They are familiar and comfortable clothes, and she has not had to think about them. But now she sees that everything she owns is for a different Sidonie, one who at that moment has ceased to exist. Nothing, not her pajamas, not her underwear, not her saddle shoes or little cotton socks, is anything that her new self would have chosen.
And all because of an invitation to a nightclub.
It is not until she is much older that Sidonie understands that most people do not become someone new overnight; do not transform with the flip of a mental switch, and that others find her proclivity for instant transformation disturbing. And she is to do it more than once in her life.
She has an instant conviction that she must go out and buy new clothes, and that the clothes she wants will not come from Mother's sewing machine, or from Ogilvy's. Where will she find them? She will discover this. It will be a research project. In the meantime, it occurs to her that the other girls in her dorm borrow clothes from each other on a regular basis. It seems to be an accepted transaction, though she has never participated in it.
She opens the door to the lounge, announces: “I need something straight and black to wear, right now.”
The other girls, who are playing records, eating popcorn, and painting their nails, as usual, on a late Saturday afternoon, freeze and stare at her. Then one of them says, “Woo-hoo, Sidonie!” and before she can escape, she is swept up and showered with garments; someone is pulling out her pinned-up braids, sweeping her hair into a ponytail; someone else is pulling a sweater over her head. In some odd way, she has become accepted, temporarily, into their society, but she must endure a ritual cleansing and robing, she thinks.
The girls buff and comb her and urge her to climb into different articles of clothing, most of which are too wide and short, but eventually they are satisfied, and lead her to a mirror. Sidonie examines herself dispassionately; she has not yet become comfortable with her own reflection, and must look at herself, still, as a compilation of angles and planes. But what she sees pleases her; she has become something sleeker, harder. A package. She has on someone's tight black sweater, and someone else's black pencil skirt, nylons, and makeup, but the final effect is of a dark, sine-curved column with striking horizontal marks â dark-lashed eyes and brows and glossy red lips.
And then she looks again, and is reminded of Alice. Though her eyes and hair are dark, she has somehow grown Alice's cheekbones and brow and oval jaw. How has that happened? She has a nasty feeling that Alice wouldn't like it, would be quite annoyed. But Alice is a long way away. And strangely, she understands something about Alice now. She has put on this understanding with Alice's image. It is this: that Alice has always been in disguise, as Sidonie is now. That it is a useful thing to be in disguise, to assume this sort of protective shell. Sidonie has eschewed artifice, feeling ashamed to attempt it, seeing it as a kind of weakness to be seen attempting beauty. But it is her own raw naked self that she has endangered by doing that. Now she sees that in creating this new image of herself, she has become invulnerable in some way. She remembers that when she was young, she used to see Alice as a seed pod: the brittle exterior, the silky threads inside. She feels some sort of surprise or wonder: she has created in her own mind a sense of Alice as being dry, cool, through to her core. Now she must adjust that image she carries, that sensation.
And inside herself, she feels the new Sidonie start to take form, with not a little contribution from Alice. She feels her edginess still, feels her strangled tongue grow quick, sardonic. Her bones and sinews, her very cells, seem to line up differently.
The other girls are pleased with their achievement. One of them says, “You're really quite pretty, Sidonie,” with obvious surprise, and another says, “You look like Elizabeth Taylor in
Cleopatra
. Doesn't she look just like Elizabeth Taylor?” And they all agree she does.
That is how she goes out to meet Clara. And Adam.
It is dark in the club, and Sidonie doesn't take in much about her companions: it's too loud to talk, also. The jazz, she opens herself to (though the cool Alice-shell remains intact; she is still, she is aware of her outer body); it is both the inspiration and detail of her new self, filling out the sketch that she has glimpsed earlier in the evening the way blood pumps through the wings of an adult insect emerging from its nymph state. Imago. The jazz, the little table where she sits with Clara and Anita and Adam, the drink (gin and tonic; horribly, excitingly bitter, but the only mixed drink she'd been able to think of when asked), the low, coloured lights, the smoky atmosphere â they all become her new tissues.
