The Eliot Girls (28 page)

“What's that you said?” He cocked his head, unbothered.

Did he fail to notice the hiss or was ignorance his defence against it? Did he notice anything at all but the sound of his retreating footsteps?

 

THE FAMILIAR SNICKER FLICKERED
somewhere behind Audrey. Seeta was warming her fingers by strumming some random chords. She hadn't performed in two weeks, and speculation about the cause of her abstinence was rampant in the class. As the music began to resolve into a specific song, Audrey knew immediately what it was: Neil Young's “Old Man,” Richard's favourite song. Seeta's voice cracked a bit with the first words, but her playing was flawless, and her voice grew steadier with each line. The song seemed made for her voice, its pure, slightly melancholic lilt. Audrey stared hard into her lap, welling up. No song could have exposed her more freshly to that laugh's jagged edges, its sly hush. It made you listen for it: that was its power. It was too refined, too clever, to thrust itself upon you. No, you'd hear something that made the skin on your back prickle. Then, nothing. You'd wonder if your paranoid imagination had concocted it. Then the sound would come again. And this time you were sure. Its potency lay not in its output of noise, but in what it held back, how it used silence to influence and command.

When Seeta reached the chorus, a whelp darted from the shadowy side of the chapel. In answer, from the other side, came another. Mid-chord, Seeta looked up with a perplexed smile. She sang on for a second, then coughed. She frowned at her guitar as though she had lost her place, then coughed again.

“I'm so sorry,” she said. “My voice is giving out on me. I've had a cold for the past few days.”

She started to strum again, but her fingers fumbled, and she lost hold of the instrument. It clattered to the ground, its strings vibrating. Seeta got up and swiftly exited the stage. For a minute, she conferred with Ms. Massie-Turnbull at the side of the stage, Ms. Massie-Turnbull nodding vehemently. Seeta was shaking her head. “Oh my God, this is hilarious,” whispered Dougie. “Do you think she's going to have a nervous breakdown?” She began a round of spirited rhythmic clapping, and after a second, others joined in. Seeta looked up, on her face a mixture of brightness and confusion, clearly uncertain of how to interpret the claps. Ms. Massie-Turnbull seemed more positive that the audience was asking for more and, beaming, she gestured for Seeta to take in her fans. She gave Seeta a nudge towards the stage and pushed up the corners of her mouth with her fingers, her favourite reminder to smile. Seeta trudged compliantly back to centre stage, began the song again, and dutifully followed it through, but all the energy had leaked out of her.

After the performance, Seeta disappeared out the side of the chapel. Audrey looked for her during the prefects' announcements and during the singing of “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” which she had often declared to be her favourite hymn. Usually, Seeta's voice could be heard soaring above the listless harmonies of the senior students. She had been known to supply spontaneous descants. Audrey felt faintly worried, though she couldn't have said exactly why. Or for whom—Seeta or herself? Depositing the notes in Seeta's locker had become a ritual. As such, the act required little forethought, and even less post-mortem analysis. But all morning she had been feeling a little sick. Seeta's hair was greasy, and under her eyes were slate-coloured circles. The Neil Young had only heightened Audrey's discomfort. She couldn't deny its beauty.

“Looking for your lover?” Dougie said, as Audrey glanced again towards the back of the chapel.

First period was gym, and Audrey hurried to the locker room to steady her mind. She was sitting on the bench, preparing to change, when Arabella entered alone. It was rare for Audrey to encounter Arabella without her entourage, and solitude only highlighted the artistry of her face. Quiet as she was, the effect was not of serenity, of slow-moving harmlessness, but of finely tuned alertness, a leopard's imminent pounce. As she sank to the bench, her hair tumbled from its bun, obscuring her expression as she pulled her knapsack onto her lap and unzipped it. Removing a piece of paper from inside, she handed it to Audrey, setting her knapsack on her legs as a shield. “
Voilà,
” she said. “We wrote it before chapel. Perfect timing, as it turns out.”

It was, of course, another note to Seeta. She hadn't used the cut-out magazine letters, as she usually did, but had written her message in block capitals with a thick black marker. Without the colour and campiness of the cut-outs, the effect was far starker. There was just one half sentence: “The day the music died…” Audrey frowned at the paper, her heart sinking. The message managed to be obscure, almost nonsensical, and threatening at the same time—not less threatening, but more, for being so obscure.

