Liberty Street (16 page)

A number of semis were parked on the shoulder across the road, and the trucks continued to stop and line up, their drivers knowing there was a roadblock ahead. It was like winter, when snow shuts down the highway. The smoke was heavy in the air, and its smell mixed with the smells of exhaust and diesel, as well as the distinct odour of a nearby pig farm.

I decided a dip in the pool was the only reasonable choice
for passing the time. I had no bathing suit with me, so I changed into lightweight shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt, wondering if the chlorine would turn my new hair green. No one else was in the pool area, which was enclosed by a chain-link fence. The metal gate squeaked as I opened it. There were a few floatation devices and paddleboards on the cement, and I selected an inflatable lounge chair and launched myself from the pool's edge to drift in the middle. The water was clear and cool, and a welcome relief from the heat and the long drive, and I wished I had a drink of some kind—a cold beer or a margarita, poolside, like in Mexico. I thought about the woman in the motel office. There was no chance that anyone was going to wait on me here.

As I floated in the pool, my legs dangling in the water, I thought about the time I appeared as the “Lost Little Mermaid” in the Yellowhead paper and lied and told my mother that it wasn't me, even though the proof—the photograph—was right there in front of me. I wanted to laugh at that impudent little girl, but there was something disturbing about the way she'd stuck to her guns. Maybe I'd missed my calling, and I should have been a hard-nosed professional gambler, or a jewel thief, or an international spy. Something more audacious than drinking-water bureaucrat.

When I saw the family with all the kids coming toward the pool, I paddled myself back to the edge and got out, refreshed. I showered and dressed, and then bought a Coke from the drink machine in front of the office. The smell of meat barbecuing came from somewhere behind the motel, and I realized I was famished.

I was sitting on the edge of the bed in my room, wondering what I could eat, when there was a knock on the door. I
answered and a little girl of seven or eight handed me a hamburger on a paper plate. She was holding several other plates as well, expertly, like a waitress.

“Mom said to bring you this,” the girl said. “There's no cafe anymore.”

I barely had time to thank the girl before she turned and went on to the next room and knocked.

I ate the hamburger, which was good, although a little charred. I watched TV for a while, and then I went to bed, even though it was still just dusk.

In the middle of the night, I woke up to the sound of a diesel truck pulling into the motel lot and parking just outside my door, and soon after a party started up in the room next to mine. I tried wrapping a pillow around my head, but it was no use. The walls were like cardboard and there was nothing I could do to block out the loud male voices and the bursts of laughter. One voice kept repeating, seemingly in response to everything said, “No way, man. No freaking way.” For some reason, I imagined the man whose voice it was sitting on top of the freezer.

At three o'clock in the morning I gave up on sleep, put my still-wet clothes in a plastic bag, left the room key on the bed, and said goodbye to the Stardust Motel, the decision made to carry on to Elliot and take my chances with the roadblock. As I left my room, I noticed that most of the transport trucks across the road had moved on. I backed the car out of the motel lot, planning to drive around the police barricade and make my way through the smoke, but both the roadblock and the smoke were gone.

Half an hour later, I was in Elliot, skirting the edge of town, passing a row of unfamiliar commercial buildings, a
sports field of some kind, a new Super 8 motel. Everything was dead quiet. I turned toward the tracks, and up ahead I could make out the white
X
of the railway crossing sign. Liberty Street was just beyond it. I crossed the tracks, the
bump-bump
of the car wheels on the rails familiar in a visceral way, and I turned right under the one light standard, which cast a glow on a faded and rusty street sign. As I drove up the dirt road to where I knew the house was, the light diminished into total blackness.

I parked in front of the house and turned off the engine. In the darkness, I could just make out the gabled roof, the window shutters that were decorative rather than functional, the little covered porch with four steps up. It was a cute house, a Beatrix Potter house. Almost nothing could be called cute in this town, at least not as I remembered it.

The only thing to do at that point was go inside, so I did. I stepped through the door that led directly into the kitchen, switched on the light, and was greeted—or rather assaulted—by the old yellow-and-chrome dining set from the farm, the one Mavis had called a dinette, and to which she had applied the term “vintage.” It had been in the farmhouse kitchen all the years of my upbringing, and we'd sat at that table every day, without fail, as my mother served us our three square meals. I remembered the respect with which we treated the chairs when we sat in them, because of the way they tipped over if you weren't careful.

