The Progress of Love (26 page)

I take her glass. Mr. Cryderman tries to get up, but she holds him down until he says, “Cigarettes. I think they’re in the bedroom.”

When he comes back from the bedroom, he enters the kitchen, not the living room. I’m at the sink, filling up the ice-cube tray.

“Did you find any?” calls Mrs. Cryderman.

“Just checking out here.”

He has a package of cigarettes in his hand, but rummages noisily in the cupboard beside the sink. He presses against me, side to side. He puts his hand on my shoulder, squeezes. He moves that hand across my back, touches my bare neck. I stand with the ice tray in my hands, looking out the window at an old bus parked in the back lane, behind the gospel hall. The words “Calvary Tabernacle” are painted on its side.

Just the tips of Mr. Cryderman’s fingers move on my throat. Their touch is light at first as drops of water. Then heavier. Heavier
and heavier, finally stroking my skin as if they would leave furrows.

“Found some.”

When I take Mrs. Cryderman her drink, Mr. Cryderman is sitting in the armchair by the stand-up ashtray.

“Come sit where you were,” she says, in her silly-sweet voice.

“I’m smoking.”

My throat tingles as if it had taken a blow.

The second scene a few days later, on the next regular day of my employment.

Mr. Cryderman is working in the garden. He is in his shirt sleeves, still wearing his tie, hacking away with a hoe at the vines that cover a little tumbledown summerhouse in a corner of the yard. He calls to me warningly, and waits for me to come over to him through the uncut grass. He says that Mrs. Cryderman is not well. The doctor has given her something to put her to sleep, to keep her still and quiet so that the baby won’t be born too soon. He says that I’d better not go inside today.

I am standing a couple of yards away from him. Now he says, “Come over here. Here. There’s something I want to ask you.”

I go closer, with shaking legs, but all he does is point to a vigorous, leafy, red-stalked plant at his feet.

“What is this thing, do you know? Should I dig it up? I can’t tell what’s a weed around here and what isn’t.”

It is a rhubarb plant, familiar to me as grass or dandelions.

“I don’t know,” I say, and at the moment I don’t.

“You don’t know? What good are you to me, Jessie? Isn’t this a queer little hole of a place?” He waves at the summerhouse. “I don’t know what it was built for. Midgets?”

He grabs some vines, tears them loose, and says, “Step in.”

I do. Inside, it is a wonderfully secret place, shady and neglected, with drifts of leafy debris on the bumpy earth floor. It is true that the roof is very low. Both of us have to bend over.

“Are you hot?” asks Mr. Cryderman.

“No.” In fact, chilly waves are passing over me—waves of weakness, physical dismay.

“Yes, you are. You’re all sweaty under that mop of hair.”

He touches my neck in a matter-of-fact way, like a doctor checking the evidence, then moves his hand to my cheek and hairline.

“Even your forehead is sweaty.”

I can smell cigarettes on his fingers, and the inky machinery smell of the newspaper office. All I want is to be equal to this. Ever since Mr. Cryderman touched my throat at the kitchen sink, I have felt that I am seeing the power of my own lies, my own fantasy. I am a person capable of wizardry but helpless. There is nothing to do but submit, submit to the consequences. I am wondering whether the passionate attack will take place here, without further preparation—here in the shelter of the summerhouse, on the earth floor, among the dead leaves and scratchy twigs that perhaps conceal the dead bodies of mice or birds. I do know one thing, and that is that the lovelorn declarations, the delicate pleas and moonings often voiced by Mr. Cryderman in my imagination, are going to have no place on the agenda.

“You think I’m going to kiss you, Jessie?” says Mr. Cryderman. “I have no doubt you’re a handy kisser. No,” he says, as if I’ve specifically asked him. “No, Jessie. Let’s sit down.”

There are boards attached to the summerhouse walls that serve as benches. Some are broken. I sit on one that isn’t, and he sits on another. We lean forward to escape the tough branches that have broken through the latticework walls.

He lays his hand on my knee, on my cotton skirt.

“What about Mrs. Cryderman, Jessie? Do you think she’d be very happy if she could see us now?”

I take this to be a rhetorical question, but he repeats it, and I have to say, “No.”