“We were thinking that you should do it after school today,” she said.

Audrey paused. “I don't know.”

“You don't know what?”

“I just…It's so…”

“It's nothing. It doesn't even say anything specific.”

“I know, but…”

“Oh, don't tell me,” Arabella said with a maudlin sigh. “You and Seeta became friends. Are you going to do a duet with her? Oh my God, that's so sweet. I knew you guys would bond, after all that time sitting together.”

“Don't be ridiculous.” Audrey slipped the note into the back of her binder, laughing to disguise the pang she felt at the thought of Seeta coming upon the note. The feeling was more bewildering than pity. She envied Seeta, in a way, for caring so much about her music, for refusing to be deterred. What must it be like, to care about something so much?

The previous night, sitting in her room while Ruth and Richard sat in the living room reading by the fire, she had taken out Ruth's old yearbooks and sat on her bed flipping through them the way she had done as a young girl. Briefly, she forgot what Eliot was really like as she studied the pictures of all the girls posing with their arms over each other's shoulders, forming people pyramids, poring over textbooks in library study groups, dressing backstage in makeshift costumes for the school play, sunbathing on the front lawn, toppling over during potato sack races, playing soccer and basketball and tennis, cheering and cheering. In the section devoted to her class, pictures of Arabella, Dougie, and Whitney dominated. They posed, at least some of the time, with what she guessed must be sincere affection, their arms slung around each other's shoulders. More often, they modelled self-consciously. In one, Arabella stood next to Ms. Glover, frowning satirically, wearing Ms. Glover's glasses on the tip of her nose.

This happy Eliot, the Eliot of the yearbooks, was the place where she had seen herself—not her, of course, but an improved incarnation of her—striding into her spot in Eliot's venerated history. Even in her most desolate moments, she had managed to cling to this vision, this unyielding conviction in the possibility of metamorphosis: the change would come, with mad, magical volatility, and her only responsibility was to be ready. It didn't matter that she now understood that the yearbook was a false document, a choreographed representation of life as it should be. How hard it was not to mourn that vanished Eliot.

The locker room door swung open and the class began to file in. Arabella swiftly departed for the other side of the room, and a minute later Seeta came in and tossed her bag onto the bench beside Audrey and began changing, her movements slow and heavy. She pulled a school T-shirt over her head and unbuttoned her blouse beneath it, then pulled on her shorts before removing her kilt. Across the room, the girls formed distinct factions according to their modesty. Some people dressed with desperate discretion, determined not to reveal any unnecessary skin, while others, like Arabella, stood around in pretty bras intended for display.

A girl named Megan Dunn stood half-dressed by the sink, studying her forehead in dismay. “I'm so getting the mother of all breakouts.”

“Must be all the chemicals,” Arabella said, smirking at Whitney.

“Arabella,” Megan said, turning around with a sigh. “What fucking chemicals? Would you get over it?”

“I used to have a doctor, if you can believe this,” said Dougie, “who pronounced the ‘ch' in
chemical
like the ‘ch' in
chuck.
He was like, ‘Stay away from nail polishes that have ch-emicals like formaldehyde.'”

“Whatever,” Megan said, shaking her head.

About a week before, she had come to school with her hair curly for the first time. Changes like this rarely passed unremarked at Eliot and were generally met with contemptuous skepticism. It was as though the girls were all perpetually on their guards against being made fools of—being a sucker for the scam, falling for the false image—and Audrey had come to understand it as just another feature of their constant fault-finding. When Megan had entered the classroom with curly hair, the entire class stopped talking and stared at her, and the scrutiny had only intensified when she denied, in response to innumerable, nagging queries, that she'd gotten a perm. She insisted that her hair was naturally curly, that she had previously blow-dried it straight.

“It's just so obvious you had your hair permed,” Whitney said, “and for, like, some reason you feel you need to lie about it. Incidentally, perms are so eighties.”

“And really damaging to your hair,” added Dougie.

The door opened a crack and Ms. Crispe called in a warning of tardiness demerits. “It's an outdoor run this morning,” she reminded. “Wear your sweatshirts.”

“Perfect,” said Arabella, “It's raining out, so now we'll know the truth. If Megan's hair is naturally curly, it'll dry curly. And if it's a perm, her hair will dry straight.”

Julie Michaels pulled her T-shirt over her head and smoothed her hair into a ponytail. “That's ridiculous,” she said. “Her hair will dry curly whether it's natural or permed. You think some magic happens when you blow dry? Anyway, who cares?”

