Lives of Girls and Women (34 page)

He threw himself into the water and swam after me, trying to catch hold of one foot.

“When are you going to get it done? Could be this month.”

I turned on my back and floated, kicking water in his face.

“You have to get saved sometime.”

The river was still as a pond; you couldn't tell to look at it which way the current was going. It held the reflection of the opposite banks, Fairmile Township, dark with pine and spruce and cedar bush.

“Why do I have to?”

“You know why.”

“Why?”

He caught up to me and grabbed me by the shoulders, pushed me gently up and down in the water. “I ought to baptize you now and get the job over with. I ought to baptize you now.”

I laughed.

“I don't want to be baptized. Its no good if I don't want to be baptized.” Though it would have been so easy, just a joke, to give in, I was not able to do it. He kept saying, “Baptize you!” and bobbing me up and down, with less and less gentleness, and I kept refusing, laughing, shaking my head at him. Gradually, with the struggle,
laughing stopped, and the wide, determined, painful grins on our faces hardened.

“You think you're too good for it,” he said softly.

“I don't!”

“You think you're too good for anything. Any of us.”

“I don't!”

“Well get baptized then!” He pushed me right under the water, taking me by surprise. I came up spluttering and blowing my nose.

“Next time you won't get out so easy! I'm going to keep you down till you say you'll do it! Say you'll get baptized or I'll baptize you anyway—”

He pushed me down again but this time I was expecting it. I held my breath and fought him. I fought strongly and naturally, as anybody does, held down in the water, and without thinking much about who was holding me. But when he let me come up just long enough to hear him say, “Now say you'll do it,” I saw his face streaming with water I had splashed over him and I felt amazement, not that I was fighting with Garnet but that anybody could have made such a mistake, to think he had real power over me. I was too amazed to be angry, I forgot to be frightened, it seemed to me impossible that he should not understand that all the powers I granted him were in play, that he himself was—in play, that I meant to keep him sewed up in his golden lover's skin forever, even if five minutes before I had talked about marrying him. This was clear as day to me, and I opened my mouth to say whatever would make it clear to him, and I saw that he knew it all already; this was what he knew, that I had somehow met his good offerings with my deceitful offerings, whether I knew it or not, matched my complexity and play-acting to his true intent.

You think you're too good for it.

“Say you'll do it then!” His dark, amiable but secretive face broken by rage, a helpless sense of insult. I was ashamed of this insult but had to cling to it, because it was only my differences, my reservations, my life. I thought of him kicking and kicking that man in front of the Porterfield beer parlour. I had thought I wanted to know about him but I hadn't really, I had never really wanted his secrets or his violence
or himself taken out of the context of that peculiar and magical and, it seemed now, possibly fatal game.

Suppose in a dream you jumped willingly into a hole and laughed while people threw soft tickling grass on you, then understood when your mouth and eyes were covered up that it was no game at all, or if it was, it was a game that required you to be buried alive. I fought underwater exactly as you would fight in such a dream, with a feeling of desperation that was not quite immediate, that had to work upward through layers of incredulity. Yet I thought that he might drown me. I really thought that. I thought that I was fighting for my life.

When he let me come up again he tried the conventional baptizing position, bending me backwards from the waist, and this was a mistake. I was able to kick him low in the belly—not in the genitals though I would not have cared, I did not know or care where I kicked—and these kicks were strong enough to make him lose his hold and stagger a bit and I got away. As soon as there was a yard of water between us the absurdity and horror of our fight became plain and it could not be resumed. He did not come towards me. I walked slowly safely out of the water which at this time of year was not much more than armpit-deep, anywhere. I was shaking, gasping, drinking air.

I dressed at once in the shelter of the truck, with difficulty making my legs go through the legs of my shorts, trying to hold my breath to steady myself, so I could do up the buttons of my blouse.

Garnet called me.

“I'll give you a ride home.”

“I want to walk.”

“I'll come and pick you up Monday night.”

