Don't I Know You? (3 page)

I thanked him and went back up to the dorm, where I kept my light on long after the others had fallen asleep. First I read his story, about a teenage boy who worked as a cashier at the A&P. Three girls in bathing suits come in and cause a stir. There wasn't much to it. And it had so many details, especially about the way one girl let the straps of her suit fall down her shoulder. Did he see
me
in such detail? The thought made me nervous.

I opened the poetry book. P. K. Page, Irving Layton, Milton Acorn, Al Purdy, Leonard Cohen. “
As the mist leaves no scar on the dark green hill/ So my body leaves no scar on you/ nor ever will…”
In school they taught us only British or American authors, and I didn't know that such writing, full of snow and longing and places that I recognized from my own life, was allowed. The love poems struck me with the force of samizdat, something clandestine and illegal.

The next day, I found a picnic table near Emilio's studio, where I set up my portable green Olivetti to do some serious work. Not the boring details of five minutes in my boring day, here in Doon where nothing happened; instead I was going to write a play about three women—but in fact, they were all aspects of one woman! The “real” woman sits on a bench at the front of the stage and does nothing. Behind her, two women talk to her, representing her hidden thoughts and everything she can't bring herself to do or be. I had read a play by Harold Pinter, and had seen a Little Theatre production of Edward Albee, so this premise felt modern and edgy to me. I wanted to write something out of the ordinary to impress John Updike.

“This is an intriguing start,” he said when I showed him the three pages I had managed to type. “But don't forget that in the theatre, things
happen.
It might be a good idea to include an event.”

He was right. It was a play in which absolutely nothing took place. The woman never even left her bench! But hadn't that worked for Samuel Beckett? Didn't he bury one of his characters up to the neck in sand? What about his play where one character is always saying, “Well, shall we go?” and then nobody moves? I flounced up to my dorm and pulled out my canvas with the whirling pine tree. Screw writing. I could always paint.

“Miss McEwan?” John called up the stairs after lunch, which I had skipped. I showed myself at the top of the stairs.

“How about a walk?”

I said nothing, but went and got my insect repellant, and also my red jacket with the navy patch pockets and the nylon hood rolled up inside the collar. I came down the stairs, vaguely aware that the other students might notice us slipping off during Individual Work Period. We headed across the back lawn without saying a word, complicit already, and trudged up the road, cresting the hill, where we would soon be out of sight of the others.

The cicadas shrieked. When I looked back at the house and the cottages behind it, that little world seemed somnolent and far away. I tried to restrain myself from chattering nervously. I had already alluded to Larry.

“Your boyfriend must be missing you,” John said.

“He's not actually my real boyfriend,” I answered, feeling it at once as the treachery it was.

“Oh?”

“I just don't want to hurt his feelings.”

“That doesn't sound promising.”

Two could play this game, I thought, turning toward him.

“Your wife must miss you too. With all those kids.”

“Yes. But I think she's also secretly relieved to run the house as she likes when I'm away.”

“Larry writes me every day,” I said, rolling my eyes. My callousness knew no bounds.

We reached a cemetery and turned into it. The path faded into uncut grass and scatterings of wildflowers, yellow and white. Most of the old tombstones were drifting down into the earth. A bunchy-looking tree stood in the middle of the cemetery, laden with small green apples. We sat under it. I had on my second-favorite seersucker shorts and was careful to avoid any mushy fallen ones.

“Did you get a chance to read any of that poetry?” he asked.

“Yes, I read it all, last night.”

“And?”

“I loved it.”

“Good. I'll give you more.”

“And I read your story about the A&P boy too. It's very well written.”

At this he smiled.

“Burlington has an A&P too,” I added.

In the shade of the tree, the ground was a little damp. To avoid getting a wet spot on my shorts I jumped up and went over to a tombstone and read the epitaph aloud. “‘Here Lies our Belov'd Annabelle/Who Is with the Angels Now.' Look at the dates,” I said; “she was only fourteen years old when she died.”

