Finding My Own Way (3 page)

It was only later, when I lived with her in Toronto that I discovered that Irene's love of the dance far outweighed her talent. Her dream of becoming a member of the
corps de ballet
had never been realized. The job at the sewing machine shop paid her bills, and it also paid the rent on an empty room in a house downtown, where she gave weekly ballet lessons to a group of children.

Sure that exposure to the ballet was a major thing that had been missing from my life at Pinkney Corners, Irene kept asking me to accompany her to a class, which these days she took only when she could afford it. Finally, one Tuesday evening, for lack of anything else to do, I agreed.

I learned when we arrived that I'd have to stay in the ladies' change room while the class was in session. “But just to see the members of the company, absorb the atmosphere, will be a thrill for you,” Irene assured me.

I sat hunched under the coat hooks, glad I'd brought my book along. I kept having to move as people came and went. Eventually, I joined a pimply-faced girl seated on an end bench under the window, darning the toes of her pointe shoes, waiting for the next class. She had holes in the sweater that was knotted beneath her small breasts and holes in the heavy wool socks that stopped short of the top of her legs. From the next room came the creak of the rosin, the gentle thump of the landings, the shrill voice of the ballet mistress, and the faltering piano.

Irene rejoined me an hour later, beaming happily, her round face red and perspiring. “Isn't it wonderful, Libby? Are you enjoying yourself? Oh, I'm exhausted!” She pulled a towel out of her small suitcase and slung it around her neck. “I'll be right back,” she promised and scampered off.

She returned in her underwear and got into her street clothes, pausing every now and then to do a little dance step, muttering, “Glissade, balancé. Isn't that music wonderful? They're doing
Coppelia
next season, you know. We'll have to save our pennies to see it, Libby. It's delightful.”

I didn't go to the studio again after that, but I did accompany Irene downtown whenever I could. That was where I made one of my most pleasant discoveries since moving to Toronto—a public library within walking distance of the bus stop.

I spent many blissful hours there, lost in the world of books. I knew this was a good library as soon as I found my mother's books, everyone one of them, listed in the card catalogue. “Quincy-Newton, Alexandra.”

I started borrowing the books, although I'd read them all before. Here were the characters that had peopled my life when I was growing up. It was like finding old friends after a long time apart.

There was Laura Hill, the adventurous girl who lived with her widowed father, a retired private investigator who was always willing to give her advice on her latest “case”. There was the father's maiden aunt Caroline who lived with them and looked after domestic duties; Laura's best friends the twins, Ruth and Reilly, who helped solve each mystery; and loveable but clumsy Spud, whose role it was in every story to muddy the waters. And there was everyone's nemesis, Byron DeLisle III, the arrogant rich boy who made things difficult for the other four. Nothing had changed; they all still lived between the covers of my mother's books.

Irene came to stay in Pinkney Corners during Alex's final illness and stayed on for a week after the funeral. When the service was over, I went down to the river's edge to escape the people who filled the little house and trampled the grass and nibbled the sandwiches Irene and my best friend's mother had prepared. That was where Mr. Thomas, the man who owned the paper in Pinkney Corners and who had given Alex her first job, found me.

“Are you going to be okay, Elizabeth?” he asked, hitching up the knees of his trousers and squatting on the grassy bank beside me.

I tossed the stick I'd been breaking into little pieces into the water. “I'm going to live with Irene in Toronto,” I said. It didn't really answer his question.

“If you need anything, a little extra cash, someone to come and check on the house for you, Marge and I would really like to help.”

I nodded. Our neighbours, the McIntyres, were going to check on the house. We remained in silence for a few moments, watching the river. William Thomas was a nice man, but he couldn't help me now. No one could. Grief, like a sickness, consumed me. It was there, waiting, the minute I opened my eyes each morning, and I fell asleep choking on it every night.

“Oh, there you are, William.” Marjory Thomas came down the slope towards us. Her husband stood up awkwardly.

“Libby, dear,” Marjory gasped, her kind face damp from the unusual mid-September heat. “People are
leaving. Do you want to come up, or shall I tell them you'd rather be alone?”

“I'm coming,” I said, brushing off my skirt and tucking in my blouse.

“Do you like to write, Elizabeth?” William Thomas inquired as the three of us made our way back up to the house.