Perhaps it was just exhaustion, but I felt a familiar kind of misery coming over me. It belied, I thought, that feeling of belonging I'd briefly sensed when I spoke with the farmer by the side of the road. It was the kind of misery that comes with knowing who you really are, and who you will always be.
I thought of what Ian had said about me resisting happiness. He was wrong. He had to be. You can't know what misery is without wanting its opposite.

I stood there in the little kitchen, my suitcase still in my hand, until finally I set it down. I put my hand on the back of one of the chairs and tipped it, and it fell over just as I knew it would, and I gave it a good kick. Then I righted the chair and ventured farther into the house and looked around. Everything was tidy, the furniture placed just so, and eventually I sat on the brown leather couch I'd purchased for the young teachers on Mavis's recommendation (durable, easy to clean), and I could see the chrome suite from the living room, the ghosts of the house gathered around it, illuminated by the overhead kitchen light. Uncle Vince. My father with his hands wrapped around a coffee cup. My mother, shaking her paintbrush at me. Silas Chance, reaching out to pull a nickel from behind my ear. The runaway pastor who claimed he could heal by the laying on of hands. Esme, before she was Mrs. Sullivan. The long-haired United Church minister who eventually left Elliot and moved on to a bigger parish.

I finally got up off the couch, found my purse in the kitchen, and retrieved a notepad and pen. I pulled one of the chairs from the table, carefully this time so it wouldn't tip, and sat down to write myself a list—a twelve-step plan for leaving Elliot forever, I called it—and when I was done, I attached it to the fridge door with a plastic flower magnet someone had left behind. Immediately, I changed my mind and tore it up, and got right to the point with a less complicated three-step plan that said, essentially, get to work, get the job done, and leave. Then I shooed away the ghosts and collapsed in my clothes on the double bed Mavis had readied
for me, falling into a sleep that was interrupted by a parade of disjointed thoughts and unwanted night visitors—Patsy Cline botching the lyrics to “Sweet Dreams,” Chuck from the gas station chaotically moving checkers around on the tabletop, the young girl from the Stardust Motel tripping and launching her burgers into space like flying saucers. Eventually, the uninvited guests went away, and I slept deeply and woke only when the sun was full in the morning sky.

I made my way to the bathroom, and when I pulled back the plastic curtains on the window, I saw an old camper trailer up on blocks a few lots to the west of me. Mavis hadn't mentioned a neighbour. Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised that someone else now lived on the street, but I was. The trailer had a screen porch built onto the front. There was a truck parked next to it. I let the curtains fall together again, resolving to ignore the fact that I wasn't alone on the street. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I was pleased with my hair. I examined it closely, checking for roots and dryness, and I decided I had done a pretty good job, considering.

In the kitchen, it struck me that I had nothing to eat. I discovered a half-full jar of instant coffee in a cupboard next to a pair of salt-and-pepper shakers, and I put the kettle on, prepared to make do with that because I was not yet ready to a face a trip to the grocery store. As I waited for the kettle to boil, I looked out the screen door into the sunshine, and I saw that the empty lots across the road had been fenced, and there was a herd of six or seven horses grazing. I looked up and down the street, and concluded that other than the addition of the trailer and the horses, Liberty Street was the same as it had always been. I wondered why it had been such a failure as a subdivision, but when a train approached and blew by just then, I thought I had my answer.

I noticed a pink geranium on the porch with a daddy-long-legs making its way up the side of the ceramic pot. I stepped outside to see if the plant needed water and found at my feet a disposable pie plate containing a half dozen muffins covered in plastic wrap. Mavis, I thought. Very small-towny. I happily took the plate inside, letting the screen door slam after me in its familiar way, and I sat at the table for a breakfast of coffee and muffins. They were still warm, freshly baked, delicious. I ate two. A third was tempting, but I wrapped the remaining muffins up again and put them in the fridge for later. Then I called Mavis on my still-functioning cellphone to say thank you.

She said she wasn't the one who'd delivered the muffins; she wasn't due in Elliot until the day after next.

“You should come to my yoga class,” she said. “Saturday at four o'clock in the United Church basement.” She lived in another town a half hour away but taught yoga in several nearby communities.

I ignored the invitation to her class, and I didn't believe her about the muffins. Who else could have delivered them?

“Well, anyway,” I said, “they were much appreciated, since I had nothing in the house for breakfast.” Then I said, “I see I have a neighbour.”

“An old hippie type,” Mavis said. “Lives alone. I hear he takes medicinal marijuana. Harmless, by all accounts. Keeps to himself.”

