Lives of Girls and Women (28 page)

Naomi's father did not go back to bed. He sat in the kitchen in the dark until Naomi came home and then he got his belt and beat her on the arms, legs, hands, wherever he could hit. He made her get down on her knees on the kitchen floor and pray to God that she would never taste liquor again.

As for me, I woke chilled, sick, aching in the early dawn, got off the verandah in time and vomited in a patch of burdocks at the side of the house. The back door had been open all the time. I ducked my head and hair in the kitchen sink, trying to get rid of the smell of whisky, and climbed safely up to bed. I told my mother, when she woke up, that I had got sick at Naomi's house and come home in the night. All day I lay in bed with a pounding headache, rocking stomach, great weakness, a sense of failure and relief. I felt redeemed by childish things—my old Scarlett O'Hara lamp, the blue and white metal flowers that held back my limp dotted curtains. I read
The Life of Charlotte Brontë
.

Through my window I could see low weedy meadows beyond the CNR tracks, purply with June grass. I could see a bit of the Wawanash

River, still fairly high, and the silvery willow trees. I dreamed a nineteenth-century sort of life, walks and studying, rectitude, courtesy, maidenhood, peacefulness.

Naomi came up to my room and said in a harsh whisper, “Christ, I could just about kill you for walking out on everybody.”

“I got sick.”

“Sick my bally old foot. Who do you think you are? Clive is not an idiot you know. He has a good job. He's an
insurance
adjustor. Who do you want to go out with?
High school boys?
”

Then she showed me her welts and told me about her father.

“If you had've come home with me he probably would've been ashamed to do that. How the hell did he know I was out, anyway?”

I never said. Neither did he. Perhaps he had got it muddled up or thought I was some sort of apparition. Naomi was going out with Bert Matthews again next weekend. She did not care.

“He can beat me till he's blue in the face. I have to have a normal life.”

What was a normal life? It was the life of the girls in the Creamery office, it was showers, linen and pots and pans and silverware, that complicated feminine order; then, turning it over, it was the life of the Gay-la Dance Hall, driving drunk at night along the black roads, listening to men's jokes, putting up with and warily fighting with men and getting hold of them, getting hold—One side of that life could not exist without the other, and by undertaking and getting used to them both a girl was putting herself on the road to marriage. There was no other way. And I was not going to be able to do it. No. Better Charlotte Brontë.

“Get up and get dressed and come downtown with me. It'll do you good.”

“I feel too sick.”

“You are a big baby. What do you want to do, crawl in a hole the rest of your life?”

Our friendship faded from that day. We became strangers to each other's houses. We would meet on the street next winter, she in her new fur-trimmed coat and I with my great pile of school-books, and she would bring me up-to-date on her life. Usually she was going out
with someone I had never heard of, someone from Porterfield or Blue River or Tupperton. Bert Matthews she had quickly left behind. His role, it turned out, was to take young girls out for the first time; he was only after young inexperienced girls, though he never really bothered them, or got them in trouble, for all his talk. Clive had been in a car accident, she told me, and had to have one leg amputated below the knee. “No wonder, they all drink like fish and drive like fools,” she said. She spoke with a maternal sort of resignation, pride even, as if to drink like a fish and drive like a fool was somehow the proper thing, deplorable but necessary. After a while she stopped giving me these progress reports. We met in Jubilee and all we said to each other was hello. I felt that she had moved as far beyond me, in what I vaguely and worriedly supposed to be the real world, as I in all sorts of remote and useless and special knowledge, taught in schools, had moved beyond her.

I got a's at school. I never had enough of them. No sooner had I hauled one lot of them home with me than I had to start thinking of the next. They did seem to me tangible, and heavy as iron. I had them stacked around me like barricades, and if I missed one I could feel a dangerous gap.

In the main hall of the high school, around the Honour Roll of those former students killed in action in 1914-18, and 1939-45, were hung wooden shields, one for each grade; inserted in these shields were little silver name-tags bearing the names of those who had come first in marks each year, until they faded into jobs and motherhood. My name was there, though not for every year. Sometimes I was beaten by Jerry Storey. His IQ was the highest ever seen in Jubilee High School or in any high school in Wawanash County. The only reason I ever got ahead of him at all was that his preoccupation with science made him impatient and sometimes completely forgetful of those subjects he referred to as “memory work” (French and History), and English Literature, which he seemed to regard fretfully as some kind of personal insult.