“Write?” I asked, surprised, as if he'd asked me if I liked to eat worms. “I suppose. My teachers all figure I should get better marks in composition because of, you know.” I couldn't say her name; it hurt too much.

“What I was going to suggest was that you try writing about what you're feeling.”

I watched my shoes moving relentlessly forward. Left, right; left, right. Write about this pain that's like a knife in my heart, I thought? The hurt I can't get away from?

“Maybe it's a bit too soon, William,” Marjory cautioned, tottering in her high heels over the bumpy back yard.

“Perhaps,” the man admitted, softly. “But when you can, Elizabeth. Write about what you are experiencing.” He meant well. Everyone did, I suppose.

The day came when it was time for Irene and me to leave. Arrangements had been made to take my dog up the road to the McIntyres' farm, where he would start a new life. We locked up the little house, and I got into the back seat of the car Irene had borrowed from a boyfriend, where I could sit with my arm around Ernie. His hairy sides heaving, Ernie put his head out the window and let his lips flap in the wind, spraying saliva back over me. I didn't even care. I wished I could be a
big, stupid dog and not know what this was all about.

Leaving Ernie was the second worst thing that had ever happened to me, and although the dog couldn't understand, I told him I'd be back for him someday, and that we'd go home again. I looked back only once and saw him sitting in the road between the farm couple, watching me drive away without him.

As it happened, I did take William Thomas' advice about writing, and as the weeks dropped away in my new home, I filled the back of half a dozen old school scribblers with my agony. Eight months later, I was still writing. Once the anger had died down and the pain had become less acute, the writing reflected the way I felt about being an outsider at the high school I went to in Toronto.

Twelve hundred students, half the population of Pinkney Corners, attended the school the year I was there. I felt crushed by the mass of people moving from class to class every forty minutes. I had to take a crowded bus to get to school and to return to Irene's late in the afternoon. A city bus, not a friendly, yellow school bus.

The cement schoolyard had a way of spilling over to the plaza on the other side of the street, so you never knew whether the smokers who lounged against the bars on the storefront windows were students or not.

I had come from Pinkney Corners late in September, when the school year had already begun. Stepping down off the bus the first morning, I tried to catch up with a girl who had been sitting in the seat ahead of me. “Hi,”
I said, galloping to keep up with her. “We came on the same bus. Do you live on Kingston Road too?”

She carried her books like armour against her chest, wrapping her arms around them. “No,” she said.

“Oh. I just figured you did, seeing as you and I were on the same bus.”

The girl looked at me from under pencilled eyebrows, as if I was a Martian. All I wanted was for her to walk across the pavement and into the school with me.

“Could you show me where the office is?” I pleaded. She didn't even have to talk to me if she didn't want to, as long as it looked as if we were together. I hated being this needy.

Every day that week it was the same: walking quickly to catch up with her. Every day hoping Marlene (that was her name, I discovered) would wait for me when she got off the bus.

Finally, on Friday, when I boarded the bus on the corner of Irene's block, the seat beside Marlene was empty. But she was gazing fixedly out the window. She had to have seen me waiting on the curb. Losing my nerve, I dropped onto the seat behind her. “Hi, Marlene,” I said.

“Oh, hi!” Pretending to be surprised.

At school, I let myself be swept along as the wave of students moved down the hall to the next class, wishing I'd known saddle shoes were out of style here and something called white bucks were in, and knowing it wouldn't have made any difference anyway.

Somehow I got through those first few weeks at school, keeping to myself, concentrating on my studies,
and filling page after page of my journal. Gradually, I took on what I considered to be the persona of a writer, aloof and mysterious. It made me feel protected, as if I'd chosen my isolation. I took to wearing my curly, red hair stuffed into a black beret, and I wrapped myself in one of my aunt's voluminous capes. I knew that some people already thought I was rather strange.

After I joined the literary club (they were anxiously recruiting new members and seemed to have few takers) I made some friends among those students who shared my interest in reading and writing. When the head of the English department learned that my mother had been a writer, he persuaded me to sign up for the yearbook committee. I spent hour after hour editing submissions, arranging for photos, collecting advertisements, cutting and pasting and preparing the final layout. I had found my niche. I imagined Alex performing many of these same tasks when she first started at the newspaper.

The day our yearbook committee of six turned everything over to the printer downtown, we cut afternoon classes and went to see a Sal Mineo movie, as if we were part of the popular crowd. It was the most fun I'd had since leaving Pinkney Corners.