nothing else. I had already thought, running home, that I would write a poem about the peacock. To have her thinking about it too was almost like trespassing; I never let her or anyone in that part of my mind.

I did start writing my poem when I went upstairs to bed.

What in the trees is crying these veiled nights? The peacocks crying or the winter's ghost?

That was the best part of it.

I also thought about Mr. Chamberlain, his hand which was different from anything he had previously shown about himself, in his eyes, his voice, his laugh, his stories. It was like a signal, given where it will be understood. Impertinent violation, so perfectly sure of itself, so authoritative, clean of sentiment.

Next time he came I made it easy for him to do something again, standing near him while he was getting his rubbers on in the dark hall. Every time, then, I waited for the signal, and got it. He did not bother with a pinch on the arm or a pat on the arm or a hug around the shoulders, fatherly or comradely. He went straight for the breasts, the buttocks, the upper thighs, brutal as lightening. And this was what I expected sexual communication to be—a flash of insanity, a dreamlike, ruthless, contemptuous breakthrough in a world of decent appearances. I had discarded those ideas of love, consolation and tenderness, nourished by my feelings for Frank Wales; all that now seemed pale and extraordinarily childish. In the secret violence of sex would be recognition, going away beyond kindness, beyond good will of persons.

Not that I was planning on sex. One stroke of lightning does not have to lead anywhere, but to the next stroke of lightning.

Nevertheless my knees weakened, when Mr. Chamberlain honked the horn at me. He was waiting half a block from the school. Naomi was not with me; she had tonsillitis.

“Where's your girl friend?”

“She's sick.”

“That's a shame. Want a lift home?”

In the car I trembled. My tongue was dry, my whole mouth was dry so I could hardly speak. Was this what desire was? Wish to know, fear to know, amounting to anguish? Being alone with him, no protection of people or circumstances, made a difference. What could he want to do here, in broad daylight, on the seat of his car?

He did not make a move towards me. But he did not head for River Street; he drove sedately along various side streets, avoiding winter-made pot-holes.

“You think you're the girl to do me a favour, if I asked you?”

“All right.”

“What do you think it might be?”

“I don't know.”

He parked the car behind the creamery, under the chestnut trees with the leaves just out, bitter yellowy green. Here?

“You get into Fern's room? You could get into her room when everybody was out of the house?”

I brought my mind back, slowly, from expectations of rape.

“You could get in her room and do a little investigation for me on what she's got there. Something that might interest me. What do you think it would be, eh? What do you think interests me?”

“What?”

“Letters,” said Mr. Chamberlain with a sudden drop in tone, becoming matter-of-fact, depressed by some reality he could look into and I couldn't. “See if she has got any old letters. They might be in her drawers. Might be in her closet. Probably keeps them in an old box of some kind. Tied up in bundles, that's what women do.”

“Letters from who?”

“From me. Who do you think? You don't need to read them, just look at the signature. Written some time ago, the paper might be showing age. I don't know. Written in pen I recall so they're probably still legible. Here. I'll give you a sample of my handwriting, that'll help you out.” He took an envelope out of the glove compartment and wrote on it:
Del is a bad girl
.

I put it in my Latin book.

“Don't let Fern see that, she'd recognize the writing. And not your

Mama. She might wonder about what I wrote. Be a surprise to her, wouldn't it?”

He drove me home. I wanted to get out at the corner of River Street but he said no. “That just looks as if we've got something to hide. Now, how are you going to let me know? How about Sunday night, when I come around for supper, I'll ask you whether you've got your homework done! If you've found them, you'll say yes. If you've looked and you haven't found them, you'll say no. If for some reason you never got a chance to take a look, you say you forget whether you had any.”