Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories Part 25

She said, "We got a ways to go yet."

Then she said, "'Way.' Stan doesn't like me saying 'ways'

either."

The repet.i.tion of things, or maybe the heat, was making me feel anxious and rather sick. We were holding my suitcase on our knees and only a couple of inches ahead of my fingers was a man's fat neck and bald head. A few black, sweaty long hairs clung to his scalp. For some reason I had to think of Mr.

Vorguilla's teeth in the medicine cabinet, which Queenie showed me when she worked for the Vorguillas next door. That was long before Mr. Vorguilla could ever be thought of as Stan.

Two joined teeth sitting beside his razor and shaving brush and the wooden bowl holding his hairy and disgusting shaving soap.

"That's his bridge," Queenie had said.

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Bridge?

"Bridge of teeth."

"Yuck," I said.

"These are his extras," she said. "He 's wearing his others."

"Yuck. Aren't they yellow?"

Queenie put her hand over my mouth. She didn't want Mrs.

Vorguilla to hear us. Mrs. Vorguilla was lying downstairs on the dining-room couch. Her eyes were closed most of the time, but she might not be sleeping.

When we got off the streetcar at last we had to walk up a steep hill, trying awkwardly to share the weight of the suitcase. The houses were not quite all the same, though at first they looked like it. Some of the roofs came down over the walls like caps, or else the whole second story was like a roof, and covered in shingles. The shingles were dark green or maroon or brown.

The porches came to within a few feet of the sidewalk, and the s.p.a.ces between the houses seemed narrow enough for people to reach out the side windows and shake hands. Children were playing on the sidewalk, but Queenie took no more notice of them than if they were birds pecking in the cracks. A very fat man, naked from the waist up, sat on his front steps staring at us in such a fixed and gloomy way that I was sure he had something to say. Queenie marched on past him.

She turned in partway up the hill, following a gravel path between some garbage tins. Out of an upstairs window a woman called something that I found unintelligible. Queenie called back, "It's just my sister, she 's visiting."

"Our landlady," she said. "They live in the front and upstairs.

They're Greeks. She doesn't speak hardly any English."

It turned out that Queenie and Mr. Vorguilla shared a bathroom with the Greeks. You took your roll of toilet paper with you-if you forgot, there wasn't any. I had to go in there at once, because I was menstruating heavily and had to change my - 244*

pad. For years afterwards, the sight of certain city streets on hot days, certain shades of brown brick and dark-painted shingles, and the noise of streetcars, would bring back to me the memory of cramps low in the belly, waves of flushing, bodily leaks, hot confusion.

There was one bedroom where Queenie slept with Mr.

Vorguilla, and another bedroom turned into a small living room, and a narrow kitchen, and a sunporch. The cot on the sunporch was where I was to sleep. Close outside the windows the landlord and another man were fixing a motorcycle. The smell of oil, of metal and machinery mixed with the smell of ripe tomatoes in the sun. There was a radio blaring music out an upstairs window.

"One thing Stan can't stand," said Queenie. "That radio."

She pulled the flowered curtains closed, but the noise and sun still came through. "I wish I could've afforded lining," she said.

I had the b.l.o.o.d.y pad wrapped up in toilet paper, in my hand.

She brought me a paper bag and directed me to the outdoor garbage pail. "Every one of them," she said. "Out there right away. You won't forget, will you? And don't leave your box any place he can see it; he hates being reminded."

I still tried to be nonchalant, to act as if I felt at home. "I need to get a nice cool dress like yours," I said.

"Maybe I could make you one," said Queenie, with her head in the fridge. "I want a c.o.ke, do you? I just go to this place they sell remnants. I made this whole dress for around three dollars.

What size are you now, anyway? "

I shrugged. I said that I was trying to lose weight.

"Well. We could maybe find something."

"I am going to marry a lady that has a little girl about your age,"

my father had said. "And this little girl has not got her father around. So you have to promise me one thing and that is that you will never tease her or say anything mean to her about that.