“I don't care,” Arabella said defensively. “Why would I care about her pube-like hair? It's just the way she lies about it.” She turned to Dougie imperiously. “Dougie, your breath smells like dog crap.”

Audrey sat on the bench, drained, suddenly unsure of whether she'd be able to run a block, let alone a mile. The week ahead seemed an insurmountable obstacle. Even in its inanity—perhaps because of its inanity—the conversation had a baffling, almost hallucinogenic, force about it, and Audrey sensed that she would never forget it. And indeed, much later, weeks, even months, it did remain for her the linchpin, as though once it passed, everything else was inevitable, the embryonic choices of the coming days already irretrievable.

 

 

Cha
p
ter
Fo
urteen

THE BISTRO WAS THE
kind of place Ruth had prodded Richard to try for years: black-and-white chequered floors, crimson walls, dimly lit, cramped, and slightly shabby in a deliberate way that constituted a mission statement of sorts: in the devotion to food, a repudiation of slickness. Richard had long favoured more conservative places, but the choice was out of his hands. Perhaps Ruth wasn't being quite fair: it was his birthday, after all. She had heard Henry speak of this restaurant at work, and she had made the reservation before Richard could protest. When she told him where they were going, he looked disappointed. If she wanted French food, he said, how about that place just north of the lake, a mere five-minute drive from home? Ruth returned the observation that surely the last thing he wanted as he got older was to get set in his ways.

Over the preceding weeks, the household had descended into a morbid mood. Richard was working longer hours at the clinic, often eating dinner there. When he was home, Ruth tried to be busy marking student assignments or working on
The Pomegranate
. She was surprised by how easy it was to get around talking about anything of significance, to pretend that the pit bull argument had never happened. Richard had once been unable to let any acrimony between them pass without redress, but now he appeared as happy as she to dwell within discomfort, to accept it as a condition without easy alteration. He kissed her limply before work each morning, and limply upon his return, then retired to bed, where he slept heavily beside her.

Audrey, for her part, found freedom in the tension. Little was being asked of her. Since the dance, Ruth had been sullen in a way that released Audrey from conversation. Often, Ruth prepared dinner for Audrey, then proclaimed herself not hungry, or too busy to eat. Audrey sat at the kitchen island, picking at reheated chicken fingers or grilled cheese sandwiches and canned soup while Ruth took Marlow for long, slow walks around the block. When their paths crossed in hallways, at home and at Eliot, they glanced away, like acquaintances trying not to notice each other in the grocery store. Audrey wanted her anger at her mother to remain alight, but every sighting of Ruth in her old fisherman's sweater and pyjama bottoms, folders spread across her lap, dampened it. Ruth looked undeniably sad, sipping herbal tea from her lumpy old pottery mug. Better for Audrey to keep to her room, to stare down the homework that could occupy her for hours, that dependably kept aflame her sense of injustice.

She had hoped to be left out of the birthday meal, but Ruth had rounded her up, not even bothering with a phony display of cheerfulness. In the term “family dinner” was an undisguised edict. She was even expected to dress well.

At the restaurant, they sat by a drafty window looking onto the street. Slouching, Ruth kept her wool coat wrapped around her like a blanket too thin to keep her warm. She was wearing heels and a pencil skirt, but her hair, in a lopsided ponytail, betrayed her true attitude. Her blunt nails, usually naked, were painted red. Such a small thing, yet it made her look less like herself. Audrey stared at her mother's hands, willing Ruth to sense how pointedly she was being observed. She liked the idea that there had been a power shift between them. Even in the marginalized light, Audrey could see in Ruth's downcast face that she felt it. The opacity of the conflict only added to its power. Ruth despised any lack of clarity. She glanced at Audrey as though seeking an invitation to smile. Under her blue cardigan, she wore the white T-shirt she had been wearing on the night of the Eliot dance. Audrey cast her eyes slowly over Ruth's torso, daring her to wonder why.

Richard seemed determined to notice nothing amiss. Amid declarations of excessive hunger, he read the entrées aloud, pausing in delight at the description of the mixed grill.

“You're not going to eat horse,” Audrey said, aghast.

“I just might,” he replied, laughing.

Ruth was smiling down at the menu like it was a baby she wasn't much interested in.

“Will you be joining me, Ruth?'

