Snow Apples (15 page)

It seemed to take hours to swim back. There were times when I was sure I wouldn't make it. My heart hurt. Often I stopped and floated on my back until the pain lessened. When I finally reached the shore of our beach, I crawled out of the water and lay, completely spent, a few feet above the water line.

*  *  *

I wrote Nels a note asking him to meet me and slipped it under his front door one evening when it was dark. But he didn't reply.

I was more resigned now. I made myself concentrate on finishing off school and the coming exams. Every day the pregnancy was becoming more of a fact, even though I'd tried everything I'd ever heard of to end it, even horseback riding.

Our graduation party was held in the community hall, which was decorated with pink and white crepe paper streamers. The basketball nets held pink and white balloons, and more balloons were stuck at random on the walls.

I wore my loosest-fitting dress—a white shirtwaist that Nels particularly liked—and I felt damp with sadness when I put it on. It was too snug at the top. I had to leave two buttons undone.

The principal gave a speech about a part of our life being over. All the girls cried, and some of the boys laughed nervously. Arnie Olsen, in a gray suit and a tie—blue with red dots, like currants scattered on it—looked almost handsome.

Nels wasn't there, of course. Jean told me he was taking out Emma Hoffman, a skinny redhead who worked at the telephone office.

As soon as the speeches were over and the diplomas had been handed out, Jean and I headed for the dressing room to comb our hair.

“Jean,” I said, trying to sound casual, “is anyone having a party after the dance?”

“Gee, Sheila, I don't know. But I'll ask around. You want to go?”

“Mmmm,” I said around bobby pins. “Is there any chance I could stay overnight at your place?”

“Sure. That's okay by me, but what's your mother going to say?”

“Tom can tell her where I am.”

I'd heard somewhere that women who wanted to miscarry took castor oil and drank a lot of gin. The castor oil— two ounces of it—was in a bag in my jacket pocket. All I needed now was the gin.

But later at the beach party down at Gower Point, no gin was being passed around. Beer, rye, a few bottles of wine, but no gin.

“Gin?” Arnie asked. “Whatta you want gin for?” He'd taken off his tie, and it dangled from his pocket like a blue snake with the measles. “It's a sissy's drink.”

“It's a lady's drink,” I told him. “Come on, Arnie. Be a sport and get me some.”

“You sure you wouldn't like a beer? I thought you liked beer.”

“I'm sure, Arnie. I know you. If anybody can get it, you can.”

Half an hour later, Arnie appeared with a brown paper bag in one hand, the neck of a gin bottle sticking out the top.

“It can't be very good stuff,” he said, breaking the seal. “It only cost three bucks. But it's all I could lay my hands on.”

Arnie sat on the sand beside me, poured the gin into a paper cup and passed it over to me.

Was I supposed to take the castor oil before or after the gin?

It would have to be after, when no one was looking.

The taste of the gin and 7-Up was too sweet, but I made myself drink it. Before I'd finished, my face started to tingle. Then it went numb. Arnie stared at me.

“Jesus, Sheila! What are you trying to do? Get pissed? You're supposed to make it last.”

Between frozen lips, I tried to explain to Arnie that I wanted another drink. I held out the paper cup.

“Oh, no,” said Arnie, backing away and hugging the bottle to his chest. “You've had enough.”

It took nearly an hour to talk Arnie into giving me another drink. After, he and Jean pulled me over to the beach fire and made me eat a hot dog and then a toasted marshmallow. I barely had time to make it away from the fire before it all came up, and I was left smelling sour and with tears rising up in my eyes.

Jean and I left soon after, but before we got into her house, I threw up once more in her mother's geraniums. I think I passed out on the spare cot in Jean's room.

I woke with the sun shattering my eyeballs and my head feeling as though it were made of broken egg shells. Wandering through the house, looking for the bathroom, I discovered that no one was home but me. Everyone else was up and out.

Then I noticed the time. Ten o'clock! I should have been at work at Doc Howard's at nine. I scribbled a note of thanks to Jean and left it on her pillow.

