Lives of Girls and Women (24 page)

He made me repeat, “Yes means found them, no means didn't find them, forget means didn't get a chance to look.” This drill insulted me; I was famous for my memory.

“All right. Cheers.” Below the level that anybody could see, looking at the car, he bounced his fist off my leg, hard enough to hurt.

I hauled myself and my books out, and once I was alone, my thigh still tingling, I took out the envelope and read what he had written.
Del is a bad girl
. Mr. Chamberlain assumed without any trouble at all that there was treachery in me, as well as criminal sensuality, waiting to be used. He had known I would not cry out when he flattened my breast, he had known I would not mention it to my mother; he knew now I would not report this conversation to Fern, but would spy on her as he had asked. Could he have hit upon my true self? It was true that in the dullness of school I had worked with my protractor and compass, I had written out Latin sentences
[having pitched camp and slaughtered the horses of the enemy by means of stealth, Vercingetorix prepared to give battle on the following day]
and all the time been conscious of my depravity vigorous as spring wheat, my body flowering with invisible bruises in those places where it had been touched. Wearing blue rompers, washing with soap that would nearly take your skin off, after a volleyball game, I had looked in the mirror of the girls' washroom and smiled secretly at my ruddy face, to think what lewdness I had been invited to, what deceits I was capable of.

I got into Fern's room on Saturday morning, when my mother had gone out to do some cleaning at the farm. I looked around at leisure, at the koala bear sitting on her pillow, powder spilled on the dresser, jars with a little bit of dried up deodorant, salve, night-cream, old lipstick and nailpolish with the top stuck on. A picture of a lady in a dress of many dripping layers, like an arrangement of scarves, probably Fern's mother, holding a fat woollied baby, probably Fern. Fern for sure in soft focus with butterfly sleeves, holding a sheaf of roses, curls laid in layers on her head. And snapshops stuck around the mirror, their edges curling. Mr. Chamberlain in a sharp straw hat, white pants, looking at the camera as if he knew more than it did. Fern not so plump as now, but plump, wearing shorts, sitting on a log in some vacation-time woods. Mr. Chamberlain and Fern dressed up—she with a corsage—snapped by a street photographer in a strange city, walking under the marquee of a movie-house where
Anchors Aweigh!
was showing. The Post Office employees picnic in the park at Tupperton, a cloudy day, and Fern jolly in slacks holding a baseball bat.

I did not find any letters. I looked through her drawers, on her closet shelves, under her bed, even inside her suitcases. I did find three separate saved bundles of paper, with elastic bands around them.

One bundle contained a chain letter and a great many copies of the same verse, in pencil or ink, different handwritings, some type-written or mimeographed.

This prayer has already been around the world six times. It was originated in the Isle of Wight by a clairvoyant seer who saw it in a dream. Copy this letter out six times and mail it to six friends, then copy the attached prayer out and mail it to six names at the top of the attached list. Six days from the time you receive this letter you will begin to get copies of this prayer from all corners of the earth and they will bring you blessings and good luck IF YOU DO NOT BREAK THE CHAIN. If you break the chain you may expect something sad and unpleasant to happen to you six months to the day from the day when you receive this letter. DO NOT BREAK THE CHAIN. DO NOT OMIT THE SECRET WORD AT THE END. BY MEANS OF THIS PRAYER HAPPINESS AND GOOD LUCK ARE BEING SPREAD THROUGHOUT THE WORLD.

Peace and love, O Lord I pray

Shower on this friend today.

Heal his(her) troubles, bless his(her) heart,

From the source of strength and love may he(she) never have to part.

