The Eliot Girls (5 page)

Michael Curtis brushed past Ruth to the sink and refilled her bottle with water.

“Goodness, someone ingested a touch too much vino last night, methinks!” she said, a hand on her forehead.

“Oh, no!” Ruth replied.

“I saw Audrey earlier. Doesn't she look just darling.”

Ruth smiled.

“Poor girl was like a deer caught in headlights. I am so glad she stuck with it and powered through all those entrance tests. A great lesson for her in how hard work pays off,
n'est-ce pas
?”

Ruth nodded. “That's what Richard and I were hoping. She's a bit nervous, though.”

“
Bien sûr!
Henceforth begins the real work! Now, have you thought about getting her a tutor, Ruth?”

“Oh. I'm not sure.”

Michael drew Ruth into the refuge of her long arm. “Make sure you keep a lookout and stay ahead of problems. I always do some sessions on study habits near the start of the year, and the girls rave about how useful they are.”

Ruth tried to nod with confidence. Getting Audrey into Eliot had consumed so much of her attention that she'd spared little worry for how Audrey would fare academically once in. As Michael sailed back to the group, Ruth busied herself with pointless tasks, wiping down the counters and rearranging cleaned mugs in the dish drainer. She was rinsing out her borrowed mug when Henry Winter moved in next to her at the sink, waiting his turn to fill a mug with water.

“Hello,” he said.

Ruth looked up. “Oh.”

His voice was clean and deep, a 1940s radio voice that made everything he said sound more incisive than it really was. She glanced out at Sheila and her group, who were reorganizing themselves sombrely in the wake of his departure. Ruth and Henry stood uncomfortably for some moments, Henry smiling with detached affability, sipping water from the Far Side mug Sheila had lent him. He didn't introduce himself or inquire her name, and she was pondering how to extricate herself from their impasse when Michael cried from across the room, “Henry! Let me see you down to assembly!”

So he had been claimed already, it seemed. He nodded a goodbye and retreated, his hands tunnelling deep into his pockets. Tittering, the women encircled him, their laughter borne up on the air like birdsong.

 

 

Cha
p
ter
Fo
ur

THE FIRST ASSEMBLY OF
the year was reliably a stirring event, mobilizing the school spirit in old girls and new, but Ruth spent the length of it fidgeting, looking around the chapel for Audrey. Her own class of girls sat along the pew beside her, but she paid them little attention. Wide eyed, respectfully inhibited on this first morning of school, the girls required no management anyway, none of the shushing and stern glances, the behaviour management she so disliked, that made her feel prissy and alien to herself. It wasn't until the assembly let out, when she was on her way back across the quad, distractedly correcting the disarray of her class's line, that she saw Audrey emerging from the shadows of the chapel.

In an instant, the jittery tenderness she had been feeling for her daughter evaporated. Audrey walked alone, unmistakably apart from the girls heading in the same direction. She seemed not even to be trying to talk to anyone. In fact, her expression was vividly grumpy. Ruth stared at her, suppressing the urge to go over and say something. As though sensing herself studied, Audrey looked up and met Ruth's eyes. Ruth smiled, a small smile—it could have been meant for anyone—but Audrey's face went dead, and she hurried away as quickly as if Ruth had been reaching for her.

The trace of irritation Ruth had felt that morning in the car erupted into full being. What cause did Audrey have to be so morose? How could she expect anyone to speak to her when she had taken cover under such sulkiness? A sensation of something, guilt almost, brushed against Ruth, but she had no time to make sense of it before the head girl, Kate Gibson, sailed past with a friendly wave.

“Good summer, Ms. Brindle?”

As if to banish the cloud released by Audrey, Kate stood in the middle of the quad, glowing with the pleasure of the new year, her new position. Ruth could not help smiling widely in response. “Lovely, Kate, thank you,” she said. Kate represented everything most exemplary about Eliot. In grade nine, she had arrived at Eliot with a greater disadvantage than most girls her age could fathom, yet her triumphs formed the kind of inspirational success story everyone loved. At twelve, Kate had been in a car accident that resulted in the amputation of her left arm above the elbow, but if she had ever felt frustrated by her disability, ever experienced self-pity, she had never allowed a second of bad humour to surface on her sunny, freckled countenance. Ruth watched Audrey walk away, both arms intact, and felt the urge to yank her back.
Look!
she imagined saying to her daughter.
Only one full arm!
What complaint of her own could Audrey put up against a prosthetic limb? What a lesson Kate was in patience and victory, in indestructible spirit. Moreover, she was proof that Eliot was the seat of higher minds. The girls had not ostracized Kate, they had voted for her, they had made her their leader.