I didn't answer. I guessed this was said for courtesy. He would not come. If we had been older we would certainly have hung on, haggled over the price of reconciliation, explained and justified and perhaps forgiven, and carried this into the future with us, but as it was we were close enough to childhood to believe in the absolute seriousness and finality of some fights, unforgivability of some blows. We had seen in each other what we could not bear, and we had no idea that
people do see that, and go on, and hate and fight and try to kill each other, various ways, then love some more.

I started walking along the track that led to the road and after a while walking calmed me down and strengthened me; my legs were not so terribly weak. I walked down the Third Concession, which came out at the Cemetery Road. I had about three and a half miles to walk altogether.

I cut through the Cemetery. It was getting dark. August was as far away from midsummer as April, a fact always hard to remember. I saw a boy and girl—I could not make out who they were—lying on the clipped grass over by the Mundy mausoleum, on whose dark cement walls Naomi and I had once written an epitaph that we had made up, and thought wicked and hilarious, and that I could no longer fully remember.

Here lies the bodies of lots of Mundys

Who died from peeing in their soup on Sundays—

I looked at these lovers lying on the graveyard grass without envy or curiosity. As I walked on into Jubilee I repossessed the world. Trees, houses, fences, streets, came back to me, in their own sober and familiar shapes. Unconnected to the life of love, uncoloured by love, the world resumes its own, its natural and callous importance. This is first a blow, then an odd consolation. And already I felt my old self— my old devious, ironic, isolated self—beginning to breathe again and stretch and settle, though all around it my body clung cracked and bewildered, in the stupid pain of loss.

My mother was already in bed. When I had failed to win the scholarship something she had never questioned—her hopes of the future, through her children—had collapsed. She was faced with the possibility that Owen and I would do nothing and become nothing after all, that we were mediocre, or infected with the dreaded, proud, scared perversity of my father's family. There was Owen, living out on the Flats Road, saying “turrible” and “drownded” and using Uncle Benny's grammar, saying he wanted to quit school. There was I going out with Garnet French and refusing to talk about it, and not getting the scholarship.

“You will have to do what you want,” she said bitterly.

But was that so easy to know? I went out to the kitchen, turned on the light, and made myself a big mixture of fried potatoes and onions and tomatoes and eggs, which I ate greedily and sombrely out of the pan, standing up. I was free and I was not free. I was relieved and I was desolate. Suppose, then, I had never wakened up? Suppose I had let myself lie down and be baptized in the Wawanash river?

I entertained this possibility off and on, as if it still existed—along with the leafy shade and waterstains in his house, and the bounty of my lover's body—for many years.

He did not come on Monday. I waited to see if he would. I combed my hair and waited, classically, behind the curtains in our front room. I did not know what I would do if he came; the ache of wanting to see his truck, his face, swallowed up everything else. I thought of walking past the Baptist Church, to see if the truck was there. If I had done that, if it had been there, I might have walked on inside, rigid as a sleepwalker. I did get as far as our verandah. I was crying, I noticed, whimpering in a monotonous rhythm the way children do to celebrate a hurt. I turned around, went back into the hall to look in the dim mirror at my twisted wet face. Without diminishment of pain I observed myself; I was amazed to think that the person suffering was me, for it was not me at all; I was watching. I was watching, I was suffering. I said into the mirror a line from Tennyson, from my mother's
Complete Tennyson
that was a present from her old teacher, Miss Rush. I said it with absolute sincerity, absolute irony.

He cometh not, she said.

From “Mariana,” one of the silliest poems I had ever read. It made my tears flow harder. Watching myself still, I went back to the kitchen and made a cup of coffee and brought it into the dining room where the city paper was still lying on the table. My mother had torn the crossword out and taken it up to bed. I opened it up at the want ads, and got a pencil, so I could circle any job that seemed possible. I made myself understand what I was reading, and after some time I felt a mild, sensible gratitude for these printed words, these strange possibilities. Cities existed; telephone operators were wanted; the future
could be furnished without love or scholarships. Now at last without fantasies or self-deception, cut off from the mistakes and confusion of the past, grave and simple, carrying a small suitcase, getting on a bus, like girls in movies leaving home, convents, lovers, I supposed I would get started on my real life.