KARKAHMD

Another bundle was made up of several sheets of smudgy printing broken by blurred grey illustrations of what I thought at first were enema bags with tangled tubes, but which on reading the text I discovered to be cross sections of the male and female anatomy, with such things as pessaries, tampons, condoms (these proper terms were all new to me) being inserted or fitted on. I could not look at these illustrations without feeling alarm and a strong local discomfort, so I started reading. I read about a poor farmer's wife in North Carolina throwing herself under a wagon when she discovered she was going to have her ninth child, about women dying in tenements from complications of pregnancy or childbirth or terrible
failed abortions which they performed with hatpins, knitting needles, bubbles of air. I read, or skipped, statistics about the increase in population, laws which had been passed in various countries for and against birth control, women who had gone to jail for advocating it. Then there were the instructions on using different devices. Naomi's mother's book had had a chapter about this too, but we never got around to reading it, being bogged down in Case Histories and Varieties of Intercourse. All I read now about foam and jelly, even the use of the word “vagina” made the whole business seem laborious and domesticated, somehow connected with ointments and bandages and hospitals, and it gave me the same feeling of disgusted, ridiculous helplessness I had when it was necessary to undress at the doctor's.

In the third bundle were typewritten verses. Some had titles. “Home-made Lemon Squeeze.” “The Lament of the Truck-Driver's Wife.”

Husband, dear husband, what am I to do? I'm wanting some hard satisfaction from you. You're never at home or you're never awake. (A big cock in my pussy is all it would take!)

I was surprised that any adult would know, or still remember, these words. The greedy progression of verses, the short chunky words set in shameless type, fired up lust at a great rate, like squirts of kerosene on bonfires. But they were repetitive, elaborate; after a while the mechanical effort needed to contrive them began to be felt, and made them heavy going; they grew bewilderingly dull. But the words themselves still gave off flashes of power, particularly
fuck,
which I had never been able to really look at, on fences or sidewalks. I had never been able to contemplate before its thrust of brutality, hypnotic swagger.

I said no to Mr. Chamberlain, when he asked me if I had got my homework done. He did not touch me all evening. But when I came out of school on Monday, he was there.

“Girl friend still sick? That's too bad. Nice though. Isn't it nice?” “What?”

“Birds are nice. Trees are nice. Nice you can come for a drive with me, do my little investigations for me.” He said this in an infantile voice. Evil would never be grand, with him. His voice suggested that it would be possible to do anything, anything at all, and pass it off as a joke, a joke on all the solemn and guilty, all the moral and emotional, people in the world, the people who “took themselves seriously.” That was what he could not stand in people. His little smile was repulsive; self-satisfaction stretched over quite an abyss of irresponsibility, or worse. This did not give me second thoughts about going with him, and doing whatever it was he had in mind to do. His moral character was of no importance to me there; perhaps it was even necessary that it should be black.

Excitement owing something to Fern's dirty verses had got the upper hand of me, entirely.

“Did you get a good look?” he said in a normal voice.

“Yes.”

“Didn't find a thing? Did you look in all her drawers? I mean her
dresser
drawers. Hatboxes, suitcases? Went through her closet?”

“I looked and looked everywhere,” I said demurely.

“She must have got rid of them.”

“I guess she isn't sentimental.”

“Sennamenal? I don't know what dose big words mean, little dirl.” We were driving out of town. We drove south on the No. 4

Highway and turned down the first sideroad. “Beautiful morning,” said Mr. Chamberlain. “Pardon me—beautiful afterno-on, beautiful day.” I looked out the window; the countryside I knew was altered by his presence, his voice, overpowering foreknowledge of the errand we were going on together. For a year or two I had been looking at trees, fields, landscape with a secret, strong exaltation. In some moods, some days, I could feel for a clump of grass, a rail fence, a stone-pile, such pure unbounded emotion as I used to hope for, and have inklings of, in connection with God. I could not do it when I was with anybody, of course, and now with Mr. Chamberlain I saw that the whole of nature became debased, maddeningly erotic. It was just now the richest, greenest time of year; ditches sprouted coarse daisies, toadflax, buttercups, hollows were full of nameless faintly golden
bushes and the gleam of high creeks. I saw all this as a vast arrangement of hiding places, ploughed fields beyond rearing up like shameless mattresses. Little paths, opening in the bushes, crushed places in the grass, where no doubt a cow had lain, seemed to me specifically, urgently inviting as certain words or pressures.

“Hope we don't meet your Mama, driving along here.”

I did not think it possible. My mother inhabited a different layer of reality from the one I had got into now.

