The Eliot Girls (6 page)

At the end of a long day, she wanted to find an ally in her husband, but behind Richard's every word trailed the history of all the disagreements they'd ever had about whether she should give up on getting Audrey into Eliot. “Let's not fight about Eliot anymore,” she said.

“I don't want to fight about Eliot.”

“You know I just want what's best for her. I still remember my friend Mary leaving Leaside to go to Havergal.”

Richard sighed.

“And she loved telling me about how her
IQ
was 120. Like that was good!”

“Yes, yes.”

“If my mother had let me—”

“Ruth, we've been through this.”

Ruth could still conjure the outrage she felt almost thirty years earlier as Antonia, opposed to private education, tore up Ruth's acceptance letter and let it flutter into the garbage, after all the trouble Ruth had gone to, gathering brochures, taking the entrance exam, the
IQ
test (of which she never received the results). But she knew that the more forcefully she advanced her point of view, the more Richard would withdraw. He had already resumed throwing the ball for the dogs, a reminder that his patience was limited.

“All right, then,” she said. “How was your day? What happened with the pit?”

There was some anger behind the forceful pitch that followed. The fluorescent orb went sailing over the fence into their rear neighbour's yard.

“I bought some time. Managed to convince the owner to let me board him temporarily.”

“Good for you.”

“It's not a solution. But he's promised to think it through.”

“What I can't understand is why he wouldn't be happy just to let you find the dog a new home.”

“He insists he could never forgive himself if the dog hurt someone. I think we're dealing with more of a control issue, though.”

“Well, stand your ground. You're the expert.”

Stevie and McGill scrabbled at the back of the yard, whimpering at the sight of their inaccessible toy, but Richard abandoned the game. Stepping up to the deck, he stood over Ruth for a moment, his head blocking the descending sun. Then he pulled her out of the chair and put his arms around her, pressing his scratchy cheek against hers. Ruth had a weird urge to laugh. She could hear it inside her head, a lunatic cackle. Her skin prickled with sensitivity at his closeness. They had not made love in a long time. Weeks, she thought. Maybe a month. She cast a backward glance at August, and then July. She could not remember sex in as long as the weather had been hot. That couldn't be right. The fact that she couldn't even remember seemed more distressing than the prospect that it had really been since spring.

He took her hand in his and regarded it contemplatively. “Your hands look just the same as when we first met.”

In the dimming light, he, too, resembled his younger self. For a second, Ruth blinked out of the moment, and when she returned, it seemed no longer to be Richard who was there. Another face flickered, threatening to materialize. Flustered, she looked away, now inexplicably embarrassed to be standing so close to him.

 

AUDREY LAY ON HER
back across the width of her bed, her legs dangling over the side. There was homework already, so there was procrastination already.
Oedipus rex
lay next to her on the pillow. She had opened it with the ambitious intent to read the first half by bedtime, but the pressure of that unrealistic goal caused fatigue to overtake her at the first line, and she had fallen into a dream of nothingness. She was dressed for apathy, in an old denim shirt with badly frayed elbows and the loose grey sweatpants she jogged in sporadically, when sudden disgust at her own laziness upended her in the middle of a quiet morning. The pants were a size too large, with a hole in the bottom big enough to give anyone a clear view of her underwear when she bent over. Across the rear were the patchy words “Camp Oconto,” the middle and final Os of Oconto long since rubbed away. In spite of this endorsement of a hated camp, Audrey had formed a strong attachment to the ratty garment, and she had sought the pants upon arriving home from school as a repudiation of the uniform she'd been wearing all day.