He came over to read it and we stood together, arms touching. As I brushed away some vines that were creeping over the inscription, he took my hand and inspected the back of it.

“What's this?”

“Warts,” I said. I withdrew my hand. “I've had them since I was ten.” There were three on my ring finger, small and white, scarcely noticeable, but I was self-conscious about them.

“In the Middle Ages, people thought warts were caused by someone putting a curse on you, and that a charm could cure you too.”

“Witches, you mean.”

“For instance, they thought that driving nails into an oak tree could prevent a headache, or that wearing a ring made from the hinges of a coffin could heal cramps.”

He ran his fingers over the pale bumps with their mottled, brainlike surface. “What do you think—shall I try?”

“I don't know. The doctor burnt them with some frozen liquid stuff last year but they just grew back.”

He brought the back of my hand to his lips. That's when I got scared. The sound of a truck laboring up over the hill, unseen, grew louder. I turned and began walking quickly toward the gate.

“But you have to believe in the spell, or nothing will happen,” John said, right behind me.

“What is it with you and things
happening
?” The truck driver with his load of lumber sped past us without a glance at this ill-matched couple walking single-file in the afternoon heat.

“It's a perfectly good beginning for a play, Rose,” John said. “You just need to keep working on it.”

When we reached the grounds of the school, we made our separate ways into the house, him through the back door. It was understood that we had embarked on something secretive. Up in the dorm, L'Orren was sitting cross-legged on her bed writing in her notebook with a thick-nibbed fountain pen.

“Where were you?” she asked. That girl did not beat around the bush.

“I went down to the bridge for a walk. I'm having trouble with my opening scene.”

“We missed you at lunch,” she said unconvincingly.

It soon became evident that no one in our class was a writer of any real promise, so John busied himself organizing entertainment to fill our evenings. He found some National Film Board shorts in the parlor cabinets, and we screened them on a tacked-up bedsheet in the rec room. There were two live-animation, stop-motion films called
Neighbours
and
A Chairy Tale
by Norman McLaren—little comic parables about the childishness of human conflict. Like the love poems they made a deep impression on me about what is possible in art. I didn't think playfulness and humor were allowed.

We found some records on the basement shelves too, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, and Ravel's
Bolero
. L'Orren and the novelist danced around the Ping-Pong table to the orgasmic pulse of
Bolero
, eyes closed, waving their arms like seaweed, a sight that mortified the rest of us.

Earlier that day L'Orren had spent a good two hours with John, going through her narrative cycle of poems about an Inuit woman who wants to become a hunter like the men, but is stoned to death by her relatives instead. For some reason the two of them met in the greenhouse. I could see them both from my perch on a window seat in the dorm. I was working on my assignment that day, a descriptive scene about nature using no figures of speech. This I found challenging, as I believed similes and metaphors to be the sine qua non of fine writing.

I had a good view of her facing John, braiding and unbraiding her hair. Through the streaky glass I could see him, occasionally laughing, tipping back in his chair. After a long time L'Orren left the greenhouse and strode toward the house, hugging her binder with a hopeful, preoccupied air.

I had moved over to my bed by the time she came into the dorm.

“How was your meeting?” I asked.

“A-mazing. He wrote his thesis on Robert Herrick and I have this whole sonnet cycle about the metaphysicals.”

I worked all afternoon and sat at the opposite end of the table from John at dinner. He looked tired and bored. The war widow was sitting next to him, talking steadily, sometimes tapping the back of his hand. I felt sorry for him, stuck with all these amateurs. I left the table before dessert was served and in the hall I heard his chair scrape back.

He caught up to me by the big newel post at the bottom of the stairs.

“Miss McEwan. Feel like an excursion later on?”

I shrugged. “Maybe. If I get my work done.”

“Work now, then meet me at the greenhouse at ten. Wear something warm.”

