The Eliot Girls (8 page)

Most of the teachers were already waiting when Ruth arrived with a tea from the café around the corner. She took a seat by the windows, away from the main sitting area, next to a cluster of glazed-looking Senior School teachers, though it was probably wiser to stand. During last period, she had felt her eyes drooping while her students completed a math worksheet. Sheila was sitting on one of the couches talking chirpily to Lorna Massie-Turnbull, as though greatly invigorated by the prospect of a meeting. When she saw Ruth, she beckoned with her head, but Ruth gestured to the heavy briefcase on her lap with a helpless shrug, to indicate that its weight had her somehow pinioned to the chair.

Chuck Marostica slid into the chair next to Ruth's and offered a kind of smile-grimace combination. “Ruth.”

“Hi, Chuck.”

“Long day.”

Ruth nodded.

“I hear that…” Speaking slowly, he broke off to rub his knees firmly with both hands. “So—Audrey…”

Chuck Marostica's nervous half sentences were sometimes endearing, but not now.

“Audrey?” Ruth smiled impatiently.

“I'm concerned about the results of her first quiz. She has a really weak grasp of trigonometric ratios.”

“Oh.”

“Have you thought about getting her a tutor?”

“I was hoping she wouldn't need one.”

Chandra Howard, who sat on Ruth's other side, looked over with a sympathetic smile.

Chuck scratched his head. “It's probably best to…I'm sure Audrey could benefit. Get on the need sooner rather than later.”

Ruth tried to look appreciative of the advice. “I'll look into it.”

“How long will this meeting last, do you guys think?” asked Chandra. “I need to pump.”

Chandra Howard, a Senior School biology teacher whose maternity leave had ended over a year ago, was the mother of two children, aged two and four. It was said that she was still breastfeeding both of them. Ruth knew little of her but often heard her bragging about how sleep-deprived she was. And she did, indeed, look perpetually bedraggled and virtuous, with her canvas Big Carrot bags and her unkempt hair, which was overrun with coarse and kinky grey strands.

“Not long, I'm sure,” replied Elaine Sykes, a young chemistry teacher who was sitting on Chandra's other side, patting Chandra's knee.

“I only got three hours of sleep last night,” Chandra said.

“Insomnia?”

“Wouldn't that be a luxury! No, if it wasn't Sienna wanting to eat, it was India. Just one of those nights.”

Elaine stuck out her bottom lip. “What if Gus gave them a bottle of milk so you could sleep longer?”

Chandra fixed her with an appalled stare. “Would you feed kangaroo milk to a baby elephant?”

“Well,” said Elaine, looking confused. “No.”

“It's all worth it, though. Isn't breastfeeding the greatest thing in the world, Ruth?”

Ruth had barely been listening to the conversation, so busy was she worrying that Audrey would refuse more tutoring, but she snapped to attention at the sound of her name.

“Oh. Yeah!” Ruth paused. “Actually, I only breastfed for a few months.”

“Ohh,” said Chandra, her voice falling. “Breastfeeding can be really hard for some people. You have to really keep at it.”

Elaine nodded in agreement.

“I know this mom who had so much trouble breastfeeding her first child that she just gave up, and of course she was devastated. And then her second came along a year later, and nothing could have been easier. So the older kid, who's no fool, says, ‘Hey, I want some.' And Sue said it was just like a light bulb went off for her. She said, ‘What the hell,' latched her toddler back on, and breastfed both kids for another two years. I thought that was such an inspirational story.”

“Did you know that breastfed children have higher
IQ
s?” said Elaine. “Isn't that something?”

Ruth let out a clumsy, honking laugh. “Well, then, I suppose I have only myself to blame that Audrey's doing so poorly in math!”

There was an awkward silence, and Chandra and Elaine looked uncomfortably at each other. Ruth turned to Chuck Marostica and sheepishly muttered, “A tutor is a really good idea, Chuck. Thanks.” Some minutes later, Ruth was thankful to hear Larissa's approach. She stalked into the room, flicked the lights on and off, and promptly announced, “The flasher is back.”

