The Eliot Girls (16 page)

Ruth glanced towards Henry and was faintly repelled by the sight of his teeth sinking into the bland wad of his lukewarm sandwich. The very fact that he was eating seemed improbable. There were so few real things she knew about him. Nearly everything had come from the inter-staff chatter. As when he had first arrived, she tried to hold herself apart from these stories. Of no concern to her was Sheila's report that he never drank coffee, only tap water, out of his University of Toronto mug because he refused to let anything have that much control over him, having at one time been so fiercely addicted to coffee that if he didn't have time to drink some before a morning meeting, he would spend the entire time in a fever of distraction, thinking of nothing else. Irrelevant was Michael Curtis's intelligence that he loved baseball but had been teased terribly as a young boy for his lack of coordination, and although forever causing his own black eyes—getting in the direct path of a hurled ball, standing too close to a swinging batter—he trumped up schoolyard fights to gain some masculine credibility with his parents. The only thing he had ever told Ruth directly about himself was that his favourite tome to read from was a Norton anthology, because he loved being able to sink into each dense thousand-word page. But she felt no lack in her ignorance. She preferred to feel the quiver of mystery.

The wind whipped ribbons of hair across her face. Henry reached over and brushed a hair from her lips. She sighed more audibly than she would have liked.

“Are you not hungry?” he said, gesturing to her uneaten apple.

She shrugged. “I guess not. I had a big breakfast.”

“Are you cold?”

“Not really.”

“Because we could go back.”

She shook her head and insisted that she was fine. He wrapped up his sandwich and stuffed it back into his pocket.

“It's not an environment I'm used to, in the school” he said. “The activity is unending. The noise can be…”

“You may never get used to it. It's a far cry from the libraries at U of T,” she replied. “Finding your own space there can be a challenge. Some people, like Michael…” Her voice trailed off. Trying to bait him into negative pronouncements about their colleagues would only make her look bad: predictably catty, too desperate for conspiratorial talk.

“Let's not talk about work,” he said.

She nodded in agreement. What would they talk about, then? She waited for him to introduce a new topic, but he seemed quite comfortable saying nothing. Finally, he lifted her hand, cupped it in both of his own, and blew his warm breath on it. “You're freezing,” he murmured. She started to shake her head again in protest, but he began to kiss her fingertips one at a time. A teenage boy was approaching farther down the sidewalk. He had the look of an evolving thug, like he had been working on his walk and had to concentrate to get the half limp just right. As he passed, he stared at them defiantly.

Henry released her hand, and they watched the boy's back as he walked away. Even after he had disappeared around the corner, his presence lingered in the air. Their earlier self-consciousness descended again.

“I trust that he looked in no way familiar,” Henry said.

Ruth was briefly confused and thought he was asking whether she knew the boy, whether they had been spotted, and she felt a flush of annoyance—
he
had suggested the walk,
he
had taken her hand; how cowardly it was to initiate risks and then fret over the possible consequences. Then she noticed the worry in his face and it dawned on her that he was referring to the mugging.

“Oh, no,” she replied. “Funny, I'd all but forgotten about that.” She looked down at her new wedding ring, a plain white-gold band that Richard had bought her as a temporary replacement. Perhaps, he had said, they could consider an eternity band for their next anniversary. She disliked the new ring—it was thick and boring and looked as though it may have been purchased at the mall—but Richard had been so proud of his purchase, so solicitous, that she pretended it was exactly what she wanted as he slid it on.

They watched the park in silence for some minutes more. The mother was now settling her baby back into the stroller, burying him beneath layers of fleece blankets. A border collie mix trotted across her crumpled quilt, grabbing the sheaf of napkins and tearing away with them.

“My dog Marlow used to—” she began, then stopped, seeing Henry check his watch. “I guess we should head back.”

He gave her a long, almost sleepy look and nodded his agreement.

When they were nearing the school, Henry halted in the middle of the sidewalk. At the stop sign ahead of them was Chandra Howard, holding the handlebars of her bicycle and fussing with the contents of its wicker basket (which she referred to, affectionately, as her pannier).