The music says: I am floating apart from the confusion around me. I am seeing and appreciating it and keeping my distance from it. I am a little sad and detached, but surprised or agitated by nothing. I am ordering the world: this room, the wet pavement outside, the neon lights, the red leaves in the park: they all have their place. I am ordering sadness and happiness, tipping them slightly on their edges, spinning them like schnapps glasses. All of the world: the rows of apple trees, the moody lake, Mother's relentless polishing and preserving, Father's weary, calm immersion in whatever space he is in, Alice's cool silky smoothness, the black sewing machine, the battalion of bottled golden peach quarters, Mr. Defoe's hard hurting hands, the sheen of Masao's brown back, Mrs. Inglis's hats and her plummy voice and gee and tee: all of those things are ordered inside me, part of me but not part of me, all winding through their own variations. And calculus and past subjunctive and Dr. Leavis and Dr. Skinner, and all of their ideas, they are lining up to put out their little solos, and it is all about a pattern, and the pattern plays and changes and winds back through itself, but it is only pattern.
She is transformed. It is not to last; the old anxieties and muteness will break through. But she is transformed enough that some of this new vision of self will remain, enough to javelin her, improbably, with amazing luck, into another life, one in which she can expand and bloom; one imminently suited to her oddities, her hybrid culture. Though there is a cost, of course.
A man walks up
to her on the path between the Arts building and the Leacock building. He says hello, and ducks under her umbrella. He has dark hair, longer in front, dark eyes, is perhaps in his early thirties. He is also very thin, and walks in an unusual way, as if his arms and legs were too long, too delicate, to bear weight. He holds his head slightly inclined, too. Everything about him, in fact, forms a series of graceful sine curves. But he looks familiar. A prof?
“Adam St. Regis,” he says. “We went to the Yellow Door last weekend.”
Clara's brother, of course. The new Sidonie doesn't grin in recognition, however, but makes a little inclination of her head, a small laugh at herself. “Out of context,” she says.
“Yes!” Clara's brother says, “I always find that too.”
Sidonie has seen Clara twice at the pool since Saturday. She notices the resemblance between Clara and her brother. “Where are you off to?” he asks, and for a moment she can't remember, so happy is she to be reminded of Clara.
So it is Clara who is her first friend, and Anita and Adam only Clara's siblings, who often come along on outings, who are at the apartment when Clara takes Sidonie home. But Sidonie adapts to them all with delight. Her new self grows niches in which to absorb and respond to the St. Regis life: the food, the topics of conversation, the tone, the jokes, the habits of concerts and reading and walks on the mountain. All, she thinks, new experiences, though looking back, decades later, she can see that it was a only a slight adaptation she was making, that she had been bred very nearly for this life, even in that far-flung community of Marshall's Landing. Father's gramophone, Mother's Royal Family scrapbook, the omnipresence of the orchard, the Inglises' brand of Britishness, the prim dry Scottishness of Mr. Ramsay and Miss Dobie, the accents and cabbage-roll domesticity and serious Schubert addictions of the Schillers: all of these had been a sort of primordial soup in which she had become a suitable addition to a family like the St. Regises.
But at the time, it had seemed miraculous: her adaptability, their acceptance.
She is persuaded to bring her violin to Sunday dinners at the house on Clarke, and she and Adam play a duet, Clara accompanying them on the piano. Sidonie thinks about how much Mother would like to see this: how to Mother it would be the epitome of Culture. She writes about it in one of her brief, infrequent, laborious letters home, trying, for once, to choose the detail that will convey this image to Mother, both precisely and accurately. (Why does she feel the need to show off to Mother, to gain her approval, at this point of rebirth? She doesn't know.)
Perhaps she is practicing her new voice.
Clara played the piano, while her brother and I attempted a violin
duet
.
We were all very serious, until Clara's mother mercifully interrupted
us with the tea-tray
.
Who is speaking in these letters? A different Sidonie, one who has transformed herself into the sort of magazine that Mother might like to read.
But there is another story, one that she doesn't tell.
