The Romantic Page 10

  Near dawn I sleep for about an hour. As soon as I open my eyes I am hit by a wave of nausea, and I get to my feet and stumble to the bathroom, where I throw up last night’s chicken cacciatore.

  “Louise?” my father calls. As I’m coming back down the hall he opens his door. His face startles me, it’s so haggard, not yet hoisted into its cheerful daytime aspect.

  “I think I have the flu.”

  This throws him into his physician’s persona. He feels my forehead. “You’re not running a fever. Do you have diarrhea, the runs? Stick out your tongue.”

  I push past him. “I just need to sleep.”

  “I’ll get you a glass of ginger ale.”

  “I don’t want one. I’ll be okay. I’m going to stay home today, so could you call my school and leave a note for Mrs. Carver?”

  Back in bed I lose consciousness until Mrs. Carver arrives. She brings me a warm red tea that tastes like worms. I spit it back into the cup. “What is this?”

  “Drink it down,” she whispers. “It’ll settle your …” She rubs her stomach.

  “I don’t feel sick any more.”

  “It’s also good for …” She makes a sharp shoving-away motion with both hands.

  “Banishing my enemies,” I finish.

  She gives me a reproachful look that says I should know by now she doesn’t think in terms of enemies or wicked people. If you act badly, it’s because you’ve been goaded by harmful spirits, who themselves are only fulfilling the prophecies of harmful omens. In her school of thought, there is no will, no morality, only atmosphere.

  I force down more of the tea. Over the years I have come to welcome her occult interventions as insurance against the faint possibility that she’s actually on to something. She presses her child-sized, sandpaper-textured palm against my forehead. “I’m not hot,” I tell her. She adjusts her glasses to peer at me, her frazzled eyes arrested for a moment in a look almost penetrating.

  “What?” I say.

  She pats my leg.

  “What?”

  She takes the cup and sets it on the bedside table.

  When she’s out of the room I sink into dread, convinced she has envisioned some catastrophe in my future. No, no, I’m imagining things. She can’t see into the future! I hear her clattering around in the kitchen. “Mrs. Carver,” I think fondly, and after a few minutes manage to shrivel her down to the sweet, harmless crackpot I’ve lately come to see her as.

  Still, I finish the tea.

  By now it’s a quarter to eleven, a quarter to eight Vancouver time. If Abel is at home, and not dead or in jail, he likely won’t have left for school yet.

  I use the phone in my father’s study. While the operator makes the connection I pray for Abel to answer, but it’s Mr. Richter’s sedate “Hello” that comes over the line. Obviously, no calamity has struck at that end.

  “Is Abel there?”—altering my voice in case he isn’t and then he’ll never have to know it was me who called.

  “Louise?”

  I drop the disguise. ‘Yeah, hi. May I speak to Abel, please?”

  “Of course. Yes, of course. Just one moment.”

  The dog barks. Mr. Richter calls,“Abel!” and, farther off, Mrs. Richter sing-songs something I can’t make out. A happy morning in the Richter household. Longing pours through me.

  “Playing hooky?” It’s Abel.

  “I don’t feel well.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I didn’t sleep last night.”

  One of those eternal, excruciating pauses, and then,“I’m sorry I didn’t phone. Mr. Earl, you remember that old black saxophonist I told you about, he was playing at the Bear Pit and I stayed for his set. It was after two by the time I got home.”

  “He was playing on a Sunday night?”

  “Hey, this is the West Coast.”

  “And this is the East Coast.”

  Silence.

  “Abel, I was really worried. I thought you’d been murdered or something.”

  More silence.

  “I know it’s crazy.”

  “Don’t do this to yourself,” he says quietly.

  That does it, that mixture of detachment and pity. Tears start streaming down my face. “Don’t do what?”

  “Get yourself down.”

  “I don’t get myself down. You get me down. You don’t call when you’re supposed to, and that gets me down.”

  “I’m sorry. I guess I just … forgot.”

  “Forgot!”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Everything’s falling apart.”

  “No, it isn’t. Don’t say that. Everything’s fine.”

  I sigh.