Audrey's bedroom always made her feel at least a little bit like a fraud. Ruth had initiated a redesign of the room earlier that year, with the aim of obliterating all vestiges of childishness, and for six months Audrey had inhabited this superior space without ever feeling at ease. Rather than reflecting what she liked, the room reflected what she ought to like. The decor was a work-in-progress. The idea was that it would always be a work-in-progress until she left for university and set about visiting her personality on her drab residence room. Every few months, Ruth would drag her to a flea market or an antique show and urge her to take delight in the quirky treasures on display, and wasn't content to leave until Audrey had pointed out at least two items upon which her heart was set. Audrey had never actually set her heart on anything, but she learned that by watching Ruth, she could figure out which things Ruth hoped she would set her heart on. Most recently, Ruth had come upon her in a trance near a headless 1950s female mannequin and exclaimed, “I was thinking exactly the same thing!” The mannequin now posed in the corner, uncostumed, her wrists lifted demurely, and at night Audrey draped a blanket over her and tried to forget she was there.

If Audrey's new bedroom was an expression of the teenager she should have been, her old bedroom had been a reflection of the childhood she had hoped to have, with pink walls and a white canopy bed, a ballet theme throughout, even though she had never actually been interested in ballet. It was, she had to admit, an embarrassing room for a teenager, but she missed it. The high canopy bed had been replaced with an austere metal bed frame from
IKEA
. The walls were painted white, with the idea that they would simply be a backdrop to the collection of hangings Audrey would cull from visits to various flea markets. Above her bed hung a cracking green vintage sign that read “Fred's General Store,” and on another wall a deck of 1940s vintage tarot cards were tacked up in messy rows. Ruth, on Audrey's behalf, had fallen in love with a rose-coloured 1950s Arborite kitchen table, used now as a desk, and a wall of acid-green vintage lockers, repurposed as a clothes armoire. On Audrey's behalf she had also replaced the flowery duvet with a lime-green comforter patterned with white zigzags. The bed itself, a queen also aspired to on Audrey's behalf, felt far too large to Audrey, and often at night when she stretched out her feet, she discovered cold planes of sheet, unfriendly regions where dark things might find her: spiders, or the hard, grabbing hands of the mannequin, come alive.

What a day it had been. In her classes, although little material was actually covered, it was clear from the teachers' introductions alone how far behind she was. Her mother had warned her that Eliot was two grade levels ahead of the average public high school. Audrey couldn't even understand Mr. Marostica's simplified overview of what they would cover in math over the coming weeks. In one particularly atrocious episode, she was forced to sing aloud by herself in music class so that Ms. Massie-Turnbull could determine whether she was an alto or a soprano. She ate lunch at her desk as quickly as she could, then fled to the library, the only place she could be alone without embarrassment, where she wandered the stacks until the bell rang.

That morning, Audrey had felt lost when she and Ruth went their separate ways at the car. A part of her had wished things could be different, that her mother could shepherd her through the day, as she had when Audrey began kindergarten. But when she got inside the school and the minutes began to pass so painfully, she began to think that she could feel Ruth everywhere, watching, pitilessly judging her performance. In the quad after assembly, the instant she had stepped out of the chapel she was jarred to spot Ruth standing in the sunlight, looking like the first Eliot girl that ever was. The red of her skirt made a striking contrast with her crisp white blouse, and her hair, freed of its ugly tortoiseshell restraint, now sheltered her face as though consciously arranged to conceal it until the perfect moment. Ruth had no need to bark out orders at her straying pupils or to corral them with singsong commands. Her elegant presence alone seemed to draw them into her orbit. Audrey had cast her head down and tried to get by unnoticed. She had hoped to evade that gaze, so composed, so entitled. Stupidly, she had looked up too soon and been caught.

With the end of the school day came relief, but also the need for a new kind of evasion. The prospect of dissecting her day with Ruth was demoralizing. Now that they shared the common ground of Eliot, communication seemed more, not less, complex. Audrey sensed a protocol she was failing to follow. Luckily, a series of interruptions at dinner had delayed the looming discussion. Stevie had jumped up on the kitchen counter to steal some raw broccoli from where it lay cut up on the bread board, knocking a plate onto the floor in the process. Then Richard had received a call from the clinic about the care of a post-surgical dog boarding overnight. Although Ruth kept trying to find a way into the conversation, between the racket of Richard's rebuke of Stevie, the subsequent vacuuming of the mess, and the ringing phone, she had finally given up and said they would talk after dinner.

