Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You (11 page)

“Oh, now,” said Mrs. Peebles.

“Filthy,” Alice Kelling sobbed. “Filthy little rag!”

“Don't get yourself upset,” Loretta Bird said. She was swollen up with pleasure at being in on this scene. “Men are all the same.”

“Edie, I'm very surprised,” Mrs. Peebles said. “I thought your parents were so strict. You don't want to have a baby, do you?”

I'm still ashamed of what happened next. I lost control, just like a six-year-old, I started howling. “You don't get a baby from just doing that!”

“You see. Some of them are that ignorant,” Loretta Bird said.

But Mrs. Peebles jumped up and caught my arms and shook me.

“Calm down. Don't get hysterical. Calm down. Stop crying. Listen to me. Listen. I'm wondering, if you know what being intimate means. Now tell me. What did you think it meant?”

“Kissing,” I howled.

She let go. “Oh, Edie. Stop it. Don't be silly. It's all right. It's all a misunderstanding. Being intimate means a lot more than that. Oh, I
wondered
.”

“She's trying to cover up, now,” said Alice Kelling. “Yes. She's not so stupid. She sees she got herself in trouble.”

“I believe her,” Mrs. Peebles said. “This is an awful scene.”

“Well there is one way to find out,” said Alice Kelling, getting up. “After all, I am a nurse.”

Mrs. Peebles drew a breath and said, “No. No. Go to your room, Edie. And stop that noise. That is too disgusting.”

I heard the car start in a little while. I tried to stop crying, pulling back each wave as it started over me. Finally I succeeded, and lay heaving on the bed.

Mrs. Peebles came and stood in the doorway.

“She's gone,” she said. “That Bird woman too. Of course, you know you should never have gone near that man and that is the cause of all this trouble. I have a headache. As soon as you can, go and wash your face in cold water and get at the dishes and we will not say any more about this.”

Nor we didn't. I didn't figure out till years later the extent of what I had been saved from. Mrs. Peebles was not very friendly to me afterwards, but she was fair. Not very friendly is the wrong way of describing what she was. She never had been very friendly. It was just that now she had to see me all the time and it got on her nerves, a little.

As for me, I put it all out of my mind like a bad dream and concentrated on waiting for my letter. The mail came every day except Sunday, between one-thirty and two in the afternoon, a good time for me because Mrs. Peebles was always having her nap. I would get the kitchen all cleaned and then go up to the mailbox and sit in the grass, waiting. I was perfectly happy, waiting, I forgot all about Alice Kelling and her misery and awful talk and Mrs. Peebles and her chilliness and the embarrassment of whether she had told Dr. Peebles and the face of Loretta Bird, getting her fill of other people's troubles. I was always smiling when the mailman got there, and continued smiling even after he gave me the mail and I saw today wasn't the day. The mailman was a Carmichael. I knew by his face because there are a lot of Carmichaels living out by us and so many of them have a sort of sticking-out top lip. So I asked his name (he was a young man, shy, but good humored, anybody could
ask him anything) and then I said, “I knew by your face!” He was pleased by that and always glad to see me and got a little less shy. “You've got the smile I've been waiting on all day!” he used to holler out the car window.

It never crossed my mind for a long time a letter might not come. I believed in it coming just like I believed the sun would rise in the morning. I just put off my hope from day to day, and there was the goldenrod out around the mailbox and the children gone back to school, and the leaves turning, and I was wearing a sweater when I went to wait. One day walking back with the hydro bill stuck in my hand, that was all, looking across at the fairgrounds with the full-blown milkweed and dark teasels, so much like fall, it just struck me:
No letter was ever going to come
. It was an impossible idea to get used to. No, not impossible. If I thought about Chris's face when he said he was going to write to me, it was impossible, but if I forgot that and thought about the actual tin mailbox, empty, it was plain and true. I kept on going to meet the mail, but my heart was heavy now like a lump of lead. I only smiled because I thought of the mailman counting on it, and he didn't have an easy life, with the winter driving ahead.

Till it came to me one day there were women doing this with their lives, all over. There were women just waiting and waiting by mailboxes for one letter or another. I imagined me making this journey day after day and year after year, and my hair starting to go gray, and I thought, I was never made to go on like that. So I stopped meeting the mail. If there were women all through life waiting, and women busy and not waiting, I knew which I had to be. Even though there might be things the second kind of women have to pass up and never know about, it still is better.

I was surprised when the mailman phoned the Peebles' place in the evening and asked for me. He said he missed me. He asked if I would like to go to Goderich where
some well-known movie was on, I forget now what. So I said yes, and I went out with him for two years and he asked me to marry him, and we were engaged a year more while I got my things together, and then we did marry. He always tells the children the story of how I went after him by sitting by the mailbox every day, and naturally I laugh and let him, because I like for people to think what pleases them and makes them happy.