Jerry Storey and I drifted together. We talked in the halls. We developed, gradually, a banter, vocabulary, range of subject matter
that was not shared with anybody else. Our names appeared together in the tiny, mimeographed, nearly illegible school paper. Everyone seemed to think that we were perfectly suited to each other; we were called “The Brains Trust” or “The Quiz Kids” with a certain amount of semi-tolerant contempt, which Jerry knew how to bear better than

I. We were depressed at being paired off like the only members of some outlandish species in a zoo, and we resented people thinking we were alike, for we did not think so. I thought that Jerry was a thousand times more freakish, less attractive than I was, and it was plain that he thought putting my brains and his in the same category showed no appreciation of categories; it was like saying Toscanini and the local bandmaster were both talented. What I possessed, he told me frankly when we discussed the future, was a first-rate memory, a not unusual feminine gift for language, fairly weak reasoning powers and almost no capacity for abstract thought. That I was immeasur-ably smarter than most people in Jubilee should not blind me, he said, to the fact that I would soon reach my limits in the intellectually competitive world outside (“The same goes for myself,” he added severely. “I always try to keep a perspective. I look pretty good at Jubilee High School. How would I look at M.I.T.?” In talking of his future he was full of grand ambitions, but was careful to express them sarcastically, and fence them round with sober self-admonitions.)

I took his judgement like a soldier, because I did not believe it. That is, I knew it was all true, but I still felt powerful enough, in areas that I thought he could not see, where his ways of judging could not reach. The gymnastics of his mind I did not admire, for people only admire abilities similar to, though greater than, their own. His mind to me was like a circus tent full of dim apparatus on which, when I was not there, he performed stunts which were spectacular and boring. I was careful not to let him see I thought this. He was truthful in telling me what he thought about me, apparently; I had no intention of being so with him. Why not? Because I felt in him what women feel in men, something so tender, swollen, tyrannical, absurd; I would never take the consequences of interfering with it: I had an indifference, a contempt almost, that I concealed from him. I thought that I was tactful, even kind; I never thought that I was proud.

We went to movies together. We went to school dances, and danced badly, self-consciously, irritated with each other, humiliated by the disguise of high school sweethearts which we had somehow felt it necessary to adopt, until we found that the way to survive the situation was to make fun of it. Parody, self-mockery, were our salvation. At our best we were cheerful, comfortable, sometimes cruel comrades, rather like a couple who have been married for eighteen years. He called me
Eggplant,
in honour of a dreadful dress I had, a purply-wine coloured taffeta, made over from one Fern Dogherty had left behind. (We were suddenly poorer than usual, due to the collapse of the silver fox business after the war.) I had hoped, while my mother was altering it, that the dress would turn out to be all right, would even show a voluptuous sheen on my rather wide hips, like the Rita Hayworth dress in the ads for
Gilda;
when I put it on I tried to tell myself that this was so, but as soon as Jerry made a face and gulped exaggeratedly and said in a squeaky, delighted voice, “Eggplant!” I knew the truth. Immediately I tried to find it as funny as he did, and nearly succeeded. On the street we improvised further.

“Attending last evening's gala midwinter dance at the Jubilee Armouries were Mr. Jerry Storey the third, scion of the fabulous fertilizer family, and the exquisite Miss Del Jordan, heiress to the silver fox empire, a couple who dazzle all beholders with the unique and indescribable style of their dancing—”

Many of the movies we went to were about the war, which had ended a year before we started high school. Afterwards we would go to Haines's Restaurant, preferring it to the Blue Owl where nearly everybody else from the high school went, to play the jukebox and the pinball machines. We drank coffee and smoked menthol cigarettes. Between the booths there were high, dark wooden partitions, topped by fanlights of dark-gold glass. Creasing a paper napkin into geometrical designs, wrapping it around a spoon, tearing it into fluttering strips, Jerry talked about the war. He gave me a description of the Bataan Death March, methods of torture in Japanese prison camps, the fire-bombing of Tokyo, the destruction of Dresden; he bombarded me with unbeatable atrocities, annihilating statistics. All without a flicker of protest, but with a controlled excitement, a
curious insistent relish. Then he would tell me about the weapons now being developed by the Americans and the Russians; he made their destructive powers seem inevitable, magnificent, useless to combat as the forces of the universe itself.