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There 'll be times when you may get in a fight and disagree with each other the way sisters do, but that is one thing you must never say. And if other kids say it you never take their side."

For the sake of argument, I said that I did not have a mother and n.o.body said anything mean to me.

My father said, "That's different."

He was wrong about everything. We did not seem anywhere near the same age, because Queenie was nine when my father married Bet and I was six. Though later, after I had skipped a grade and Queenie had failed one, we came closer together in school. And I never knew anyone to try to be mean to Queenie.

She was somebody everybody wanted to be friends with. She was chosen first for a baseball team even though she was a careless baseball player, and first for a spelling team though she was a poor speller. Also, she and I did not get into fights. Not once. She showed plenty of kindness towards me and I had plenty of admiration for her. I would have worshipped her for her dark-gold hair and her sleepy-looking dark eyes-for her looks and her laugh alone. Her laugh was sweet and rough like brown sugar. The surprise was that with all her advantages she could be tenderhearted and kind.

As soon as I woke up on the morning of Queenie 's disappearance, that morning in early winter, I felt her gone.

It was still dark, between six and seven o'clock. The house was cold. I pulled on the big woolly brown bathrobe that Queenie and I shared. We called it Buffalo Bill and whichever of us got out of bed first in the morning would grab it. A mystery where it came from.

"Maybe a friend of Bet's before she married your dad,"

Queenie said. "But don't say anything, she 'd kill me."

Her bed was empty and she wasn't in the bathroom. I went down the stairs not turning any lights on, not wanting to wake Bet. I looked out the little window in the front door. The hard - 246*

pavement, the sidewalk, and the flat gra.s.s in the front yard all glittering with frost. The snow was late. I turned up the hall thermostat and the furnace rolled over in the dark, gave its reliable growl. We had just got the oil furnace and my father said he still woke up at five every morning, thinking it was time to go down to the cellar and build up the fire.

My father slept in what had been a pantry, off the kitchen. He had an iron bed and a broken-backed chair he kept his stack of old National Geographics on, to read when he couldn't sleep. He turned the ceiling light off and on by a cord tied to the bed frame. This whole arrangement seemed to me quite natural and proper for the man of the house, the father. He should sleep like a sentry with a coa.r.s.e blanket for cover and an unhousebroken smell about him of engines and tobacco. Reading and wakeful till all hours and alert all through his sleep.

Even so, he hadn't heard Queenie. He said she must be somewhere in the house. "Did you look in the bathroom?"

I said, "She 's not there."

"Maybe in with her mother. Case of the heebie-jeebies."

My father called it the heebie-jeebies when Bet woke up-or didn't quite wake up-from a bad dream. She would come blundering out of her room unable to say what had frightened her, and Queenie had to be the one to guide her back to bed.

Queenie would curl against her back, making comforting noises like a puppy lapping milk, and Bet would not remember anything in the morning.

I had turned the kitchen light on.

"I didn't want to wake her," I said. "Bet."

I looked at the rusty-bottomed bread tin swiped too often by the dishcloth, and the pots sitting on the stove, washed but not put away, and the motto supplied by Fairholme Dairy: The Lord Is the Heart of Our House. All these things stupidly waiting for the day to begin and not knowing that it had been hollowed out by catastrophe.

The door to the side porch had been unlocked.

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"Somebody came in," I said. "Somebody came in and took Queenie."

My father came out with his trousers on over his long underwear. Bet was slapping downstairs in her slippers and her chenille robe, flicking on lights as she came.

"Queenie not in with you?" my father said. To me he said, "The door had to've been unlocked from the inside."

Bet said, "What's this about Queenie?"

"She might just have felt like a walk," my father said.

Bet ignored this. She had a mask of some pink stuff dried on her face. She was a Sales Representative for beauty products, and she never sold any cosmetic she had not tried on herself.

"You get over to Vorguillas'," she said to me. "She might've thought of something she was supposed to do over there."