Walking on Water
 

This was a part of town where a lot of old people still lived, though many had moved to high-rises across the park. Mr. Lougheed had a number of friends, or perhaps it would be better to say acquaintances, whom he met every day or so on the way downtown, at the bus stop, or on the walks overlooking the sea. Occasionally he played cards with them in their rooms or apartments. He belonged to a lawn-bowling club and to a club which brought in travel films and showed them, in a downtown hall, during the winter. He had joined these clubs not out of a real desire to be sociable but as a precaution against his natural tendencies, which might lead him, he thought, into becoming a sort of hermit. During his years in the drugstore business he had learned how to get through all kinds of conversations with all sorts of people, to skate along affably and go on thinking his own thoughts. He practiced the same thing with his wife. His aim was to give people what they thought they wanted, and continue, himself, solitary and unmolested. Except for his wife, few people had ever suspected what he was up to. But now that he was no longer obliged to give anybody anything, in the ordinary daily way, he put himself in a position where now and again he would have to, as he believed in some way it must be good for him. If he left it all to his own choice who would he talk to? Eugene, that was all. He would get to be a nuisance to Eugene.

It was on the sea walk Mr. Lougheed heard the first time what Eugene had been proposing.

“Says he can walk on water.”

Mr. Lougheed was sure Eugene had said no such thing.

“It's all in the way of thinking your weight out of your body, according to him. There's nothing you can't control if you set out to. So he says.”

This was Mr. Clifford and Mr. Morey, sitting on the lookout bench catching their breath.

“Mind over matter.”

They invited Mr. Lougheed to sit but he remained standing. He was tall and thin and if he kept a sensible pace did not run out of breath.

“Eugene talks a lot of that kind of thing but it's just speculation,” he told them. He did not care for their tone on Eugene although he knew it was partly justified. “He's very intelligent. He's not cracked.”

“We'll have to wait for the demonstration to make up our minds on that.”

“He's either cracked or I am. Or else he's Jesus Christ.”

“What demonstration is that?” said Mr. Lougheed cautiously, and with foreboding.

“He's going to demonstrate walking off the Ross Point pier.”

Mr. Lougheed said he was sure Eugene had been joking. Mr. Clifford and Mr. Morey assured him that it was no joke, a serious undertaking. (Mr. Clifford and Mr. Morey, saying it was serious, were laughing a bit and shaking their heads cheerfully, while Mr. Lougheed, saying it was a joke, was frowning and staying aloof.) The time set was Sunday morning. Today was Friday. Ten o'clock had been the exact time picked so that some people could get to church after the walking or the not-walking was over. But, just as Mr. Lougheed suspected, neither Mr. Clifford nor Mr. Morey had actually heard these arrangements being made, they had heard about them from somebody else. Mr. Morey had heard while playing cards with friends and Mr. Clifford had heard in the British Israel Reading Room.

“It's getting talked up all over.”

“Well it might as well get talked down, then, because Eugene is not a fool, or anyway not so much of a fool as that,” said Mr. Lougheed shortly, and continued on his walk. He cut off home by a shorter route than he usually took.

He knocked on Eugene's door, which was across the hall from his own. Eugene said, in a serene but warning voice, “Come in.”

Mr. Lougheed opened the door and was struck by a brisk cool wind blowing right off the ocean and in at Eugene's window, which was raised as high as it would go.

Eugene was on the bare floor in front of the window, sitting with his legs bent and twisted that unnatural-looking way, which he declared was now entirely natural to him. He wore a pair of jeans, that was all. Mr. Lougheed contemplated the slenderness, the delicacy, of this young man's upper body. What work could he do, how many pounds could he lift? Yet he could do all these contortions, twist and stretch his body into the most distressing-looking positions, which he claimed were delightful, of course. He took his pride in that.

“Sit down,” said Eugene. “I'm coming out.”

He meant that he was coming out of meditating, which was how he finished up his exercises. Sometimes he sat and meditated without bothering to shut his door. Mr. Lougheed, walking past, always quickly averted his eyes. He did not look to see the expression on Eugene's face. Rapt, was it supposed to be? He was as alarmed, as appalled, in the furthest corner of himself, as if he had seen somebody making love.

That had happened, too.

Living downstairs in the house were three young people. Their names were Calla, Rex and Rover. Rover was apparently a name given for a joke, to a skinny, sickly boy with a twelve-year-old's body and some days a fifty-year-old face. Mr. Lougheed had seen him sleeping on the hall carpet, like a dog. But Rex and Calla were also strange names, more properly belonging to an animal and a flower; were those the names their parents called them? They struck Mr. Lougheed as having got here without parents, without any experience of highchairs or tricycles or wagons; they seemed to have sprung up, armed as they were, from the earth. No doubt that was how they thought of themselves.