Hours later, Ruth was still raw with disappointment. The drive home to the Beach was long, and she had trouble keeping her eyes on the road, though she knew the route so well she followed it mindlessly. It had been the same house on Silverbirch all these years, however little it resembled its original self. When she and Richard bought it during her pregnancy, it had been a small semi-detached at the top of a steep hill. For years, they had made only small improvements; then the old woman next door died and her errant children descended, appraising the neighbourhood and counting their money. Richard suggested that he and Ruth buy the house and make one large detached home out of the two. A trendy architect was deployed to replaced every existing wall, every known corner, with a better wall, a superior corner, yet every time she faced it, Ruth was frustrated by the lack of finesse that had gone into its design. The house looked exactly like what it was: two houses that had been joined awkwardly into one.

Closing the door behind her, she dropped her briefcase and tossed her keys onto the console table in the front hall. The keys clanged as they hit the ornate porcelain dish that served as the table's centrepiece. The disruptive noise was satisfying, a splash of cold water on the face, and Ruth had a flash of a different outcome: the compote toppled like a bowling pin. An act of carelessness so easily avoided might have been perversely gratifying. A kind of wicked fulfillment would be found in kneeling on the floor amid the jagged shards—the physical defeat of the maid-like posture, the clink as she dropped each broken piece into a garbage bag, the satisfaction of wallowing in her stupidity. The day's pleasures had fallen short of her forecast, and disillusionment brought out the anarchist in her.

The dish had been Richard's first gift to her. There had been no occasion for the offering, a fact that ought to have doubled the sweetness of the gesture but had only ever added to Ruth's bewilderment. It was an antique English compote (a term she'd never heard until he offered it), a delicate, fanciful thing. The first part was a scalloped cream bowl with intricately carved cactus lilies and vines winding around its outer wall. This bowl sat atop a similarly garlanded pedestal, around which stood three winged cupids involved in the work of making gilt arrows, each at a station supplied with tools, also gilt. When Richard had presented it, in a box wrapped in pink tissue paper, she looked to him for some sign of ironic intent, though she knew there was none. The compote was rare and expensive. That much was clear.

Over the years, Ruth's perception of the compote had changed. Still it clashed embarrassingly with her cooler antiques and still she was bored by such sincere, fastidious craftsmanship. Still she was puzzled over the wrongness of the gift, but no longer did she see this wrongness as a failing. She pictured Richard puttering around a musty antique store and picking this present in a wave of foolish bliss about their future. To be so smitten that his sense deserted him, to try so hard and be so wide of the mark—there was something endearing about the misstep. Ruth found that to imagine his innocence was to imagine her own, to conceive of herself as a gentler person than she was truly becoming.

It was out of such surprises that their life together had been born. The ordinary ways people ended up together had always needled Ruth's conviction that true love must grow out of inflammatory circumstances. She and Richard had met at a vet clinic, where Ruth was working part-time as an assistant for the summer before she started teachers' college. Their relationship had been companionable enough—in her view sorely lacking in the tempestuous ill will she associated with passion. Dinners followed by polite kisses followed by dinners followed by impolite kisses: she was certain that love ought not to develop so functionally. Their first visit to her mother's house became their true beginning, in spite of—indeed because of—the fact that it was almost the end of them.

Ruth's parents had bought one of the Playter estates in Greektown before they were fashionable and before they were called estates. Although widowed, Ruth's mother, Antonia, had continued to rattle around in the roomy three-storey Edwardian house. Ruth and Richard were removing their shoes in the octagon of the entryway when Antonia, a slim and elegant woman who still managed to look like she could beat Richard at an arm wrestle, materialized in the doorway to the kitchen, running her hands upwards through her short white hair like a child waking from a nap. “So sorry,” she said. “I was just outside watching the dust in the sunlight.” So began a monologue that ranged in subject from the lawyers across the street who wanted to buy her latest series of photographs (in which the conflict between Apollo and Dionysus was variously depicted in nighttime scenes from her recent trip to Brazil) to the cat across the street who had a crush on her golden retriever, and that included no one in particular, least of all Richard, who, by the time the roast chicken was served, sat in the stifling heat of the dining room dabbing at his forehead with a monogrammed handkerchief, staring blankly at his wine glass.