  “I’ve got to go. My father’s calling, he’s giving me a ride.”

  “Can you phone me when you get home from school?”

  No answer.

  “Abel!”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Four o’clock your time. Is that too early?”

  “It should be okay.”

  “I love you.”

  “I know.” Barely audible.

  “Do you love me?”

  ‘Yep.”

  “Okay, I’m okay now.”

  Throughout the day I master the skill of multiplying by sixty, counting down not the hours, which feel like centuries, but the minutes. Five hundred and ninety. Four hundred and eight-five. I stay in bed and read Rimbaud’s collected poems. ‘Your eye-teeth gleam. Your breast is like a cithara, plucked notes run in your pale arms.” Why didn’t he send me that one? Why doesn’t he see me in everything, as I see him?

  At suppertime I rouse myself to eat a bowl of beef broth in the kitchen. My father says I still look “a little pale, a little ashen, a little wan.”

  “Which?” I burst out. His inability to settle on a single adjective suddenly strikes me as a form of mental illness. “Pale? Ashen? Wan? Washed-out? Colourless?”

  He blinks.

  “Callow?” I yell.

  “I believe you mean sallow,” he says carefully.

  “I’m fine,” I mutter.

  He fades to nothing. There is only the clock and the phone. When he pours his coffee, I become aware of him again and say, ‘You don’t have to sit with me. I’ll do the dishes.” He escapes gladly. “If the phone rings,” I call after him,“I’ll get it.”

  Twenty-five after six.

  At a quarter to seven, the dishes done, I sit on the chair under the phone.

  Five to seven.

  Seven.

  Seven-fifteen. Seven-thirty.

  I rest my head on the table, in the cradle of my arms. The seconds tick by. They fall, drop by drop, the smithereens of my life. Presently my father strolls in for a second cup of coffee, and I cover my ears with my hands but he speaks anyway.

  “Wouldn’t you be better off in bed?”

  In bed I am not better off. All I can think about is Abel’s “Yep” when I asked him if he loved me. “Yep.” Like somebody who doesn’t want to talk about it. Or—oh, God—like somebody who is only telling you what you want to hear. But he might have just been confirming the obvious: Yep, of course, goes without saying. In the park he told me he loved me too much. Too much for what? For who? Doesn’t he want to love me?

  I can’t phone him, I won’t. There’s still time. It’s only five o’clock in Vancouver. He could have got held up at school or at a piano lesson.

  I reread his two letters, for clues, for hope. They just upset me more. How can he say I’m not alone and shouldn’t be lonely and then abandon me? The “Eternity” poem now seems to be a warning with all its flying off and fleeing and diverging. Why, though? Why would he want to flee? Or maybe it isn’t that, maybe when we’re so far apart he can’t hold on to me somehow. Out of sight, out of mind.

  I return the letters to the bedside table and get up and go to the window just as the streetlights come on. After a few minutes a moth appears beneath the light on our property. It circles, ascending. “Don’t, don’t,”
I think. But up it goes. When it hits the lamp it drops almost to the ground, recovers itself and starts another climb. I know, because Abel told me, that moths navigate by the moon, and so big moonlike objects tend to throw them off course. On summer evenings we used to capture lost moths in his butterfly net and release them down in the ravine. Once, to rescue a luna moth that had been bashing itself against the lamp for at least a half-hour, we solicited the help of my father, his long arm. “Blind faith,” my father observed as the three of us stood looking up and waiting for the moth to fall within reach.

  Now, watching this moth, I think that maybe it isn’t a matter of faith. Or of hope, or even guesswork. Maybe it’s just that certain moths decide to smash themselves to death. Who knows why? Or maybe what’s going on is that moths don’t understand shades of resemblance. To them, if a thing looks enough like another thing, it is that other thing. All lights are the moon. The moth is all other moths, and all other moths are the moth. There is one human, and he is everywhere.

  There is one human, and he is nowhere.

  Why doesn’t he phone?