“Because I did to her what you might like me to do to you, she’s going to have a baby, and she isn’t going to have an easy time of it.”

He strokes my leg through the thin cotton. “You’re an impulsive girl, Jessie. You shouldn’t go inside places like this with men just because they ask you. You shouldn’t be so ready to let
them kiss you. I think you’re hot-blooded. Aren’t you? You’re hot-blooded. You’ve got some lessons to learn.”

And this is how things continue—the stroking and the lecturing, coming at me together. He is telling me I’m to blame, while his fingers start up these flutters under my skin, rousing a tender, distant ache. His dry voice reproaches me. His hand rouses and his words shame me, and something in his voice mocks, mocks endlessly, at both these responses. I don’t understand that this isn’t fair. At least, I don’t think of protesting that it isn’t fair. I feel shame all right, and confusion, and longing. But I am not ashamed of what he’s telling me I should be ashamed of. I’m ashamed of being caught out, made foolish, of being so enticed and scolded. And I can’t stop it.

“One thing you will have to learn, Jessie. To consider other people. The reality of other people. It sounds simple but it can be difficult. For you it will be difficult.”

He may be referring to his wife, whom I am not considering. But I understand this differently. Isn’t it true that all the people I know in the world so far are hardly more than puppets for me, serving the glossy contrivings of my imagination? It’s true. He has hit the nail on the head, as Aunt Ena is fond of saying. But hitting the nail on the head in a matter like this, in a matter of intimate failure, isn’t apt to make people abashed and grateful and eager to change their ways. Pride hardens, instead, over the nakedly perceived fault. So mine does now. Pride hardens, pride deals with all those craven licks of sweetness, douses the hope of pleasure, the deep-seated glow of invitation. What do I want with anybody who can know so much about me? In fact, if I could wipe him off the face of the earth now, I would.

He feels the change. He takes his hand away and gets up. He tells me to go out ahead of him, to go home. He may have said a couple of cautionary words, in addition, but I was not listening anymore.

On top of this, MaryBeth announced that she did not believe me. “I did at first. I did. But then I started to wonder.”

“We broke off,” I said. “It’s all over.”

“I don’t believe you,” said MaryBeth, in a trembling voice, grieving and shaking her head. “I don’t believe there was anything going on between you and him at all. I had to tell you. Don’t be mad. I had to.”

I didn’t answer her. I walked along quickly. We were on the way to school. We had met as usual at the Dominion Bank corner and she had waited three blocks before blurting out what she had to say. She had to trot to keep up with me. Just before we caught up with some other girls—just before I called out their names with a great show of friendliness and good humor—I gave her a bitter look. I gave her the look deserved by a traitor. And I thought she did deserve it. She was wrong—plenty had gone on between me and Mr. Cryderman. She was right, too, of course. But I suppressed all thought of that with ferocious ease. You can feel the same rush of justified anger, whether you are rightfully or wrongfully accused.

Without quite planning to, I took up a policy of not speaking to MaryBeth. When she came up to me in the cloakroom and said softly, “Are we walking home together, Jessie,” I didn’t answer. When she walked along beside me, I pretended she wasn’t there. Examinations had begun, our schedules were disrupted; it was easy to avoid her.

A letter appeared, folded into my French book. I didn’t read it all the way through. She said that I was hurting her, that she couldn’t eat, she cried in bed at night, she got such blinding headaches from crying that she couldn’t see the questions on the examinations and would fail. She apologized, she wished that she had kept her mouth shut; how could she tell me she was sorry when I wouldn’t even speak to her? She knew one thing—she would never have the heart to treat me as I was treating her.

I looked ahead to the end of the letter and saw two intertwined hearts made up of little x’s, with our two names inside. Jesse and Meribeth. I didn’t read any more.

I wanted to get rid of her. I was tired of her complaints and confidences, her pretty face and gentle nature. I had got beyond her, beyond needing anything she had to offer. But there was more
to it than that. Her puffy eyes, her stricken looks satisfied something in me. I felt the better for wounding her. No doubt about it. I got back a little of whatever I had lost in the Crydermans’ summerhouse.