“We have to meet elsewhere,” he said, looking straight ahead.

Eliot was just now in sight, the top of the ornamental bell tower emerging with imperial self-importance, cresting the heads of the trees like a crown. What had happened between them had seemed possible only there, within those walls, and she couldn't imagine their encounters in another venue.

“I want to hold your hand so badly it's killing me,” he said.

“How about my house?” she replied quickly. She didn't let herself look at him too closely as he mumbled his assent and crossed the street to return to school on his own.

 

AUDREY SAT IN THE
library at a long table by the window. It was Friday afternoon, and Monday was to bring yet another test, this time history. Ruth was in a meeting but had left a note on Audrey's locker offering a drive home. Audrey's former school had been nearly deserted so late in the day, but the Eliot library was bustling. Although exams were weeks away, most of the grade tens were already fretting. Every morning when Julie Michaels arrived at school, she claimed to have been up until two o'clock the previous night, and every morning she loudly predicted that between basketball practice, debating, and school work, she was well on her way to an early coronary.

Outside, the soccer team was practising in the last light of the day. Even from a distance, Audrey could make out Ms. Crispe's irritation, the unmistakable pose of whistle-blowing. On the other side of the field, Ms. Sampson, the elementary geography teacher, sat under a tree observing the practice, bundled prematurely into a puffy down coat with a fake fur–lined hood. Because they lived in the same apartment building, though apparently in separate units, Ms. Crispe and Ms. Sampson were rumoured to be having an affair. Dougie claimed to have once come upon Ms. Crispe addressing Ms. Sampson in an ardent whisper as “Peaches.” Audrey watched them, trying to detect some invisible chemistry, a girlish devotion in Ms. Sampson's sensible demeanour, a corresponding boastful competence in Ms. Crispe's coaching, but she was too far away to impose any specifics.

At a table not far away from Audrey's sat Arabella and Whitney in whispery conference, their heads close together. They looked up and caught Audrey staring at them. Blushing, she picked up her pen and started taking notes. A few minutes later, she heard rustling behind her. She looked back, expecting Ruth, but found Arabella emerging from the stacks.

“So,” she said, plopping into the chair next to Audrey. “I just figured something out. Audrey Brindle. Ruth Brindle.”

Audrey looked over to where Whitney had been sitting and saw that she had disappeared.

“Fuck!” Arabella said delightedly. “I can't believe I missed that!”

Audrey shrugged sheepishly in consent.

“Dude, there's nothing to be ashamed of,” Arabella said. “Your mom is awesome.”

Audrey wasn't exactly ashamed of Ruth, but she still wasn't sure how to handle having a mother who was also a teacher. She smiled, fighting down the panic that was always rising in her when Arabella was around.

“So, this morning,” Arabella said. “What the fuck, huh?”

That morning, Seeta had given another performance. She was, by now, performing at least twice a week. Her repertoire was seemingly endless, tending towards the upbeat (“Feelin' Groovy” had become her signature piece, and she had played it several times as an unsolicited encore, always with a sly grin of assumption that this was what everyone had been waiting for). She favoured the classics, declaring that no one could be anything but happy while listening to the Beach Boys, and offering a small speech about her personal environmental initiatives before “Big Yellow Taxi.” Every now and then, she grew eager to show off her range, and she opened the morning with a selection from
AC/DC
or Jimi Hendrix, “You Shook Me All Night Long” and “Castles Made of Sand” transformed into mellow, heartbroken ballads by her sweet voice pushing its gritty edges.

For the first several weeks, the grade tens had reacted to her performances with pointed boredom: long yawns staggered as if perfectly timed along the pews, explosive coughs throughout, and a lazy smattering of applause at the end. But at some point along the way, Arabella and Whitney had instigated a change in strategy. Now people leaned forward in the pews in a parody of rapt attention. They squealed in delight when she played the opening chords of “Let It Be” and let out whelping cheers when she finished. Arabella had once stood, applauding forcefully, saying “Bravo” in a projecting, manly voice. Whether or not Seeta perceived the fraudulence in this enthusiasm was impossible to tell. There was no reduction in her visibility. She went about as she always had, taking her bow, humming in the halls and strumming her guitar at lunchtime, raising her hand at every question.