“You've got to be kidding.”

“It's quite well regarded, the
cheval
here.”

“That doesn't mean that
we
eat it.”

“It's inhumane,” Audrey said. “It's disgusting.”

“You eat pig,” he replied.

“Richard, come on,” Ruth said. “Now's not the time.”

“Yes, by all means, let's banish culinary curiosity,” he said, not yet willing to abandon lightheartedness.

“It's horse, Dad. Horse!”

“Then let's call it
cheval.
”

“I'm not even sure I can eat anything,” Ruth said. “I feel kind of queasy, I think from this deli meat I ate yesterday at work.”

“Oh, for Christ's sake.” Richard said, tossing the menu onto the table in annoyance.

The appearance of the waiter brought temporary relief. Audrey took an immediate dislike to him: his affected French accent as he recounted the specials, his beady eyes, calculating their deficit of hipness. With his every glance in her direction, her irritation with Ruth mounted. Why had her mother chosen such a restaurant? As if dining out with parents wasn't bad enough. A waitress circled the room demurely, mindful not to disturb the murmuring couples, touching a match to the tea lights at the centre of each table.

“So, Audrey,” Richard began, once they were alone again. “How's school these days?”

Audrey responded the way she always did to this question, with a beleaguered sigh and a half roll of her eyes. “God,” she moaned. “Is that why we're here? To bug me about school?”

Richard looked startled. “It's a fairly normal question.”

“If I'd known how you people were going to harass me every day of my life if I got into Eliot, I'd never—”

“Whoa.” Richard said. “I haven't—”

“Let's just get along,” Ruth said pleadingly.

Audrey took a long drink of her water.

“Audrey has totally improved in math,” Ruth said. “Isn't that great? Chuck was just telling me that he thinks you're turning the corner.”

“Turning the corner,” Audrey replied. “How impressive.”

“We always knew that Eliot would be tough academically. Your father and I aren't at all displeased with your results,” Ruth said. “Right, Richard?”

“It's goddamn ridiculous they're doing grade twelve level math,” Richard said.

“It'll be great for her!” Ruth said brightly. “In the end, anyway.”

“In what way is it great for her to spend four hours every night doing homework?”

Audrey looked to her father in question. She knew that her parents had differed at times in the degree of their belief in Eliot, but she had never heard her father speak so strongly in opposition to it. Richard had always let Ruth set the agenda, so intense had she been about school matters, and Audrey had interpreted his reserve as indifference, his understanding of the nature of Eliot minimal. Now, as her father studiously redirected his attention to his wine, as if to back away from his overt contradiction of Ruth, a bolt of gratitude went through Audrey. He was on her side, after all.

The waiter appeared with their meals and deposited them on the table, then offered pepper to taste.

“You see, this is always interesting to me,” Richard said. “Let me ask you a question. Does the chef recommend extra pepper? Hasn't he seasoned the food as he sees fit?”

The waiter returned a standoffish nod.

“And so wouldn't I be undermining his skill, or suggesting my lack of confidence in his expertise, by choosing to impose more pepper than he found advisable?”

“All right, Richard,” Ruth said, blushing. “If you don't want pepper, don't have it.”

Richard held up his hands in surrender. “I've just always been curious.”

“We don't want any extra pepper, thank you,” Ruth said to the waiter.

Unbothered by the exchange, Richard dug into his mixed grill and descended into a minor food ecstasy. “Oh boy, it's a shame you won't try this.”

Audrey had never given much thought to her father, such was the stability he provided. Richard was a traditional sort of man, not so much in his values as in the nature of his presence. He left Audrey to her meanderings, to her joys, her tempers; her sense had always been that he didn't know her well. And she had felt no distressing lack therein. Intimacy was Ruth's territory—that nauseating term
daddy's girl
was a joke between them, Ruth seeming bleakly terrified of the family dynamic to which it alluded. Richard's remove had been liberating. He was her father. What more did she need to know of him?

But his pleasure in the meat moved her inexplicably: it was a glimpse into his vulnerability, his humanity, and she felt some defence in her buckle. She had never particularly believed in the myth of her parents' perfection. Their happiness had been irrelevant, of such exclusive concern to her was her own happiness. On a recent morning at school, Dougie had sat in the back of the classroom proclaiming how traumatized she was by hearing her mother behind the closed door of the master bedroom declaring that she had sperm on her leg. Audrey had been grateful that her own life supplied no such anecdotes. Her parents' love had been tactfully concealed; she'd had no cause to consider it.

