Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories Part 26

Then Bet would come back from seeing the woman to the door and groan and say, "Touch her face in the dark and you'd never know the difference from sandpaper."

Queenie didn't seem interested in hearing about these things.

And there was not much time, anyway. Before we had finished our c.o.kes there were quick hard steps on the gravel and Mr.

Vorguilla came into the kitchen.

"So look who's here," cried Queenie. She half got up, as if to touch him, but he veered towards the sink.

Her voice was full of such laughing surprise that I wondered if he had been told anything about my letter or the fact that I was on my way.

"It's Chrissy," she said.

"So I see," said Mr. Vorguilla. "You must like hot weather, Chrissy, if you come to Toronto in the summer."

"She 's going to look for a job," said Queenie.

"And do you have some qualifications?" Mr. Vorguilla asked.

"Do you have qualifications for finding a job in Toronto?"

Queenie said, "She 's got her Senior Matric."

"Well, let's hope that's good enough," said Mr. Vorguilla. He ran a gla.s.s of water and drank it all down, standing with his back to us. Exactly as he used to do when Mrs. Vorguilla and Queenie and I were sitting at the kitchen table in that other house, the Vorguillas' house next door. Mr. Vorguilla would come in from a practice somewhere, or he would be taking a break from teaching a piano lesson in the front room. At the sound of his steps Mrs. Vorguilla would have given us a warning smile. And we all looked down at our Scrabble letters, giving him the option of noticing us or not. Sometimes he didn't. The opening of the cupboard, the turning of the tap, the setting of the gla.s.s down on the counter were like a series of little explosions. As if he dared anybody to breathe while he was there.

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When he taught us music at school he was just the same. He came into the cla.s.sroom with the step of a man who had not a minute to lose and he rapped the pointer once and it was time to start. Up and down the aisles he strutted with his ears c.o.c.ked, his bulgy blue eyes alert, his expression tense and quarrelsome. At any moment he might stop by your desk to listen to your singing, to see if you were faking or out of tune. Then he 'd bring his head slowly down, his eyes bulging into yours and his hands working to shush the other voices, to bring you to your shame.

And the word was that he was just as much a dictator with his various choirs and glee clubs. Yet he was a favorite with his singers, particularly with ladies. They knit him things at Christmas. Socks and m.u.f.flers and mitts to keep him warm on his trips between school and school and choir and choir.

When Queenie had the run of the house, after Mrs. Vorguilla got too sick to manage, she fished out of a drawer a knitted object that she flapped in front of my face. It had arrived without the name of its donor.

I couldn't tell what it was.

"It's a peter-heater," Queenie said. "Mrs. Vorguilla said don't show it to him, he would just get mad. Don't you know what a peter-heater is?"

I said, "Ugh."

"It's just a joke."

Both Queenie and Mr. Vorguilla had to go out to work in the evenings. Mr. Vorguilla played the piano in a restaurant. He wore a tuxedo. And Queenie had a job selling tickets in a movie theater. The theater was just a few blocks away, so I walked there with her. And when I saw her sitting in the ticket booth I understood that the makeup and the dyed puffed hair and the hoop earrings were not so strange after all. Queenie looked like some of the girls pa.s.sing on the street or going in to see the movie with their boyfriends. And she looked very much like - 252*

some of the girls portrayed in the posters that surrounded her.

She looked to be connected to the world of drama, of heated love affairs and dangers, that was being depicted inside on the screen.

She looked-in my father's words-as if she didn't have to take a back seat to anybody.

"Why don't you just wander around for a while?" she had said to me. But I felt conspicuous. I couldn't imagine sitting in a cafe drinking coffee and advertising to the world that I had nothing to do and no place to go. Or going into a store and trying on clothes that I had no hope of buying. I climbed the hill again, I waved h.e.l.lo to the Greek woman calling out her window. I let myself in with Queenie 's key.

I sat on the cot on the sunporch. There was nowhere to hang up the clothes I had brought, and I thought it might not be such a good idea to unpack, anyway. Mr. Vorguilla might not like to see any sign that I was staying.

I thought that Mr. Vorguilla's looks had changed, just as Queenie 's had. But his had not changed, as hers had, in the direction of what seemed to me a hard foreign glamour and sophistication. His hair, which had been reddish-gray, was now quite gray, and the expression of his face-always ready to flash with outrage at the possibility of disrespect or an inadequate performance or just at the fact of something in his house not being where it was supposed to be-seemed now to be one of more permanent grievance, as if some insult was being offered or bad behavior going unpunished all the time, in front of his eyes.

I got up and walked around the apartment. You can never get a good look at the places people live in while they are there.