The yellow task lamp on Audrey's bedside table cast a defined circle of light on the first page of
Oedipus rex
, and Audrey turned onto her stomach in a half-hearted attempt to corral the words swimming beneath her sleepy gaze into a string of meaning. A knock came at her door. Before she had a chance to answer, Ruth entered.

“Off to a good start, I see,” Ruth said.

“I can't believe there's already homework on the first day.”

“This is Eliot.”

“I know. But still.”

“You'll get used to the rhythm of things.” Ruth went over to the window seat and sat down, looking out the window. Leaning against the wall, she stretched her legs out across the length of the window like a sunbather. The languor seemed phony, though, part of a plan to present herself as unintimidating. Her purpose was evident.

“So, tell me everything,” Ruth finally said with a smile.

“There's nothing to tell.”

“That's impossible!” Ruth's long hair was still wet from the shower, and she was combing it with her fingers to work out the tangles. She wore a plain white T-shirt and the faded Levi's she claimed to have bought in 1985, and around her neck was the necklace she always wore, a sapphire necklace from her mother, the most ornate thing she owned and the only jewellery she ever wore aside from her slim platinum wedding band.
 

Audrey's disquiet shifted into a clearer shape. Like most little girls, she had always wanted to look like her mother. Lately, though, an unsettling awareness had begun to encircle this once-innocent desire. The sight of Ruth that morning in the quad had roused it. Now she was hit again. Ruth and Audrey had never much felt the imbalance of being adult and child—their relationship had always been one of conscientious equality—but Audrey was starting to perceive another force sabotaging their fragile parity. She was unable to ignore the hierarchy that attended the presence of beauty. How could they continue to talk openly when one was a beautiful woman and the other was, clearly, not on her way to becoming beautiful? And when each of them was so aware of this difference?

Ruth leaned forward brightly, waiting for the confidence she had always considered her due. But Audrey couldn't bring herself to divulge the dispiriting particulars of her day. Certainly, she longed for the catharsis that might come from confessing everything, from her vast disappointment to her fear of failure—her certainty of failure—but when she studied Ruth's face, it no longer seemed a face that welcomed confession, too much did it want for her what seemed out of reach. Confronted by Ruth's curiosity, Audrey felt a fresh rush of the burden of being the only child. People didn't realize, when they lamented the lot of such a child, that the main difficulty wasn't the lack of a sibling; it was the exposure. In the flurry of a bigger family, there would be countless places to conceal one's failures. Here, there was always Ruth, wanting too much.

Ruth rose from the window seat and got into bed next to Audrey, curling up her legs under the duvet. “Come on. It can't have been that bad.”

There was no easy way of explaining how bad it had been. The truth was that nothing much had happened at all, and in that nothingness lay a bleakness impossible to evoke. In the days leading up to school, Audrey had imagined so many scenarios of failure that she had grown accustomed to waking in the morning under a cloud of ill-defined alarm. But she was learning now that disaster wasn't necessarily acute and conclusive. It didn't have to be a fall over a cliff. It could stretch over a long and twisty scenic road, with a landscape of unexpected hills and turnoffs, but a desert's interminability.

Audrey knew that her despair was out of all proportion. It was just one day. It need not represent all the ones that would follow. But for so long she had believed that Eliot would launch her real life. How could she square herself to the lunacy of her prodigious expectations? She had longed for nothing short of a baptism.

Never had she understood how hostile indifference could feel. Except for Seeta Prasad and the laughing girls in the bathroom, no one had talked to her. From assembly in the morning, through lunchtime, to that final bell: not a word. At her old school, she'd had friends to eat with and sit next to in class, a small cluster of girls inside which she was sheltered from the hurtling noise in the hallways. How she now regretted the meagre investment she'd made in those friendships, so certain had she been that a more dynamic life lay ahead of her at Eliot. Stripped of that social buffer, she was astounded by how everything could get at her. The laughter was almost unbearable. It hadn't been directed towards her yet, not that she knew, but the sound of it, the suddenness, knocked the air right out of her. In moments, she had felt she might go crazy as it closed in, engulfing her without including her, the dissonant frenzy of it.