Garnet French, Garnet French, Garnet French. Real Life.

Epilogue: The Photographer

“This town is rife with suicides,” was one of the things my mother would say, and for a long time I carried this mysterious, dogmatic statement around with me, believing it to be true—that is, believing that Jubilee had many more suicides than other places, just as Porterfield had fights and drunks, that its suicides distinguished the town like the cupola on the Town Hall. Later on my attitude towards everything my mother said became one of skepticism and disdain, and I argued that there were, in fact, very few suicides in Jubilee, that certainly their number could not exceed the statistical average, and I would challenge my mother to name them. She would go methodically along the various streets of the town, in her mind, saying, “—hanged himself, while his wife and family were at church—went out of the room after breakfast and shot himself in the head—” but there were not really so many; I was probably closer to the truth than she was.

There were two suicides by drowning, if you counted Miss Farris my old teacher. The other one was Marion Sherriff, on whose family my mother, and others, would linger with a touch of pride, saying, “Well, there is a family that has had its share of Tragedy!” One brother had died an alcoholic, one was in the Asylum at Tupperton, and Marion had walked into the Wawanash River. People always said she
walked into
it, though in the case of Miss Farris they said she
threw herself into
it. Since nobody had seen either of them do it, the difference must have come from the difference in the women themselves, Miss Farris being impulsive and dramatic in all she did, and Marion Sherriff deliberate and take-your-time.

At least that was how she looked in her picture, which was hanging in the main hall of the High School, above the case containing the

Marion A. Sherriff Girls Athletic Trophy, a silver cup taken out each year and presented to the best girl athlete in the school, then put back in, after having that girl's name engraved on it. In the picture Marion Sherriff was holding a tennis racket and wearing a white pleated skirt and a white sweater with two dark stripes around the V of the neck. She had her hair parted in the middle, pinned unbecomingly back from the temples; she was stocky and unsmiling.

“Pregnant, naturally,” Fern Dogherty used to say, and Naomi said, everybody said, except my mother.

“That was never established. Why blacken her name?”

“Some fellow got her in trouble and walked out on her,” said Fern positively. “Otherwise why drown herself, a girl seventeen?”

A time came when all the books in the Library in the Town Hall were not enough for me, I had to have my own. I saw that the only thing to do with my life was to write a novel. I picked on the Sherriff family to write it about; what had happened to them isolated them, splendidly, doomed them to fiction. I changed the family name from Sherriff to Halloway, and the dead father from a storekeeper to a judge. I knew from my reading that in the families of judges, as of great landowners, degeneracy and madness were things to be counted on. The mother I could keep just as she was, just as I used to see her in the days when I went to the Anglican Church, and she was always there, gaunt and superb, with her grand trumpeting supplications. I moved them out of their house, though, transported them from the mustard-coloured stucco bungalow behind the
Herald-Advance
building, where they had always lived and where even now Mrs. Sheriff kept a tidy lawn and picked-clean flowerbeds, and into a house of my own invention, a towered brick house with long narrow windows and a porte-cochère and a great deal of surrounding shrubbery perversely cut to look like roosters, dogs and foxes.

Nobody knew about this novel. I had no need to tell anybody. I wrote out a few bits of it and put them away, but soon I saw that it was a mistake to try to write anything down; what I wrote down might flaw the beauty and wholeness of the novel in my mind.

I carried it—the idea of it—everywhere with me, as if it were one of those magic boxes a favoured character gets hold of in a fairy story:
touch it and his troubles disappear. I carried it along when Jerry Storey and I walked out on the railway tracks and he told me that some day, if the world lasted, newborn babies could be stimulated with waves of electricity and would be able to compose music like Beethoven's, or like Verdi's, whatever was wanted. He explained how people could have their intelligence and their talents and preferences and desires built into them, in judicious amounts; why not?