This was a week or so after Mrs. Vorguilla's funeral, but Queenie had kept on working there, helping to box up dishes and linens so that Mr. Vorguilla could move into an apartment. He had the Christmas concerts at school to get ready for and could not do all the packing himself. Bet wanted Queenie to just quit, so that she could get taken on for Christmas help at one of the stores.

I put on my father's rubber boots that were by the door, instead of going upstairs for my shoes. I stumbled across the yard to the Vorguillas' porch and rang the bell. It was a chime, which seemed to proclaim the musicality of the household. I hugged Buffalo Bill tight around me and prayed. Oh, Queenie, Queenie, turn the lights on. I forgot that if Queenie was working in there, the lights would be on already.

No answer. I pounded on the wood. Mr. Vorguilla was going to be in a bad temper when I finally woke him. I pressed my head to the door, listening for stirrings.

"Mr. Vorguilla. Mr. Vorguilla. I'm sorry to wake you, Mr.

Vorguilla. Is anybody home?"

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A window was heaved up in the house on the other side of the Vorguillas'. Mr. Hovey, an old bachelor, lived there with his sister.

"Use your eyes," Mr. Hovey called down. "Look in the driveway."

Mr. Vorguilla's car was gone.

Mr. Hovey slammed down the window.

When I opened our kitchen door I saw my father and Bet sitting at the table with cups of tea in front of them. For a minute I thought that order had been restored. There had been a phone call, perhaps, with some pacifying news.

"Mr. Vorguilla isn't there," I said. "His car's gone."

"Oh, we know that," Bet said. "We know all about that."

My father said, "Look at here," and pushed a piece of paper across the table.

I am going to marry Mr. Vorguilla, it said. Yours truly, Queenie.

"Underneath the sugar bowl," said my father.

Bet dropped her spoon.

"I want him prosecuted," she shouted. "I want her in Reform School. I want the police."

My father said, "She 's eighteen years old and she can get married if she wants to. The police aren't going to set up a roadblock."

"Who says they're on the road? They're shacked up in some motel. That fool of a girl and that bug-eyed pickle-a.s.s Vorguilla."

"Talk like that isn't going to bring her back."

"I don't want her back. Not if she comes crawling. She 's made her bed and she can lie in it with her bug-eyed b.u.g.g.e.r. He can screw her in the ear for all I care."

My father said, "That's enough."

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Queenie brought me a couple of 222's to take with my c.o.ke.

"It's amazing how your cramps clear up, once you get married. So-your dad went and told you about us?"

When I had let my father know that I wanted to get a summer job before entering Teachers' College in the fall, he had said that maybe I should go to Toronto and look up Queenie. He said that she had written to him in care of his trucking business, asking if he could let them have some money to tide them over the winter.

"I would've never had to write to him," Queenie said, "if Stan hadn't got sick last year with pneumonia."

I said, "It was the first I knew where you were." Tears came into my eyes, I didn't know why. Because I'd felt so happy when I found out, so lonely before I found out, because I wished right now that she would say, "Of course, I always meant to get in touch with you, " and she didn't say it.

"Bet doesn't know," I said. "She thinks I'm on my own."

"I hope not," Queenie said calmly. "I mean I hope she doesn't know."

I had a lot of things to tell her, about home. I told her that the trucking firm had gone from three vehicles to a dozen, and that Bet had bought a muskrat coat and expanded her business, holding Beauty Clinics now in our house. For these purposes she had fixed up the room where my father used to sleep, and he had moved his cot and the National Geographies to his office-an Air Force billet he had towed to the trucking yard. Sitting at the kitchen table studying for my Senior Matric I had listened to Bet say, "A skin this delicate, you should never go near it with a washcloth," prior to loading up some raw-faced woman with lotions and creams. And sometimes in a no less intense, but less hopeful tone, "I'm telling you I had Evil, I had Evil living right next door to me and I never suspected it, because you don't, do you? I always think the best of people. Right up till they kick me in the teeth."

"That's right," the customer would say. "I'm the same."

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Or, "You think you know what sorrow is, but you don't know half."