The response Larissa was hoping for—a collective gasp, the stirrings of shock and concern—was diluted by the way the teachers were spread out across the room. Several guiltily muffled snickers issued from various corners. Larissa's habit—a consequence of what Ruth thought of as the theatricality of the severe—was to follow such major announcements with silence, in which she basked until someone asked for more information. She finally got the response she wanted from Michael Curtis, who raised her hand and asked in a stricken voice whether the police had been alerted.

“Of course,” said Larissa. “As soon as I heard of the incident from a parent this morning.”

“When I think of my own wee ones…” Michael said, staring despondently into the middle distance.

“The police,” Larissa said, “are taking this very seriously.”

Few others, however, seemed to be. No one was genuinely afraid of the flasher, except Larissa, who carried pepper spray in her purse. (Ruth said to Audrey and Richard later, at dinner, “Of course she's petrified. She's never laid eyes on a penis. Which, of course, she can only bring herself to refer to as a ‘member.'” “As in, an upstanding member of the community?” Richard responded, making them groan.) The flasher was said to be in his mid-forties, grey haired and balding, pudgy. He wore a tan trench coat (with a poppy, apparently, around Remembrance Day), and he kept a respectful distance, so that in the end no one had ever gotten a good view of what he was so compelled to show off. Ruth felt that he was harmless, ultimately. There almost seemed an element of play about it, though she knew that thinking such a thing was naive, that this exhibitionism had something much darker at its core. There was a true danger of these displays escalating.

The students also found the flasher funny and considered it a badge of honour to be selected as his victim. Those who had actually been flashed basked in fame for weeks afterward. “Watch out for the flasher!” the girls called to each other when they set out in the direction where he was known to loiter, on the pathway that ran beside the fence on the school's western border. Ruth understood their perverse fascination, the warped pride of the chosen ones. Larissa, however, was furious when she got wind of the flasher's actions being taken lightly.

“So the question is, what can we do to keep our girls safe?” Larissa said, passing around handouts summarizing the flasher protocol. The teachers were to alert their classes to the threat and make clear the importance of notifying an adult if the flasher struck. Girls walking home must be always in pairs. Portable music devices, an impediment to hearing, were to be banned. It was essential that the students understand that the flasher was not a joke.

Sheila nodded vigorously as she reviewed the handout. “Pairs, I like that. That could be a truly impactful solution.”

Ms. McAllister stopped moving suddenly, as though someone had unplugged her internal wiring. Then she marched over to the dictionary and read aloud the definition of
impact
, and the list of its legitimate derivations. “This is the second time I have heard you employ the word ‘impactful,' Sheila,” said Larissa. “‘
Cuiusvis hominis est errare, nullius nisi insipientis in errore perseverare.
' ‘Anyone can err, but only the fool persists in his fault.'”

Sheila nodded again, this time in perplexed shame, studying her handout.

“If I may ask,” said Michael, raising her hand. “Who was the victim?”

“Deborah Fields.”

Michael shook her head. “That poor, darling girl.” Always quick to appoint herself the mouthpiece for thwarted female justice in the world beyond the Eliot enclave, Michael stood now and gathered the teachers to her with an embracing, outraged stare. “Imagine simply being on your way home from school in broad daylight and being accosted by the sight of a stranger's dangling phallus. Although God knows dangling is certainly preferable to the alternative.”

Henry Winter, Ruth noticed now, was sitting near Michael, listening with apparent interest as she spoke. Ruth had hardly seen him since his introduction in the staff room, though she had nearly crossed paths with him just the other day in the parking lot. She had been applying lipstick in her rear-view mirror when he pulled in next to her in his car, a beaten-up old black Saab with a dented door and red duct tape where the glass was missing from one of the brake lights. Through her peripheral vision, Ruth saw him register her presence, and after he locked his door he paused for a moment between the cars, possibly waiting for her to get out and accompany him into the school. Wanting to avoid early morning small talk, she had pretended to rummage around for something in her briefcase until he disappeared. On her way into the school, she noticed on his car a bumper sticker that said, “My other car is a bicycle.” She was surprised, having failed to detect in him any environmental zeal.