Harmless, keeps to himself—all I needed to know.

“He can smoke himself senseless,” I said, “as long as he doesn't ask me to sign any petitions.”

Mavis laughed. “Do you like the way I decorated?” she asked. “Those young teachers really wanted the house furnished. I suppose they're paying off student loans. Too bad
we didn't know you were going to sell it, but anyway, a house looks better with furniture in it. For listing purposes, I mean.”

I said I liked her decorating.

“Should I pop over before class on Saturday?” she asked. “It's up to you.”

“Maybe next week,” I said. “I have a lot to do. Lots of sorting. You know how it is—so many things no one but me would know what to do with.”

“Just let me know,” she said. “And don't forget . . . mind, body, spirit.”

“Absolutely,” I said, and we hung up.

I tried to picture Mavis, whom I had not yet met in person. Lululemon? A bright pink jacket and tight yoga pants? Maybe. You could order Lulu online, no reason to think it wouldn't have a presence in the United Church basement in Elliot. I set my phone down on the table and tried to imagine why she would deny leaving the muffins. I also wondered how long it would take me to sort through the boxes and furniture stored in the basement, and whether I could be as ruthless as I planned to be about photographs, ornaments, familiar dishes from my mother's kitchen—all the things that would say,
It's true. You didn't make your whole life up.

And I wondered how long it would take my former boss to get over her anger at my sudden resignation and call me, say something like,
Really Frances? Seriously
? Maybe she wouldn't. Maybe she would just accept my resignation, cancel my cellular account, and cut me off.

From the rest of the world, although she wouldn't know that.

S
OMETHING
F
RANCES THOUGHT
she'd never do: seek advice from a teen fashion magazine. The sixties are over, the magazine tells her, get into the swing of the new decade. Whatever that might mean in Elliot. Still, the magazine promises to guide her through high school (The Best Time of Your Life!) and help her figure out what she's doing wrong (Ten Tips for Wallflowers), and yes, any girl can become the most popular girl in the class (Losers Become Winners). An article about matching styles to your figure advises her to take off all her clothes, get naked in front of a full-length mirror, take a good long look, and be honest about (a) assets and (b) flaws. Make a list, she's told, and then circle the things on the list that she should (a) flaunt and (b) disguise. As if she would ever stand naked in front of a mirror in full daylight! Mostly, the magazine's makeover suggestions are stupid, and the fashion articles feature clothes that she'd never be able to find, even in Yellowhead. And all the models and movie stars in the pictures have long, straight hair. There's not a single picture of anyone with unruly hair like hers. The only hope she can see is for bangs. Anyone can wear bangs, according to the magazine.

The week before school starts, she convinces her mother to make her an appointment at Brenda's Beauty Salon so she can enter the next phase of her life—that is, high school—
with a new haircut. When Brenda spins her around and gives her a hand mirror so she can see her new do, she hates it. She's sure her bangs won't stay down over her eyes like that. She doesn't look a bit like, say, Goldie Hawn. Before she leaves the shop, she asks Brenda if she can work there after school, part time, doing odd jobs.

“Goodness, no,” Brenda says. “I can't afford to hire anyone. I suppose you could volunteer if you want. Sweep up hair and do laundry. That sort of thing.”

Frances says she'll think about it.

She tells her mother when she gets home, and Alice says, “That's ridiculous. Of course you're not going to work for nothing for Brenda Schuman when we can't get a lick of work out of you here. Besides, do you want to end up a hairdresser, for heaven's sake?”

“I wouldn't mind,” Frances says.

That look, which is becoming more and more familiar: horrified.

Her mother's contributions to Frances's launch into high school are a warning and two new firm-support bras ordered from the catalogue. As she hands Frances the bras to try on—which Frances refuses to do in front of her—she says, “Pants-chasing is a sure sign of weak character in a girl.” Frances looks at the boxes the bras came in and says, “No one wears this kind anymore,” and her mother says, “Well, there'll be no
braless look
in this house, so you may as well make sure they fit.”

It's determined by an exchange through Frances's closed bedroom door that Alice has ordered the right size, and when Frances comes out of the bedroom, Alice says, “Pants-chasing gets you starry-eyed blind over one boy after
another until you find yourself in trouble and married to someone with a grade ten education and a wandering interest in women that isn't put to rest just because he's signed a marriage certificate—a piece of paper he can barely read.”

“Whew,” Frances says. “How long did you practise saying that?”