What had distinguished this morning from other mornings was that after singing “Peace Train,” Seeta had announced that her brother, Ravi, a student at St. George's, was joining her for a special duet. When he took to the stage, a murmur had spread through the chapel. Holding a guitar of his own, he perched on a stool, and together they tuned their instruments. Their impeccable harmonization during “Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me” won them little respect, and their unsolicited encore of “Time After Time,” during which Ravi played a harmonica to oddly mournful effect, inspired even less. During the long morning that followed, every time Seeta was out of the room, Whitney and Dougie had twisted their hair into buns at the front of their heads and held hands, gazing into each other's eyes as they sang “I've Had the Time of My Life.”

Audrey nodded nervously. “It was brutal.”

“I want to show you something,” Arabella said with a private smile. She looked around to make sure they were alone, then reached into her knapsack, pulled out a piece of cardboard, and set it gingerly before Audrey, as though revealing a rare piece of stolen artwork.

“Whit and I made this. You like?”

Before Audrey lay a note whose intended recipient needed no illumination. In letters cut out of a magazine and placed crookedly together were the words, “No good can come of your songs. Stop while you're still ahead.” As Audrey studied the note, Arabella bobbed in her seat, as though her giggling had been trapped inside her body, where it fluttered around madly. Audrey couldn't tell whether the note was funny or genuinely creepy. There was something gleeful about its campiness, its ironic horror-film quality.

Audrey felt herself awaken, as to a granted wish. “What are you going to do with it?”

“What are
we
going to do with it?” Arabella replied.

There was a plan. With Arabella, there was always a plan. The appearance of spontaneity was paramount but in reality far too dicey a proposition. Someone would put the note in Seeta's locker, where it would sit like a love letter gone wrong, a jeering hallucination. In Arabella's imaginings, she would come upon it first thing in the morning, guitar in hand, a Beatles tune tingling at the tips of her fingers, at the highest pitch of her morning perkiness. Would she gasp, as though confronted by the flasher himself? Would she rip it up and hurl the shreds to the floor? Might they hope for tears?

As Arabella described this scenario, her usual poise crumpled and she became nervously jubilant, giddily whispering to Audrey. In her excitement, she kept forgetting herself, and her voice would rise until a sound in the stacks brought her back to herself. Then she would pause and look around edgily before resuming in a whisper. Audrey listened in a daze of disbelief. No matter how close to her Arabella murmured, no matter how seemingly dismantled her guard, Audrey couldn't see her from anything other than an intimidated distance. It was amazing, really, the lust Arabella could pour into such schemes. Held up in comparison, love was ordinary. But this derision? This spellbinding hatred? It was visionary.

“Dougie really wanted to be the one to do it,” she said. “But she's so bad at that kind of thing. She's like a magnet for witnesses. She always gets caught. Last year, she was putting orange wedges inside the music room piano, and she didn't even get two pieces in before Ms. Massie-Turnbull came in. So I said no way this time.”

Arabella regarded the note with admiration. The magazine letters were laid out strategically, with intentional crookedness, the letters ripped from headlines, clearly chosen for their bold fonts and strong colours. There was a stiffness to the paper, a result of all the glue applied, and when she passed it to Audrey, it crinkled like a child's arts and crafts project. “Do you want to do it?” she asked, as though doubtful of Audrey's fitness.

Audrey knew instantly that she would not say no. She had known even before the question was formed, perhaps even before Arabella herself knew that she would ask. And it was unnecessary for Arabella to heap compliments upon her, to praise how well she had executed the ketchup plan, to say things like “masterful touch.” It was unnecessary for her to pause for a minute before releasing the note to Audrey's care, as though she were agreeing to something Audrey had suggested. Beyond the fear of getting caught, beyond the fear of Arabella's recrimination, of trying too hard and disappointing, beyond the sweeping fear that had so commanded her life for months, there was desire.