  The next morning I throw up again. Quietly this time, into my bedside wastepaper basket. In the bathroom I rinse out the basket, then undress and step into the shower. I look down at my body. “Not as thin,” Abel said about the girl he dated who looked like me. Was I wrong to take that as a compliment? I feel my breasts. They seem heavier, but maybe not, I can’t tell. They’re a bit sore, though. I move my hands down to my belly. Sdii flat. I can’t be pregnant. Since Abel and I were together I’ve had two periods and, besides, I’m fairly certain that morning sickness starts earlier than this. I’m a nervous wreck, that’s all. Nervous wrecks throw up.

  But what if I ami The thought sends another wave of nausea through me, pure fear. I imagine quitting school, the scorn, my father wild-eyed and helpless, Aunt Verna arriving to hammer together a crib and be the midwife. I imagine dropping the bombshell on Abel: “Sorry to bother you, it’s just that I thought you should know …” Would I move out to Vancouver and marry him, then? Set up house in his basement, the two of us and the baby? And Lenny? No, we’d get rid of Lenny. Abel would keep going to school while I hung around with Mrs. Richter, chopping cabbage, planting tomatoes, as in my old fantasies. It wouldn’t be so bad. Abel and I would be together, at least.

  Whether he wanted me or not.

  I start to cry. He doesn’t want me. He’d pretend he did, out of decency, and pity. He might even love the damn baby.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I think of myself as having no friends at Greenwoods Collegiate, but that’s probably not fair to Alice Keystone, the girl I walk to and from school with. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, because our lunch hours coincide, we eat together in the cafeteria.

  Alice gives the impression of being a worrier until you discover that she isn’t constantly wringing her hands, she’s moisturizing them. The family-sized jar of Jergens lotion she carries in her purse (along with the pickle jars of leftovers that hold her lunch) would weigh down a less robust girl. Not that she’s big, she’s sturdy: thick calves and wide hips, about my height. “I can’t stand touching paper if my skin gets too dry,” she told me shortly after we got to know each other. Before then I’d thought she was vain about her tapered fingers. It turns out she’s far from vain; she seems to have no idea how pretty she is. You look at her—her round blue eyes, small white face—and see a doll. When a teacher asks her a question, a red circle the size of a silver dollar materializes on each of her cheeks and her resemblance to a doll becomes even more pronounced.

  Our understanding, Alice’s and mine, is that we have almost nothing in common aside from our unpopularity and that this glaring fact will go unmentioned between us. I wouldn’t mind talking about it, gloating over it sometimes, but I’m fairly certain Alice would be crushed by even the most oblique suggestion, from me anyway, that she’s an outcast. Of course, she must know that she is. I know lam, and why. People think I’m weird and sarcastic. Alice herself has said a few times,“Oh, you’re so sarcastic!” Let it burst out after I’ve made a remark as self-evident and unscathing as “That girl sure is tall.”

  I try to be careful around her. Not only is she easily scandalized, she’s also deeply religious, a junior Sunday-school teacher and a volunteer Bible reader at the old-folks’ home. When I was dating Tim Todd (she referred to him as my fella: “There goes your fella”) I would talk about what movie he and I had seen on Saturday night or what his tropical fish were up to, but I would no more have told her that he had touched my breasts than I would have told my father. Even to say “breasts” would have been going too far.

  She lives only two blocks from me, in a newer part of the subdivision, and yet we rarely run into each other on weekends or holidays. This past summer I caught sight of her just once. I was waiting for a bus to go to my job, and her father’s station wagon pulled up at the red light and there she was in the passenger seat, the baby in her lap, her three little sisters in the middle seat and, behind them, in the back, her little brothers. Alice was holding the baby’s wrists to make it clap. She seemed to be singing to it. From what she has told me, she’s her mother’s right hand, she’s the one who puts all those kids to bed and dresses them for church. “What drudgery,” I thought as the car drove away. By then I’d had sex with Abel and could hardly imagine having had anything to do with somebody so straitlaced.