“It's true,” her mother says. “Believe me. I come from the pants-chasing capital of England, maybe the Commonwealth.”

“Why not go for the world?” Frances says. Then she says, “I look like Marilyn Monroe in these bras, at least from the neck down. I thought you wanted to scare boys away.”

Two weeks into school, she does get a phone call from a boy. His name is Mark, and he asks her if she wants to go to the freshie dance with him. She stretches the phone cord as far as it will go and turns away from her mother, who is peeling potatoes for supper, and says, “
Who
did you say this is?”

“Mark,” he says again. “Social studies. You know.”

She does know. Mark from another town, not a boy she went to elementary school with.

“I guess I could,” she says, in spite of herself, and Mark says, “Okay, then. You can tell me at school where you live,” and he hangs up. As she places the receiver back on its cradle, she feels just a little bit pleased that she must not be a complete social loser, although now she's going to have to
go
to the dance with a boy she doesn't even know.

“Who was that?” her mother asks.

“No one,” says Frances. “Just a boy.”

“A boy? What did he want?”

“He wants me to go to the freshie dance with him,” she says. “You don't know him. He's new this year.”

“Did I hear you saying yes?” her mother asks.

“Why would I say no?” Frances says. “And before you start lecturing about pants-chasing, it's not pants-chasing when the boy phones you. Plus he's my own age, and it's a school dance.
School
dance, get it? Teachers will be there, ruining everyone's fun.”

“Don't get your shirt in a knot,” Alice says. “I don't have anything against school dances.”

She buys Frances a new dress from the catalogue. Frances tries it on when it comes, just in time, and hopes for a big payoff—that is, that her status at school will be elevated when she shows up in the gymnasium with a date. There'd better be a big payoff, she thinks, because the closer it gets to the Friday of the dance, the more she wishes she'd said no.

The day of the dance, Mark bumps her shoulder as they pass in the hallway and says, “I'll pick you up at seven. I found out where you live, so.” Then the president of the student council comes on the intercom to remind everyone about the rules—
no smoking, no drinking, no hard heels in the gym
—and Frances feels an unexpected rush of excitement when she thinks, I, Frances Moon, am going to the dance with a boy named Mark. She wonders if he'll kiss her when he takes her home afterward, and she's curious about how that happens, how the first move is made. She assumes it will all be up to him.

She also assumes one of Mark's parents will pick her up, but the driver of the truck that pulls into the yard is an older boy whom she recognizes from the hallways at school. Mark gets out of the cab so she can get in and sit in the middle; the driver doesn't say anything, and she isn't introduced. As Frances glances sideways at Mark before he pulls the door
closed and the dome light goes off, she thinks he looks too polished and shiny, as though his mother had scrubbed him down. She knows she should forgive him for that, but he's wearing a red shirt, as bright as a fire engine.

Halfway to town he pulls a mickey of vodka out of the glovebox and offers her some, and then takes a swig himself when she shakes her head.

“It's okay,” he says. “They can't smell vodka on your breath.” He passes the bottle across her to the driver.

At the dance, in a gym decorated with streamers made from blue and yellow crepe paper—the school colours—Frances can feel (and she's sure she isn't imagining this) all eyes on her.
What is Frances Moon doing at a dance? And oh my God, look who she's with—and get a look at that shirt
! Frances follows Mark, her date, trying to be invisible, but how can that happen when you're with someone in a red shirt, wishing you'd just said no when he called, and
why did he have to wear that shirt
? The older boy, the driver, has disappeared.

The band is from Yellowhead—the Wild Things—and they're too loud. Mark keeps asking her questions—shouting in her ear—things like, “What do you do for fun, anyway?” to which she has no answer. When he asks, “Do you want to dance?” she nods her head, even though she doesn't know how. She has a vague recollection of her mother offering to teach her, Frances rolling her eyes because what would her mother know about dancing? She steps her way through the song, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, trying to figure out what to do with her arms, but she feels as though everyone is watching her—
oh my God, look at Frances Moon dancing
—and when it's over, she walks off the dance floor with Mark following.

“Don't you like dancing?” he asks, and she says, “Not really.”

“What should we do, then? Do you want to go sit in the parking lot for a while, in the truck?”