As I hurried along the road, I thought about what to do. All month I had concentrated on studying for exams and finishing grade twelve, trying to push everything else from my mind. Now that it was over, I had to take the next step, whatever that was.

I would go into Vancouver and find a job. And then... I would decide what to do about being two months pregnant.

I heard a truck come round the bend of the road. It slowed down. I turned to look, the dust settling. Suddenly it changed gears, revved its engine and sped away, throwing gravel.

But I had time to see Nels' face. In that moment I caught a glimpse of his expression—jaw set, eyes straight ahead.

He looked as though he hated me.

H
ELP
W
ANTED
F
EMALE
.

I spread out the classified section of the Vancouver
Sun
on the café counter and pushed my coffee cup away.

Typist, some bookkeeping...Lady of mature years needed in motherless home...Hostess for dining room...Want a lively, highly paid job that lets you meet interesting people from all walks of life
?

That one sounded too good to be true. But another one looked promising. Jolly Jumbo Drive-In. Waitresses and kitchen help wanted, top wages and working conditions, afternoon shift, uniforms and meals provided.

I circled it with my pencil. The address was in the south end of the city but on the streetcar line. It would be easy for me to find.

I had come into the city on the early morning boat, my belongings packed in a small cardboard box and with twenty-seven dollars in my purse. I had the feeling I was stealing away in the dawn. Only Mr. Percy was up that early, to take the head line of the
Lady Alexander
when she docked just before six. The sun had been up long enough to take the chill off the air, but the morning still had a brand-new feeling.

The night before I had packed and set the alarm for five o'clock. No one else was up when I buttered a piece of bread and drank a glass of milk for breakfast.

My mother, who was still sleeping, had left me four cheese sandwiches and an orange to take with me, and inside the lunch bag was a two-dollar bill and a note:
Good wishes go with you from your mother. Don't forget to write
.

At the top of the trail, just before I lost sight of the house, I turned. At that moment I didn't want to leave home. A movement at the window, which could have been my mother in her long white nightgown, disappeared as I watched.

After the
Lady Alexander
nosed into her berth in Vancouver, I stopped for coffee in the Union steamship's waiting room before walking up the ramp from the dock to the foot of Carrall Street. Below I saw railway tracks and the shuttling CPR trains and could smell their hot cinders mixed with the other smells of the waterfront: roasting coffee beans, coconut oil, rope, tar, diesel oil, and salt from the sea.

I felt hopeful. Anything could happen.

I went up Carrall Street to Hastings, passing old men slumped in doorways, loggers in caulk boots waiting outside hiring halls, and women—their hair tied up in kerchiefs—hurrying to the fish canneries that lay along the waterfront. The day was going to be hot. Already the sun brought out the stench of rotting refuse from trash cans and a smell of urine from corners. Its rays pierced the dusty windows of pawn shops, making halos around second-hand watches, cameras, binoculars and trumpets.

Chinese storekeepers hosed down the sidewalks in front of their shops and set displays of produce in flat boxes outside their doors. Lettuce, radishes, cucumbers and carrots made patterns of green, red and orange that brightened the shabby street.

A Number 9 streetcar clanged to a stop, and I climbed on, leaving my cardboard box up near the conductor while I found a seat where I could keep my eye on it. That and the small amount of money in my purse were all I owned.

The manager of the Jolly Jumbo Drive-In was young, brisk and efficient. He interviewed me right there on the parking lot with its smell of hot tar and car exhaust. All the while he kept his eyes on the car hops, snapping his fingers at them if they were slow to notice when a customer wanted service. The boys ran to the serving window and to the cars, balancing their trays of milkshakes, hamburgers and French fries like acrobats.

“My name's Ralph,” he told me quickly. “I need a girl in
the kitchen—frying fish and chips, chicken. You can start today. Be here at four-thirty. Sign up in the office first. They'll give you a uniform. Friday and Saturday night we're open till two, otherwise you're off at one-thirty. Any questions?” I opened my mouth to speak. “Good,” he said and left to check a tray that a car hop was taking to a car, sending the boy back for mustard.