Since seeing her mother and Henry Winter in the library, though, she had not been able to stop imagining scenarios of her father finding out about the affair. In the most basic, he picked up the phone and unwittingly found himself in the midst of a heated conversation between Henry and Ruth. In another, he came home, feeling sick, on his lunch hour and was greeted by the sight of them half-dressed in the kitchen, kissing up against the fridge, magnets scattered on the floor around them. In the most convoluted, and the most unlikely, she herself was injured at school, and because Ruth couldn't be located, Richard was summoned, and ran smack into Ruth and Henry in the back stairwell, fully clothed but in a less than platonic embrace. Fantasizing about Ruth's exposure gave her a perverse thrill, not because she wanted her father to know, but because there was something electrifying in the contemplation of something so terrible. This was a secret with the power to reconfigure everything, to dismantle, detonate, her life, to render the family identity instantly useless.

She thought of a decade earlier, when her father had gone into the hospital for an emergency appendectomy. On a visit after the surgery, she'd keenly felt the dire possibilities throbbing in the air around them. The chance that catastrophe could strike made her feel important, improbably excited. The nurses had given her lolli-pops and made her their pet; in the elevator, a doctor had lifted her up to push the buttons. She had been sitting in her mother's lap in the corner of the pale pink room when her father was brought down from recovery. He'd opened his eyes to smile drowsily at them before drifting back to sleep. This was a different kind of sleep than she had witnessed before, trying to peel her father's eyes open at dawn on a Saturday. Her father wore a hospital gown; an
IV
bag dripped clear fluid into a tube that snaked into his bare arm. She had started to cry. “Your father is fine!” Ruth had exclaimed, wiping the tears away. “He'll take care of us forever, I promise!” His misfortune suddenly seemed to be her fault. Too much had she been seduced by the dramatic flair of it all, by the attention of so many men and women in scrubs. Alone in bed at night, she had too often daydreamed of being an orphan, made magnificent by tragedy, like so many of her favourite storybook characters. What if her imagination were powerful enough to bring that fantasy into reality?

Now here she was, ten years on, still just beginning to grasp her own impotence. She looked from Richard, contentedly deconstructing his meal, to Ruth, picking at her fish, and was overcome by a wayward impulse.

“Speaking of Eliot,” she said, “the dance was pretty interesting.”

“Oh?” Richard said, his eyebrows raised.

Ruth's face sparkled in either excitement or alarm.

“Did you meet a boy?” he asked.

Audrey blushed. “Actually, I left for a while. I went upstairs. It was so hot in the gym.” She took a sip of her water. “I went into the library. I found a book.”

“I'm sure Larissa McAllister would be proud of you for resisting the temptation of male flesh,” Richard said. “What was the book?”

Audrey looked squarely at her mother. “
Who Do You Think You Are?
”

Ruth's hand, laying down her fork, betrayed a tremble.

“Ah,” said Richard. “How fitting. Did you know that
The Lives of Girls and Women
was the first book your mother ever gave me?”

Audrey shook her head, still levelling her gaze at Ruth.

“I never read it, though, I'm ashamed to say. But think about it.
Lives of Girls and Women
? I was closed-minded. It was a first edition, too. Your mother said she searched the city for it.”

Ruth watched Audrey as she spoke. “I did. It's a shame you never bothered to read it.”

Richard dipped his head. “I'm sorry.”

Audrey dropped her fork with a clang onto her plate. “Well, I guess we all do things we're sorry for.”

A fresh blast of icy air heralded a new set of diners, a man and woman, red-cheeked from the wind, clearly regulars. Chattering with the wait staff about a recent trip to Belgium, they stopped to kiss on the way to the table. Audrey turned from her parents, entranced by the woman's waifish elegance. (It is the nature of fascination, isn't it, to most admire those who are nothing like you?) But it was soon clear how much the woman was misrepresented by her entrance. At a distance, her curtain of glossy blonde hair hid all the ways in which she had striven to make herself hard: her thin lips were coated with matte black lipstick, her eyes messily lined with kohl; on the side of her neck was a black tattoo of a dragon with a long, forked tongue, on her ring finger a disturbingly lifelike black widow spider. She was already a little drunk, teetering flirtatiously, laughing too loudly, her head thrown back.