“Then biological warfare—they could reintroduce the bubonic plague—they're making diseases there are no antidotes for, storing them up. Nerve gas—how about controlling a whole population by semistupifying drugs—”

He was certain there would be another war, we would all be wiped out. Cheerful, implacable behind his brainy boy's glasses, he looked ahead to prodigious catastrophe. Soon, too. I responded with conventional horror, tentative female reasonableness, which would excite him into greater opposition, make it necessary to horrify me further, argue my reasonableness down. This was not hard to do. He was in touch with the real world, he knew how they had split the atom. The only world I was in touch with was the one I had made, with the aid of some books, to be peculiar and nourishing to myself. Yet I hung on; I grew bored and cross and said all right, suppose this is true, why do you get up in the morning and go to school? If its all true, why do you plan on being a great scientist?

“If the world is finished, if there is no hope, then why
do
you?” “There is still time for me to get the Nobel Prize,” he said blasphe mously, to make me laugh.

“Ten years?”

“Give it twenty. Most great breakthroughs are made by men under thirty-five.”

After he had said something like this he would always mutter, “You know I'm kidding.” He meant about the Nobel Prize, not the war. We could not get away from the Jubilee belief that there are great, supernatural dangers attached to boasting, or having high hopes of yourself. Yet what really drew and kept us together were these hopes, both denied and admitted, both ridiculed and respected in each other.

On Sunday afternoons we liked to go for long walks, along the railway tracks, starting behind my house. We would walk out to the trestle over the big bend in the Wawanash River, then back. We talked about euthanasia, genetic control of populations, whether there is
such a thing as a soul, whether or not the universe is ultimately knowable. We agreed on nothing. At first we were walking in the fall, then in the winter. We would walk in snowstorms, arguing with our heads down, hands in our pockets, the fine bitter snow in our faces. Worn out with arguing, we would take our hands out of our pockets and spread our arms out for balance and try to walk the rails. Jerry had long frail legs, a small head, curly hair, round bright eyes. He wore a plaid cap with fleece-lined earflaps, which I remembered him wearing ever since the sixth grade.

I remembered that I used to laugh at him, as everybody else did. I was still sometimes ashamed to be seen with him, by somebody like Naomi. But I thought now there was something admirable, an odd, harsh grace about the way he conformed to type, accepting his role in Jubilee, his necessary and gratifying absurdity, with a fatalism, even gallantry, which I would never have been able to muster myself. This was the spirit in which he appeared at dances, steered me spastically over the treacherous miles of floor, in which he swung uselessly at the ball in the yearly, obligatory baseball game, and marched with the Cadets. He offered up himself, not pretending to be an ordinary boy, but doing the things an ordinary boy would do, knowing that his performance could never be acceptable, people would always laugh. He could not do otherwise; he was what he seemed. I whose natural boundaries were so much more ambiguous, who soaked up protective coloration wherever it might be found, began to see that it might be restful, to be like Jerry.

He came to my house for supper, against my will. I hated bringing him up against my mother. I was afraid that she would be excited, try to outdo herself in some way, because of his brainy reputation. And she did; she tried to get him to explain relativity to her—nodding, encouraging, fairly leaping at him with facile cries of understanding. For once, his explanations were incoherent. I was critical of the meal, as I always was before company; the meat seemed overdone, the potatoes slightly hard, the canned beans too cool. My father and Owen had come in from the Flats Road, because it was Sunday. Owen lived out on the Flats Road all the time now, and cultivated churlishness. While Jerry talked, Owen chewed noisily and directed at my father
looks of simple, ignorant, masculine contempt. My father did not answer these looks but talked little, perhaps embarrassed by my mother's enthusiasm, which he might have thought enough for them both. I was angry at everybody. I knew that to Owen, and to my father too—though he would not show it, he would know it was only one way of looking at things—Jerry was a freak, shut out of the world of men; it did not matter what he knew. They were too stupid, it seemed to me, to see that he had power. And to him my family were part of the great mass of people to whom it is not even worth while to explain things; he did not see that they had power. Insufficient respect was being shown all round.