“Pay's thirty-one dollars a week,” he continued over his shoulder as he supervised a truck unloading at the service door. “Oh, by the way, be sure to wear something on your hair. Net, kerchief. Board of Health regulations.”

“You mean I'm hired?” I managed to slip in.

“Of course. You need a place to stay?” he asked, taking in the cardboard box at my feet. “There's a Mrs. Williams rents rooms in the next block. You can't miss it, a brown house on the corner. It's the only house on the street. Tell her I sent you. Charges seven dollars a week. Likes to have people from the Jolly Jumbo.” He hurried away to talk to a customer.

Mrs. Williams' house was exactly where Ralph had said. A dark-brown painted bungalow with morning glories climbing up the old-fashioned porch, it was set at the back of a narrow lot, and the whole of the area in front of the house was given over to a vegetable garden. The soil looked screened, black and moist.

Moving in and out of the raspberry canes was an older woman in a bright pink cotton dress who, when she saw me, worked her way slowly over in my direction. She stopped to inspect the size of the pea pods. She pulled a
small weed, then she gathered a handful of rhubarb stalks, which she placed in her open apron.

Mrs. Williams was stocky and energetic looking, with hair that was streaked with gray. She talked all the way up the path to the front steps of the house, pointing out her prize plants. Leaving the rhubarb on the swinging wooden porch seat, she opened the screen door and led me into a cool dark hallway.

After the bright sunlight, it took a minute for my eyes to adjust. Mrs. Williams slid open stained walnut doors to show me the room for rent.

At one time it must have been the living room, because there was a small fireplace with a marble mantelpiece.

“Been renting rooms since my husband died,” she explained. “He passed away seven years ago last month. Had a heart attack, he did.” Her eyes magnified with tears. Absently, she dusted the top of a dresser with the corner of her apron.

“Here now, love.” She was cheerful again. “See this? A lovely new mattress. Paid handsomely for it, I did, even though it was on sale.” Then, pulling open the doors of the wardrobe, “There's plenty of room here for your clothes. I know how you young girls like pretty things. I did myself when I was young. But I like girls, I do. Rather rent to them than to young men. Keep their rooms clean, even if they do use more hot water. I have a boy myself. Walter, his name is,” she went on and, as if summoned, Walter poked his head in between the sliding doors.

Walter looked to be close to thirty. His eyes seemed too small and looked over my head. His ears, too, were small and close to his head. A face without expression. My mother would have said he was subnormal.

“Oh, there you are, Wally,” Mrs. Williams said. “Did you put out the garbage as I asked?”

Wally grinned—foolishly, it seemed to me.

“Do it now, then, there's a good lad,” she said sadly, and he bobbed his head, grinned once more—this time at me— and left.

She sighed, took a handkerchief from her sleeve and wiped her nose thoroughly, first one way, then the other.

“You'll find Wally's no problem. Now and again he loses his temper. Then he's apt to shout. But pay no attention to that.”

I wondered where Wally slept. Across the hall from me? I didn't know what to think. I'd heard about people like him from my mother, but there was no one at the Landing like Wally.

I followed Mrs. Williams down the hallway to the kitchen. Motioning me to sit down at the kitchen table opposite her, she told me about Wally.

“Had a kidney problem, I did.” She kept her voice low. “The doctors didn't want me to get pregnant. But there you are. These things happen, don't they?” Had she guessed about me? “And in those days, dear, there wasn't much they could do about it except take me off salt and put me to bed.” Did my running to the bathroom often mean I had a
kidney problem? “Not like nowadays with their new medicines and machines and I don't know what else. So there it was. And when the doctors told us Walter wasn't quite right...almost broke my husband's heart, it did. I said to him then, ‘Mr. Williams,' I said—I always called him that, him being so much older—'I'll not put him in an institution until I have to. After all's said and done, he's our own flesh and blood.'