If Ruth had thought nothing could ruin an evening more than her mother's determination to prove how delightful she was, that was because she hadn't yet experienced Richard countering Antonia's posturing with humourlessness so impossibly extreme that Ruth wondered if it were a form of deep irony too sophisticated for her to understand. She gave him chances to prove that he was just being rebellious. She repeatedly let her leg fall against his under the table, offering opportunities for stealthy groping, but Richard kept his hands well ordered on his lap or occupied with his utensils. She went into the kitchen to fill the glass pitcher with fresh water and lemon slices, hoping that he would follow her in and accost her at the refrigerator, or at least touch her breast. To Antonia's story about moving into the neighbourhood long before gentrification was even a consideration, Richard replied that it must have been the last thing the architects had in mind, Greek immigrants right off the boat buying these grand houses. As Antonia used her fork to feed the dogs chicken scraps, Richard volunteered that his advice, as a veterinarian, was never to feed animals from the table, particularly when the dogs are already overweight.

Ruth excused herself immediately after dinner and went upstairs to her mother's room to consider how to break up with him. A short time later, she heard Richard closing the door to the bathroom across the hall. Minutes later, he appeared in the doorway and cleared his throat.

“Was this your room?” he asked. “I don't see you in it.”

“It's my mother's. Well, my parents'. But my mother hasn't slept in here since my father died.”

An ornately engraved Louis
XV
walnut bedstead with a pristine white quilt draped tidily over its high mattress took centre stage on the long wall opposite the windows. Ruth sat on the edge while Richard took in the room in long, respectful strides. She wanted to be angry at him, as she had been earlier, for being so much himself at every moment, but the sweat-moistened creases in his shirt pulled her back to sadness. She wished he weren't so correct, so conservative. She knew he was the kind of man she ought to love. Just before meeting him, she'd had a short-lived relationship with a boring man whose casual cruelty had briefly made him seem exciting. Near the end of their first date, he'd leaned over the dwindling candle on their restaurant table and told her that he loved her sexiness, the daring of it, because the horsey edge in her looks prevented her from being truly beautiful. She couldn't think that was what she wanted from Richard, but his appropriateness, his consideration, his geniality—his obese, immovable respect—were killing her.

He stopped at a Group of Seven calendar fixed at April 1985, two years earlier. “This calendar is outdated,” he said instructively.

“I realize that,” Ruth replied. “My father died that April. My mother won't change the calendar.”

He moved towards the bed. Now he would offer the tedious apology. Now he would hover above her, reverently skirting the dead man's bed. Now he would take her hand.

“How very Miss Havisham of her,” he said.

For all her notions about passion as an unruly, uninvited guest who stumbled drunkenly through the house and smashed all her best antiques, it had been a long time since Ruth had been surprised by anything, least of all her own feelings.

Then Richard leaned over her.

“I want to rape you,” he whispered.

Ruth remembered lying back on the quilt, thinking,
At last
.

Through the tall windows that ran along the back of the house, she now saw Richard in the backyard throwing a ball for the dogs. Stevie and McGill raced in tandem while Marlow lay panting at Richard's feet, casting worshipful eyes upwards each time Richard stooped to pat him.

In spite of their first meeting, it had been Antonia who observed that Richard would age well. This prediction had immediately made Ruth value him more highly, for what was the use of good looks if they were just a flare, a dying sparkle? Richard had certainly been attractive as a young man, though what prevented him from being notably handsome was unclear. Perhaps he was too generic, too vague a version of the dark and handsome prototype. Or perhaps he was simply too apologetic to be striking. The problems of aging had only served him well. As a young man, his height had had an edge of lankiness that could make him look weak, but the added bulk of middle age had made him more elegant, more at ease in his frame. His extra weight was not a softness—regular morning jogs along the boardwalk kept him fit—but rather the physical solidity that suggests an inner solidity. The dashes of grey in his brown hair had the same effect of conferring dignity. He was certainly no longer the man who had given her a compote.

Outside, the late afternoon air was still heavy with the heat of the day. Richard's cheeks were flushed, his T-shirt damp at its underarms. Marlow still lay at his feet.

“Where's Audrey?” Ruth asked, pushing open the screen door.

“Upstairs. Door closed. I wouldn't dare.”

Sighing, Ruth sat on a deck chair. Marlow ambled over for a pat, but the greeting he received in return was distracted. After a moment, she launched into her version of the day's events. Within seconds, Richard was shaking his head.

“What? What is it?” Ruth said

“Kate Gibson has no bearing here.”

“But—”

“She's pretty and confident, and that prosthetic—”

Ruth rolled her eyes. This was not the first time Richard had been keen to point out that Kate's prosthetic was a decent double for the real thing and that, in any case, the adjustments in deportment she had to make to compensate for her missing limb lent her an against-the-odds magnificence, a worldly confidence that made her popularity inevitable—never mind the fact that, on top of Kate's own obvious charms, Eliot liked what a one-armed head girl said about its values. No matter what he said, Richard could not make Ruth accept his sour interpretation, and she was determined that her view was the one Audrey would share.