She knows the mickey is in the truck, and she doesn't want him drinking any more of that. And why is he asking her what they should do? How should she know? He keeps trying to touch her, slip his arm around her shoulder, tug her toward the dance floor again, brush her hair with his hand. Why? Why is he acting as though they're going steady or something? There's that other thing boys do—“feel you up,” she's heard the girls at school talking. Is that what this is about? He wants to feel her up? He keeps talking about the truck, how they should go out and sit in the truck. All she can think to say in response is “I heard that's against the rules,” and then more questions, and she wants to shout, “I don't know! How am I supposed to know what we should do?” but her voice closes up on her and eventually she can't manage anything, not even a polite “No, thank you” when he asks her if she wants a Coke. All she can do is shake her head.

Finally the band takes a break and Mark says, “What's the matter with you, anyway?” and he goes into a sulk, and then he leaves her alone and finds some older boys to hang out with—the driver among them—and she sits by herself on one of the chairs lined up along the gym wall. All eyes are definitely on her now. Has Frances Moon been jilted by the boy in the red shirt? She thinks about what he'd said—“What's the matter with you?”—and begins to get mad.

When Mark comes back, he asks her if she can call her dad and get him to pick her up so his brother (
he hadn't even told her the other boy was his brother
) doesn't have to drive all
the way out to the dairy farm to take her home. Frances has been sitting by herself for half an hour, and by this time she is furious and no longer cares what people think, especially not Mark from some hick town without even its own high school. She finds her voice, and stands up and says, “Of course my dad can't pick me up. He's blind.” Which isn't completely true, but he never drives to town anymore. Fucking idiot, she thinks as she heads for the payphone in the hallway outside the gym. “Fuck” is a word she has never said, but now she knows what it's for. Myrna Samples and another girl from her grade are standing at the entrance to the gym under a drooping valance of streamers. Frances glares at them
—What the fuck are you looking at
?—and they step aside.

Naturally, Frances's mother peppers her with questions when she pulls up in front of the school and Frances gets into the car.

“At least tell me if you had a good time,” Alice says.

Frances gives her the most disdainful look she can manage and says, “Do I look like I had a good time? Would I be calling for a ride home if I was having a good time?”

“Oh, dear.”

“It was the worst night of my life. I hate the whole idea of a stupid dance and a student council and stupid school colours. What a bunch of idiots. I will never go to another school dance. Ever. I swear. Don't even call me to the phone if another boy gets it into his head to invite me. Not that one will. Anyway, that's that. The dating phase of my life is over, and I don't want to talk about it. Ever. Again.”

Frances's mother says, “At least I won't have to worry about you running off and eloping before you get that education.”

“I don't know what education you're talking about,” Frances says. “And you don't have to sound so pleased, and God, I wish just for once that you'd quit harping.”

At home in her room, she hangs up the new dress, which she likes. It's navy blue with a white collar, and it's short. Her mother had thought it was too short. She looks at the dress on its hanger and decides to wear it—her failure—to school on Monday, just to show Mark Whatever-his-name-is that she didn't get the dress just for him, and to show everyone else that in her opinion, school dances are nothing special.

It's sort of true, since they are regular occurrences. There's another one for Hallowe'en, one before Christmas holidays, and a few more before the year is done. Valentine's Day is a big one. It seems as if the student president is always on the intercom with his “no drinking, no smoking” warning. Whenever she hears him, she thinks about Mark and his mickey of vodka. She'd like to tell a teacher what goes on in the parking lot, but she knows what the consequences of that would be.

True to her word, she doesn't even think about going to another dance.

Also true: no one asks.

W
HEN
F
RANCES HITS
grade ten, her mother insists that she make supper once a week. She tries macaroni and cheese, but it looks more like day-old porridge. (How
much flour did you use? A cup? Surely not.
) Her mother says, “Even a career woman needs to know how to cook.” It sounds like the closing statement in a debate, and Frances is driven to point out the contradiction in her mother's logic, mainly to be argumentative, and says that an educated woman—the
kind her mother admires so much—might not want to get married at all.

“And hypothetically,” Frances says, “a career woman might earn enough money that she wouldn't have to cook. She could eat in restaurants. She could eat Kentucky Fried Chicken every day if she wanted.” Kentucky Fried Chicken is now the holy grail of food to Frances. It has replaced Teen Burgers as her meal of choice when they go to Yellowhead.

“What kind of job would earn you enough money for that?” her mother asks.

Oh, her mother is so obvious, seizing on the fact that higher earnings—the ones that buy you Kentucky Fried Chicken—result from higher education. Even the word “career” coming from Frances's mouth is, to her mother, an opening.