Lives of Girls and Women (36 page)

I know it. Because I think my own problems—all my own problems since my young days—are related to undernourishment. From studying so hard and not replenishing the brain. Of course I did not have a first-rate brain to begin with, I never claimed that.”

I kept watching him attentively so he would not ask me again if he was boring me. He wore a soft, well pressed yellow sport shirt, open at the neck. His skin was pink. He did resemble, distantly, Caroline's brother that I had made him into. I could smell his shaving lotion. Odd to think that he shaved, that he had hair on his face like other men, and a penis in his pants. I imagined it curled up on itself, damp and tender. He smiled at me sweetly, reasonably talking; could he read what I was thinking? There must be some secret to madness, some
gift
about it, something I didn't know.

He was telling me how rats, even, refused to eat white flour, because of the bleach, the chemicals that were in it. I nodded, and past his head saw Mr. Fouks come out the back door of the
Herald-Advance
building, empty a wastebasket into an incinerator,
and plod back in. That back wall had no windows in it; it had certain stains, chipped bricks, a long crack running down diagonally, starting a bit before the middle and ending up at the bottom corner next to the Chainway store.

At ten o'clock the banks would open, the Canadian Bank of Commerce and the Dominion Bank across the street. At twelve-thirty, a bus would go through the town, southbound from Owen Sound to London. If anybody wanted to get on it there would be a flag out in front of Haines's Restaurant.

Bobby Sherriff talked about rats and white flour. His sister's photographed face hung in the hall of the high school, close to the persistent hiss of the drinking fountain. Her face was stubborn, unrevealing, lowered so that shadows had settled in her eyes. People's lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable—deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.

It did not occur to me then that one day I would be so greedy for Jubilee. Voracious and misguided as Uncle Craig out at Jenkin's Bend, writing his History, I would want to write things down.

I would try to make lists. A list of all the stores and businesses going up and down the main street and who owned them, a list of family names, names on the tombstones in the Cemetery and any inscriptions underneath. A list of the titles of movies that played at the Lyceum Theatre from 1938 to 1950, roughly speaking. Names on the Cenotaph (more for the first World War than for the second). Names of the streets and the pattern they lay in.

The hope of accuracy we bring to such tasks is crazy, heartbreaking. And no list could hold what I wanted, for what I wanted was every

last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together—radiant, everlasting.

At present I did not look much at this town.

Bobby Sherriff spoke to me wistfully, relieving me of my fork, napkin and empty plate.

“Believe me,” he said, “I wish you luck in your life.”

Then he did the only special thing he ever did for me. With those things in his hands, he rose on his toes like a dancer, like a plump
ballerina. This action, accompanied by his delicate smile, appeared to be a joke not shared with me so much as displayed for me, and it seemed also to have a concise meaning, a stylized meaning—to be a letter, or a whole word, in an alphabet I did not know.

People's wishes, and their other offerings, were what I took then naturally, a bit distractedly, as if they were never anything more than my due.

“Yes,” I said, instead of thank you.