L'Orren came into the hallway and gave us a look.

“Prepare to lose!” said John, and he headed downstairs to play Ping-Pong with her and Axel, the claymation man. But instead of finishing my story I left the house and walked down to the bridge to watch the swollen river run. Then I came back to the house to use the communal phone in the hall to call Larry.

He was working in his dad's car dealership for the summer and he missed me tons, he said. “There's a brand-new 1961 LeSabre here with room in the back for both of us,” he said.

“I miss you too,” I said wanly, although it wasn't the least bit true. This is how you marry the wrong person, I told myself.

“I have to go now, Larry, I've got work to do.”

“Bye, doll,” he said. “Be good, and if you can't be good, be careful.”

*   *   *

“You're not going to read late again are you?” said the war widow, who slept in the bed next to me. It was almost ten p.m. She had her hair up in pink brush rollers and wore a quilted blue housecoat and sock-slippers with leather soles.

“Actually, I think I'll read downstairs for a while. I'll just take a blanket.”

“You won't need insect repellant in the parlor,” she observed. I had my sneakers on and a roll-up stick of 6-12 in my hand.

“The screen door has holes in it,” I said, and gently closed the door. I almost flew down the stairs; I was about to write my first love poem, my first Best Canadian Short Story. The narrative of the night, rich with similes and metaphors, raced ahead of me. All I had to do was catch up to it.

*   *   *

The lights were still on in the painter studio, where I could see someone moving around. Emilio probably, he liked to work at night. I circled around the back of the lawn to the greenhouse, which was dark. No sign of John. I thought about Larry, and my parents, and felt a little sick. But maybe he just wants to talk, I thought. Maybe he's just missing his family.

“There you are,” he said. He saw the blanket. “Good girl,” he said with a laugh. I held up my little baton of 6-12. He showed me a flashlight.

“Let's go the front way. We don't want to run into Emilio.”

In the shadows we crossed the lawn, wet with evening dew, to the road. There were no streetlights, no moon. But if we kept feeling the gravel under our shoes that would mean we were still on the road as it rose toward the top of the hill and the cemetery.

“I can carry that,” he said softly, taking my blanket. When we were out of sight of the school, he said, “I brought some candles too.”

Candles! He was so not Larry, who had to have the hockey game on the car radio when we went parking.

As we made our way into the cemetery, I felt flat bare rock underfoot. John's light found the inscription:

ESTELLE CHRISTINA BETZNER BORN 1910, DIED 1959.

I lay down on the stone and crossed my arms over my chest.

“
Here lies Estelle/she's not very well,
” I said, laughing nervously. John shone his light on my hands and then my face. His face had an odd, bright expression.

“Up you get,” he finally said, giving me his hand. The night was cool; I thought I could even see my breath. The starry blackness above us seemed curved, like a cupola.

“Will we see the Northern Lights?” he said.

“No, of course not. This isn't the Arctic.” Americans, I thought.

“What do they look like? I've only seen pictures.”

“Sort of like curtains. Spooky green curtains that billow and move across the sky. I saw them a couple times, up at camp. Usually all we can see from Burlington at night are the lights of Buffalo.”

“Mary has a great romance about the aurora. She was jealous that I might get to see them up here.”

“Well, we won't.”

I didn't want to know too much about him, or Mary. That wasn't part of our story. I was proud of understanding the rules without him having to spell them out. It would be only this time for us, and only here in Doon. When the week was over, we'd never see each other again.

Looking up at the blackness was making me dizzy. I spread the blanket under the apple tree, our spot.

“Wait,” he said. He cleared the grass away from a flat tombstone close to the roots of the tree, and lit a candle. He let it drip onto the stone and lit the other candle, rooting them both in the warm wax. The flames wavered but the night was still and they kept on burning. We lay down. John wrapped the edges of the blanket around my back.

“I'm a virgin,” I said with my face inches from his.

“Sure, okay,” he said, “I wondered.”