The day Adam ducks under her umbrella, he invites her to lunch at the faculty club. It is a dull, wet Friday in early October. Clara and Sidonie were supposed to go shopping after their morning classes, but Clara has a bad cold. She has suggested that Sidonie go look at the exhibit in the Redpath, instead. And that is where Adam finds her. Had Clara arranged this? Probably, though it wouldn't have occurred to Sidonie, at the time, to wonder.
At lunch, Adam seems nervous. Sidonie has not yet formed much of an impression of him, except that he is quiet, that he listens to and trades witticisms with his sisters, especially with Clara, as if they were equals, something that in her experience boys or young men are not likely to do. She has learned that he plays the violin, as she does. She had thought at first that he was a musician, but, in fact, he is a professor of architecture. And driving home that Saturday night, she'd sat in the front, and they'd talked about turnover in lakes. He had that sort of detached politeness that reminded her of Graham and Hugh Inglis; a sort of suit through which it was hard to see.
Today, he stammers a little, seems to be sweating. Perhaps it's because students aren't really supposed to be in the faculty club, Sidonie surmises. She is also perhaps unsuitably dressed. She hasn't had time yet to hunt down the sort of clothes she has envisioned for herself, and yet her old wardrobe seems unsupportable â and so she is wearing (and Adam wouldn't have been able to see this until she took off her raincoat) a boy's rugby jersey, striped in olive and cream, a short pleated skirt in rust-coloured Harris tweed, and marigold tights, all borrowed in a forage through her dormitory mates' closets. She likes the abstract effect of the colours and lines of the clothes; up close, she has to admit, they might seem strange.
She says, “Should I keep my coat on? I'm afraid that I'm inappropriately dressed.” But Adam says, emphatically, that she isn't.
She asks for eggs and bacon (she has missed breakfast, as usual). Adam orders soup and a clubhouse for himself, but hardly eats. It's warm in the faculty club, and the leather chairs and oak tables gleam comfortingly, substantially. The food is a pleasant weight in her stomach. It is almost as nice as being with Clara. But the new Sidonie, self-aware, remembers to smile pleasantly at Adam and to ask him if he liked the Sibelius piece at the concert the evening before. She knows he goes to these â Clara has mentioned it â but Clara had been ill and Sidonie had not thought to look for Adam.
They discuss Sibelius.
Adam says, “Do you like Italian food?”
“I don't know,” Sidonie says. “I've only ever eaten the Marshall Landing version of spaghetti, which has Campbell's tomato soup in it. I doubt that's the real thing.”
Adam laughs. He says he knows a little place off St. Denis that's supposed to be good. Would she like to try it? What about tomorrow night?
“Do you think Clara will be up to it?” Sidonie asks.
“I thought just the two of us,” Adam says. His voice is odd. Skittish, she would say.
It isn't until Sidonie is getting dressed the next evening that it occurs to her that she has been asked on a date. She has spent Saturday shopping for clothes â an annoying activity, she thinks, when she could have used the time to do homework â except for discovering the St. Laurent discount stores â and has come back with a sleeveless black shift and black tights, new leather boots with Cuban heels (she'll have to go without new books for a month to pay for them) and a long string of improbable, large imitation pearls with a golden cast. One of the girls â Judy? Jenny? She can never tell them all apart â offers to help her with her hair. A chignon, says the girl. Think Audrey Hepburn. It requires a lot of pins, but the effect is correct, Sidonie sees.
“Is it a date?” the girl asks.
“I don't think so,” Sidonie says. “Older brother of a friend.”
“Is he handsome? Single?”
“Those are irrelevant questions,” Sidonie says. She means it humorously, but the old, brusque Sidonie has emerged, and the girl is offended.
“Is he interested in you or not?” she snaps.
She did not know, but it became apparent quite quickly that the dinner was meant to steer their relationship down a specific path. When their engagement is announced in December, people keep remarking to Sidonie, “That was a quick courtship,” or some version of that idea. Sidonie thinks that if anyone knew really how quick it had been, they would have been quite shocked. It is a matter of minutes, from the moment she realizes that Adam has asked her on a date, to the time it takes her to finish getting dressed, gather her coat and handbag, and walk downstairs to the lobby to wait for the car, her mind opens to, accepts, embraces the idea of Adam as her lover.