“How dare men use their genitalia as a threat. A weapon of intimidation.” Michael's voice had fallen to a haunted, impassioned hush. “It's sickening. I remember back in my single days how awful it was never having a moment's peace when I was out with my girlfriends. Men constantly interrupting. Pushing themselves into our conversations. Insisting upon buying me drinks. Sitting on bar stools with their legs spread wide, thrusting their groins at the world.”

Demoralized at the recollection, she sank to her seat and Lorna Massie-Turnbull patted her shoulder.

“Don't worry,” said Larissa. “We'll get this bastard.”

A delighted, nervous titter rose up from her audience. Larissa was known for reviling curse words as the lazy man's mode of self-expression.

“Let's see how brave he is then,” put in Chandra Howard.

Larissa made a lengthy note on her clipboard, then looked sharply in Ruth's direction.

“May I ask why you are smiling, Ruth?”

Ruth's gaze had been fixed on the handout in her lap. The more she had tried to tell herself that the situation was not humorous, the sillier it had seemed. She had tried to imagine Audrey being a victim, how upset she would be, but all she could think of was how they would laugh about it together. She was sure that teenagers weren't permanently scarred by that kind of thing.

“Was I?” Ruth answered. “I'm very sorry, Larissa. Something else entered my mind.”

“I'm sorry this news fails to hold your attention.”

All the teachers had turned around in their seats to look at her.

“I'm sorry, Larissa. It was a momentary lapse. I assure you that I'm just as concerned about the flasher as you are.” Ruth bowed her head to convey her shame, and as the meeting drew to a close she remained in her chair, unmoving, as though held down by the lingering weight of the reprimand.

As Larissa withdrew to the side of the room to discuss the morning's musical program with Lorna Massie-Turnbull, some teachers rose from their seats, stretching with a somewhat post-coital contentment. Chandra and Elaine began conversing in hushed tones, making Ruth suspicious that they were talking about her. In the centre of the seating area, Michael, flanked by Henry and Sheila, was animatedly describing her methods for training her children not to speak to strangers. After a year or so of what she called total intimidation (“and we spare them no gruesome details!”), she and her husband arranged to have an acquaintance attempt an abduction in a crowded mall or grocery store. So far, only one of her children had failed this test, a lapse that, given the number of children involved, struck her as an acceptable record of success.

Others joined their cluster, and the conversation turned back to the flasher. Ruth couldn't hear them well now, but she thought she heard someone say, “Apparently not small at all!” She decided she must have been mistaken—Larissa was still in the room, after all—but then she noticed that Henry was laughing, though the sound could barely be classified as a laugh. It was very contained, almost reluctant, a rustle in his throat: an acknowledgment of humour more than a release of mirth.

For the past month, rumours about Henry had been vigorously circulating. Some people claimed that he had left his University of Toronto job after a nervous breakdown. Others guessed that he'd had an affair with a student. What was known was that he had recently married Clayton Quincy, the mother of Arabella. Out of this lone fact, the teachers spun a simple but epic tale. Clayton Quincy was perhaps the only single mother in the Eliot world. And although the fact that she could well afford to send her daughter to the school separated her from the truly disadvantaged, that she had been widowed in Arabella's infancy was compensation enough. Ruth herself had no concrete recollection of the woman from Arabella's time in grade four, but someone recalled that she had once been a cellist. Sheila had extracted the nugget that they had been engaged on top of a mountain. That Henry held himself apart, offering scant information, only inflamed their interest; speculation was more arousing than knowledge anyway. A Byronic hero had happened into their own little school.

Ruth tried to stay out of these conversations, not because she disliked gossip as a rule, but because she disapproved of the subject, resenting Henry's unearned renown.

Secretly, she preferred to dwell on the probable disgrace that had ejected him from the University of Toronto. This projection of the noble romance, love after widowhood, hit a nerve. She didn't care whether he'd proposed on a mountaintop or the car ride home after a night in jail. There was nothing in his story that merited such fervour. Wasn't there something a little weird about a fortyish bachelor anyway?