The kitchen was the nicest room, though too dark. Queenie had ivy growing up around the window over the sink, and she had wooden spoons sticking up out of a pretty, handleless mug, just the way Mrs. Vorguilla used to have them. The living room had the piano in it, the same piano that had been in the other living room. There was one armchair and a bookshelf made with bricks and planks and a record player and a lot of records sitting - 253*

on the floor. No television. No walnut rocking chairs or tapestry curtains. Not even the floor lamp with the j.a.panese scenes on its parchment shade. Yet all these things had been moved to Toronto, on a snowy day. I had been home at lunchtime and had seen the moving truck. Bet couldn't keep away from the window in the front door. Finally she forgot all the dignity she usually liked to show to strangers and opened the door and yelled at the moving men. "You go back to Toronto and tell him if he ever shows his face around here again he 'll wish he hadn't."

The moving men waved cheerfully, as if they were used to scenes like this, and maybe they were. Moving furniture must expose you to a lot of ranting and raging.

But where had everything gone? Sold, I thought. It must have been sold. My father had said that it sounded as if Mr. Vorguilla was having a hard time getting going down in Toronto in his line of work. And Queenie had said something about "getting behind." She would never have written to my father if they hadn't gotten behind.

They must have sold the furniture before she wrote.

On the bookshelf I saw The Encyclopedia of Music, and The World Companion to Opera, and The Lives of the Great Composers.

Also the large, thin book with the beautiful cover-the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam-that Mrs. Vorguilla often had beside her couch.

There was another book with a similarly decorated cover whose exact t.i.tle I don't remember. Something in the t.i.tle made me think I might like it. The word "flowered" or "perfumed." I opened it up, and I can remember well enough the first sentence I read.

"The young odalisques in the harim were also instructed in the exquisite use of their fingernails."

I was not sure what an odalisque was, but the word "harim"

(why not "harem"?) gave me a clue. And I had to read on, to find out what they were taught to do with their fingernails. I read on and on, maybe for an hour, and then let the book fall to the - 254*

floor. I had feelings of excitement, and disgust, and disbelief.

Was this the sort of thing that really grown-up people took an interest in? Even the design on the cover, the pretty vines all curved and twisted, seemed slightly hostile and corrupt. I picked the book up to put it back in its place and it fell open to show the names on the flyleaf. Stan and Marigold Vorguilla. In a feminine handwriting. Stan and Marigold.

I thought of Mrs. Vorguilla's high white forehead and tight little gray-black curls. Her pearl-b.u.t.ton earrings and blouses that tied with a bow at the neck. She was taller by quite a bit than Mr.

Vorguilla and people thought that was why they did not go out together. But it was really because she got out of breath. She got out of breath walking upstairs, or hanging the clothes on the line.

And finally she got out of breath even sitting at the table playing Scrabble.

At first my father would not let us take any money for fetching her groceries or hanging up her washing-he said it was only neighborly.

Bet said she thought she would try laying around and see if people would come and wait on her for nothing.

Then Mr. Vorguilla came over and negotiated for Queenie to go and work for them. Queenie wanted to go because she had failed her year at high school and didn't want to repeat it. At last Bet said all right, but told her she was not to do any nursing.

"If he 's too cheap to hire a nurse that's not your lookout."

Queenie said that Mr. Vorguilla put out the pills every morning and gave Mrs. Vorguilla a sponge bath every evening.

He even tried to wash her sheets in the bathtub, as if there was not such a thing as a washing machine in the house.

I thought of the times when we would be playing Scrabble in the kitchen and Mr. Vorguilla after drinking his gla.s.s of water would put a hand on Mrs. Vorguilla's shoulder and sigh, as if he had come back from a long, wearying journey.

"h.e.l.lo, pet," he would say.

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Mrs. Vorguilla would duck her head to give his hand a dry kiss.

"h.e.l.lo, pet," she would say.

Then he would look at us, at Queenie and me, as if our presence did not absolutely offend him. "h.e.l.lo, you two."

Later on Queenie and I would giggle in our beds in the dark.

"Goodnight, pet." "Goodnight, pet." How much I wished that we could go back to that time.

Except for going to the bathroom in the morning and sneaking out to put my pad in the garbage pail, I sat on my made-up cot in the sunporch until Mr. Vorguilla was out of the house. I was afraid he might not have any place to go, but apparently he did.

As soon as he was gone Queenie called to me. She had set out a peeled orange and cornflakes and coffee.

"And here 's the paper," she said. "I was looking at the Help Wanteds. First, though, I want to do something with your hair. I want to cut some off the back and I want to do it up in rollers.

Okay with you?"

I said okay. Even while I was eating, Queenie kept circling me and looking at me, trying to work out her idea. Then she got me up on a stool-I was still drinking my coffee-and she began to comb and snip.