  But when the first day of school came round and from my living-room window I saw her waiting at the bottom of the street, I didn’t sneak out the back door, partly because I was working at being a nicer person, partly because I thought that my new look would come between us anyway. It occurred to me she must have figured we were of one mind concerning fashion in that, up until a few months ago, everything I wore used to belong to my mother and was therefore at least ten years out of date. But this hardly constituted an expression of taste. It was laziness, practicality, it was me saying to my father,“She’s never coming back,” and it was also, I suppose, a reluctant appreciation of the fine fabrics and designs. Alice’s clothes were deliberately out of date, not to mention new, cheap, homemade and spinsterish: sack-like dresses, high-necked cotton blouses and full skirts past the knee, all plain pastel, or if there was a pattern, it was some wallpaper motif of horses or windmills. Her one concession to style, and even that looked old-fashioned, was her teased hair. Neither of us wore make-up.

  Now here I was traipsing toward her in a tie-dyed tank top and a skirt that barely covered my rear end. Bare legs, no bra, and I wore leather sandals and a navel-long necklace of wooden beads I’d bought from a street vendor downtown. I had on lipstick, pale pink, almost white, and black eyeliner so thick that at breakfast my father, usually wary of provoking me, steeled himself into asking,“Don’t you think you should tone that down a little for school?”

  “I toned it up for school,” I said with less annoyance than I felt, fantasizing that Abel could hear how tolerant I was being. But my father kept casting me alarmed looks, kept palming back his oiled, thinning hair, and I couldn’t resist muttering,“Some people are so uptight.”

  “Talk about uptight,” I thought now, as I watched Alice clutch her purse to her chest. “Hi!” I called. She lifted one hand.

  When I reached her she said,“I hardly even recognized you.”

  “I’ve gone through some changes. I’m not going out with Tim any more, for one thing.”

  “Oh. I didn’t know.”

  “It was never very serious.”

  “What happened? If you don’t mind my asking.”

  I hadn’t intended to go into detail, but the sight of her exasperated me, her matronly teacup-patterned dress, her bouffant hairdo (she hadn’t changed), and I found myself wanting to give her a shock. “Oh,” I said,“I ran into my old boyfriend at a party and we ended up smoking pot and making out on the neighbour’s lawn, and then Tim came along, I was so stoned I forgot he was even there, and he caught us rolling around half naked.”
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  I walked off, sure she’d stay put. But no, here she was, trotting up alongside me. “By rolling around,” she said, not looking at me, cheeks aflame,“do you mean what I think you mean?”

  “We went all the way.”

  She sucked in her breath.

  “It’s not like it was a one-night stand or anything,” I said more gently. “Abel and I—that’s his name, Abel, it’s German—we’re in love. We’ve been in love ever since I was eleven.” My voice thickened to be telling somebody this pure, true thing. “Seven years.”

  Alice’s expression eased. “That’s a long time.”

  We didn’t speak the rest of the way to school. “Bye for now,” I said once we were inside the front doors, adding “for now” only to be civil, as I had no doubt that our friendship really was finished. I felt her big, uneasy eyes on my back as I went down the hall to my home room. I felt other eyes as well. “Is that Louise Kirk?” Everybody thinking it so loudly I could hear.

  Still, no one talked to me, other than to say hi, ask how I was doing, the mechanical acknowledgements I’d always gotten. But the pity, the condescension, that was gone. Maureen Hellier, passing me, turned right around to keep gaping. So did a couple of boys, sliding their eyes up and down my body. For the first time in my life I knew what it felt like to hold a little power in my hands. My mother used to say, ‘You are what you wear.” She was right.

  And I was wrong. About Alice, that is. After school she called “Wait up!” as I was crossing the parking lot, and when she was beside me she started right in with a report on who else she’d noticed dressed like a hippy: “Beverley Bowman was wearing, I guess you’d call it a psychedelic skirt, did you see her? Down to the floor, all sorts of swirling colours. Very eye-catching. And Steve Plath, his hair is longer than yours, I’ll bet. It must have grown like crazy over the summer. He had on a kind of Indian bracelet, you know, those woven straps with the coloured beads. And then that fella who plays the drums … oh, gosh, what’s his name? Brent something. Brent Coren, that’s it. He was wearing one of those Beatles jackets with the collars that stand up.”