Mr. Chamberlain drove off the road, following a track that ended soon, in a field half gone to brush. The stopping of the car, cessation of that warm flow of sound and motion in which I had been suspended, jarred me a little. Events were becoming real.

“Let's take a little walk down to the creek.”

He got out on his side, I got out on mine. I followed him, down a slope between some hawthorn trees, in bloom, yeasty-smelling. This was a travelled route, with cigarette packages, a beer bottle, a Chiclet box lying on the grass. Little trees, bushes closed around us.

“Why don't we call a halt here?” said Mr. Chamberlain in a practical way. “It gets soggy down by the water.”

Here in the half-shade above the creek I was cold, and so violently anxious to know what would be done to me that all the heat and dancing itch between my legs had gone dead, numb as if a piece of ice had been laid to it. Mr. Chamberlain opened his jacket and loosened his belt, then unzipped himself. He reached in to part some inner curtains, and “Boo!” he said.

Not at all like marble David's, it was sticking straight out in front of him, which I knew from my reading was what they did. It had a sort of head on it, like a mushroom, and its colour was reddish purple. It looked blunt and stupid, compared, say, to fingers and toes with their intelligent expressiveness, or even to an elbow or a knee. It did not seem frightening to me, though I thought this might have been what Mr. Chamberlain intended, standing there with his tightly watching look, his hands holding his pants apart to display it. Raw and blunt, ugly coloured as a wound, it looked to me vulnerable, playful and naive, like some strong snouted animal whose grotesque simple looks are some sort of guarantee of good
will. (The opposite of what beauty usually is.) It did not bring back any of my excitement, though. It did not seem to have anything to do with me.

Still watching me, and smiling, Mr. Chamberlain placed his hand around this thing and began to pump up and down, not too hard, in a controlled efficient rhythm. His face softened; his eyes, still fixed on me, grew glassy. Gradually, almost experimentally he increased the speed of his hand; the rhythm became less smooth. He crouched over, his smile opened out and drew the lips back from his teeth and his eyes rolled slightly upward. His breathing became loud and shaky, now he worked furiously with his hand, moaned, almost doubled over in spasmodic agony. The face he thrust out at me, from his crouch, was blind and wobbling like a mask on a stick, and those sounds coming out of his mouth, involuntary, last-ditch human noises, were at the same time theatrical, unlikely. In fact the whole performance, surrounded by calm flowering branches, seemed imposed, fantastically and predictably exaggerated, like an Indian dance. I had read about the body being in extremities of pleasure, possessed, but these expressions did not seem equal to the terrible, benighted effort, deliberate frenzy, of what was going on here. If he did not soon get to where he wanted to be, I thought he would die. But then he let out a new kind of moan, the most desperate and the loudest yet; it quavered as if somebody was hitting him on the voice box. This died, miraculously, into a peaceful grateful whimper, as stuff shot out of him, the real whitish stuff, the seed, and caught the hem of my skirt. He straightened up, shaky, out of breath, and tucked himself quickly back inside his trousers. He got out a handkerchief and wiped first his hands then my skirt.

“Lucky for you? Eh?” He laughed at me, though he still had not altogether got his breath back.

After such a convulsion, such a revelation, how could a man just put his handkerchief in his pocket, check his fly, and start walking back—still somewhat flushed and bloodshot—the way we had come?

The only thing he said was in the car, when he sat for a moment composing himself before he turned the key.

“Quite a sight, eh?” was what he said.

The landscape was post-coital, distant and meaningless. Mr. Chamberlain may have felt some gloom too, or apprehension, for he made me get down on the floor of the car as we reentered town, and then he drove around and let me out in a lonely place, where the road dipped down near the CNR station. He felt enough like himself, however, to tap me in the crotch with his fist, as if testing a coconut for soundness.

That was a valedictory appearance for Mr. Chamberlain, as I ought to have guessed it might be. I came home at noon to find Fern sitting at the dining room table, which was set for dinner, listening to my mother calling from the kitchen over the noise of the potato masher.

“Doesn't matter what anybody says. You weren't married. You weren't engaged. It's nobody's business. Your life is your own.”

“Want to see my little love letter?” said Fern, and fluttered it under my nose.