"What kind of a job are we looking for, now?" she asked. "I saw one at a dry cleaner's. At the counter. How would that be?"

I said, "That'd be fine."

"Are you still planning on being a schoolteacher?"

I said I didn't know. I had an idea that she might think that a drab sort of occupation.

"I think you should be. You're smart enough. Teachers get paid more. They get paid more than people like me. You've got more independence."

But it was all right, she said, working at the movie theater. She had got the job a month or so before last Christmas, and she was - 256*

really happy then because she had her own money at last and could buy the ingredients for a Christmas cake. And she became friends with a man who was selling Christmas trees off the back of a truck. He let her have one for fifty cents, and she hauled it up the hill herself. She hung streamers of red and green crepe paper, which was cheap. She made some ornaments out of silver foil on cardboard and bought others on the day before Christmas when they went on sale in the drugstore. She made cookies and hung them on the tree as she had seen in a magazine. It was a European custom.

She wanted to have a party, but she didn't know who to ask.

There were the Greek people, and Stan had a couple of friends.

Then she got the idea of asking his students.

I still couldn't get used to her saying "Stan." It wasn't just the reminder of her intimacy with Mr. Vorguilla. It was that, of course. But it was also the feeling it gave, that she had made him up from scratch. A new person. Stan. As if there had never been a Mr. Vorguilla that we had known together-let alone a Mrs.

Vorguilla-in the first place.

Stan's students were all adults now-he really preferred adults to schoolchildren-so they didn't have to worry about the sort of games and entertainment you plan for children. They held the party on a Sunday evening, because all the other evenings were taken up with Stan's work at the restaurant and Queenie 's at the theater.

The Greeks brought wine they had made and some of the students brought eggnog mix and rum and sherry. And some brought records you could dance to. They had thought that Stan wouldn't have any records of that kind of music, and they were right.

Queenie made sausage rolls and gingerbread and the Greek woman brought her own kind of cookies. Everything was good.

The party was a success. Queenie danced with a Chinese boy named Andrew, who had brought a record she loved.

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"Turn, turn, turn," she said, and I moved my head as directed. She laughed and said, "No, no, I didn't mean you.

That's the record. That's the song. It's by the Byrds."

"Turn, turn, turn," she sang. "To everything, there is a season-"

Andrew was a dentistry student. But he wanted to learn to play the Moonlight Sonata. Stan said that was going to take him a long time. Andrew was patient. He told Queenie that he could not afford to go home to Northern Ontario for Christmas.

"I thought he was from China," I said.

"No, not Chinese Chinese. From here."

They did play one children's game. They played musical chairs. Everybody was boisterous by that time. Even Stan. He pulled Queenie down into his lap when she was running past, and he wouldn't let her go. And then when everybody had gone he wouldn't let her clean up. He just wanted her to come to bed.

"You know the way men are," Queenie said. "Do you have a boyfriend yet, or anything?"

I said no. The last man my father had hired as a driver was always coming to the house to deliver some unimportant message, and my father said, "He just wants a chance to talk to Chrissy." I was cool to him, however, and so far he hadn't got up the nerve to ask me out.

"So you don't really know about that stuff yet?" said Queenie.

I said, "Sure I do."

"Hmm hmm," she said.

The guests at the party had eaten up nearly everything but the cake. They did not eat much of that, but Queenie wasn't offended. It was very rich, and by the time they got to it they were filled up with sausage rolls and other things. Also, it had not had time to ripen the way the book said it should, so she was just as glad to have some left over. She was thinking, before Stan pulled her away, that she should get the cake wrapped up in a wine-soaked cloth and put it in a cool place. She was either - 258*

thinking of doing that or she was actually doing it, and in the morning she saw that the cake was not on the table, so she thought she had done it. She thought, Good, the cake was put away.

A day or so later Stan said, "Let's have a piece of that cake."

She said, Oh, let it ripen a bit more, but he insisted. She went to the cupboard and then to the refrigerator, but it was not there.

She looked high and low and she could not find it. She thought back to seeing it on the table. And a memory came to her, of getting a clean cloth and soaking it in wine and wrapping it carefully around the leftover cake. And then of wrapping waxed paper around the outside of the cloth. But when had she done that? Had she done it at all or only dreamed about it? Where had she put the cake when she finished wrapping it? She tried to see herself putting it away, but her mind went blank.

She looked all through the cupboard, but she knew the cake was too big to be hidden there. Then she looked in the oven and even in insane places like her dresser drawers and under the bed and on the closet shelf. It was nowhere.

"If you put it somewhere, then it must be somewhere," Stan said.