A few years after this—not a long time to me now, but a long time then—I was walking down the main street of that town where I had gone to high school. I was a graduate student by then. I had won scholarships and no longer mispronounced Dostoyevsky. Aunt Ena was dead. She sat down and died, just after waxing a floor. Floris was married. It seemed that she had been courted for years, in secret, by the druggist who had the shop next door to the shoe store, but Aunt Ena objected to him: he drank (that is, he drank a little), and was a Catholic. Floris had two baby boys, one right after the other, and she put an auburn rinse on her hair and drank beer with her husband in the evenings. George lived with them. He drank beer, too, and helped look after the babies. Floris was not shy or irritable anymore. She wanted to be friends now; she gave me flowered scarves and costume jewellery which I could not wear, and lotions and lipstick from the drugstore that I was glad of. She asked me to come and visit whenever I liked. Sometimes I did, and the hectic domesticity, the baby-centered chores and pleasures, soon drove me out to walk.

I was walking down the main street and I heard a rap on a window. It was the window of the insurance agent’s office, and the person rapping was MaryBeth, who worked there. During her last year in high school, she had taken the typing and bookkeeping course. She lived with Beatrice and Beatrice’s husband, who soon had a barbershop of his own. She didn’t try to be friends with me during that year. We would cross the street or look into a store window when we saw each other coming—though that was from awkwardness more than real enmity. Then she got the job in the insurance agent’s office.

The Crydermans were gone before that. They shut up the house and went away to Toronto before the baby was born. It was a boy—quite normal, as far as anybody knew. Aunt Ena was disgusted with them for not closing the house down properly. She said there would
be rats in it. But they sold it. They sold the newspaper They were completely gone.

MaryBeth motioned for me to come inside.

“It’s been ages since I saw you,” she said, as if we had parted most amicably. She plugged the electric kettle in, to make us instant coffee. The insurance agent was out.

She was fatter than she used to be, but still pretty, with her look of a bruised nestling. Dressed as nicely as ever, a flattering soft blue sweater, brushed wool over the tender breasts. She kept chocolates in a desk drawer and jam tarts in a tin. She offered me marzipan fruit wrapped in foil. She asked me if I was still going to school and what courses I was taking. I told her a little bit about my studies and ambitions.

“That’s wonderful,” she said, without malice. “I always knew you were smart.” Then she said she had been sorry to hear about my Aunt Ena and she thought it was nice about Floris. She had heard that Floris’s little fellows were really cute.

Beatrice had girls. They were cute, too, but rather spoiled.

We both said how lucky it was that she had spotted me, and we vowed to get together sometime for a real visit—something I knew she did not intend any more than I did. She admired my angora scarf and tarn, asked if I had got them in the city.

I said yes, and the only problem was they shed terribly.

“Keep them in the fridge overnight,” she said. “I don’t know why, but it works.”

I opened the door, and the wind blew in from the street.

“Remember how crazy we used to be?” said MaryBeth, in a voice full of plaintive surprise. She had to turn this way and that, grabbing papers.

I thought of Mr. Cryderman and all my lies, and my abysmal confusion in the summerhouse.

“Those days will never come again,” said MaryBeth, flinging herself across the desk to hold things down.

I laughed and said just as well, and quickly shut the door. I waved from outside.

I felt such changes then—from fifteen to seventeen, from seventeen
to nineteen—that it didn’t occur to me how much I had been myself, all along. I saw MaryBeth shut in, with her treats and her typewriter, growing sweeter and fatter, and the Crydermans fixed, far away, in their everlasting negotiations, but myself shedding dreams and lies and vows and errors, unaccountable. I didn’t see that I was the same one, embracing, repudiating. I thought I could turn myself inside out, over and over again, and tumble through the world scot free.

Mary Jo can hear what Dr. Streeter would have to say.

“Regular little United Nations back here.”

Mary Jo, knowing how to handle him, would remark that there was always first class.

He would say that he didn’t propose paying an arm and a leg for the privilege of swilling free champagne.

“Anyway, you know what’s up in first class? Japs. Japanese businessmen on their way home from buying up some more of the country.”

Mary Jo might say then that Japanese hardly seemed foreign to her anymore. She would say this thoughtfully, as if she was wondering about it, almost talking to herself.