Liberty Street (25 page)

For the first time she sees his side of it, and she understands that he hates her. She tries to say sorry, thinks she might even
be
sorry now that she's safe at home again, but then he leans toward her, his whiskered face just inches from hers, and says, “One more thing. Forget about that cap. Don't go spreading lies if you know what's good for you. You don't want to mess with Saul's bunch.”

She steps back, alarmed. It was a threat.
You don't want to mess with Saul's bunch.
She remembers the way Saul and Ginny had stared at her the night of the party. Joe Fletcher has just warned her that something terrible will happen to her if she ever mentions the cap.

All she can think is,
Stupid, stupid Frances Moon.
And then, not even that, because Moon is not her name anymore.

After Joe is gone, she sits down on one of her boxes and waits. The sand candle is still in her lap. She sits on the box and waits until the milk truck pulls into the yard and drives slowly past her.

Shortly after that, her mother comes running.

T
HIS
,
DELIVERED BY
her mother as a command: “Forget it. Everything. The marriage, the wedding, Joe Fletcher. Just thank your lucky stars that you got out of there. From this day forward, it didn't happen.” Frances spends the first week of her return home lying on her bed and thinking about those words,
It didn't happen.
She tries to think of them as a pardon for the mistake of the marriage. Most days, she sleeps all afternoon, and when she wakes up and smells supper cooking, she goes to the kitchen and they eat together, the Moon family, but they don't speak. It's as though they're all too fragile for conversation. Her parents are relieved—she knows it—but their relief is not joyful. The three of them are traumatized, like people who have stepped out of a bomb shelter and found themselves at a dinner table with the walls around them blown apart.

Her mother returns the wedding gifts as Frances thought she would, even the dishes. All but the candle, which Frances says she wants to keep. She thinks of it more as a friendship present than a wedding gift.

“We'll get a divorce,” Alice says, but the word “divorce” is as bad as the word “marriage” to Frances, and she says, “It didn't happen, remember? That's what you said.” Her mother says they should at least get her name changed back to Moon—some government department called vital statistics does that—and Frances beseeches her to stop, please
stop talking about it, stop reminding her of what a disaster her life is.

Her mother says, “At some point, Frances, you are going to want a divorce. You have to face that.”

“It didn't happen,” she says again, and her mother lets it go for the time being.

Myrna Samples comes to see her. They should drive to Yellowhead, she says, go shopping, check out the clothes in the Sally Shoppe, the new fall shoes in the Bata store. Frances agrees to go, but she has no enthusiasm for the things Myrna holds up and suggests she try on. Wide-leg jeans. Shoes with big block heels. A red corduroy jacket with little flowers embroidered on the collar. “This would look super fabulous on you,” Myrna says about the jacket, and Frances says, “I don't know. Red hair. You should try it on. It would look better on you.” Myrna does try it on, and she buys it. Frances doesn't buy anything. She's such bad company. They go into a new record store that Myrna has heard also sells hash pipes, but Frances leaves right away when she sees the pipes under the counter, afraid the police will come and arrest them along with the hippie owner. It starts to snow and they decide they'd better head home before the road blows in. By the end of the day, as they approach Elliot, Frances knows they can't be friends. She can't be anyone's friend.

When they pull into the yard at the dairy farm, Myrna says, “Isn't that Joe's new truck?”

Frances looks. It is Joe's copper-and-white truck, parked in front of her father's shop. She panics. She tells Myrna to turn the car around and take her the hell out of there, which Myrna is about to do when Frances's mother comes out waving her arms for them to stop and says, “Don't worry, he's gone.”

Frances gets out of the car and Myrna drives away, and Frances asks, “What's his truck doing here?”

Her mother says, “Apparently, it's your father's truck now. I'm so mad I could spit.” It turns out that Basie had bought the truck for Joe without telling Alice. As a wedding present, he said, because he didn't want his only daughter running around the country in a rusty old truck. Joe had returned the truck while Frances was in Yellowhead.

Within the week, the truck is sold and gone from the yard.

And then Frances asks her mother if it's too late for her to tell the university that she'd like to attend after all, and her mother immediately looks into it, not even trying to conceal her excitement, and finds that it isn't too late. The school is on a semester system and Frances can start after Christmas.

She will put in her time, then, Frances thinks. Endure the next few months, push aside the fear she feels whenever a vehicle passes on the road. She sees her move to the city as her best option—exile, escape to the place where a lesser mistake was made years before, the simple mistake of not locking car doors against petty criminals.

She burns the sand candle in her room until the wax caves in on itself, and then she throws it out.

She tries the guitar again, figures out three chords, and is astounded by how much her fingers hurt.
This is the bed I made for myself
, she thinks,
the price of what happened not happening.

She tries, for her mother's sake, to show some interest in her own life.

The falsehood of her compliance: that she has finally come to her senses.

H
ER PARENTS FIGHT
when they think Frances isn't listening. Her mother brings up the truck over and over. How could Basie have done that, bought the truck without telling her? She keeps harping at him. Maybe, she says, that was Joe Fletcher's plan all along—to marry Frances, an only child, and end up with a profitable farm instead of that liability he owns in the bush. Basie played right into his hands, she says, by buying him that new truck. Basie listens, or doesn't listen, until he says something like, “Judas Priest, give it a rest.” Frances thinks that she caused this; she brought this discord into the house. She worries that her father doesn't care about her anymore. He's hardly spoken a word to her since she left Joe Fletcher.

Then finally, finally, on the morning she is to embark on her new life, he says something that expresses at least the possibility that he cares what happens to her. At the breakfast table, he says to Alice, “You're sure about this room you've rented—that it's a proper family she's moving in with?”

“I'm sure,” Alice says. “I've spoken to them on the phone. Several times, in fact.”

“Maybe I should be coming along,” he says.

Frances wants him to come, but Alice says it's not necessary. She needs to stay overnight to get Frances sorted, and
there's too much to do on the farm for them both to be away.

When Basie says, “You be careful in that city,” it's clear what he's getting at.

“Phhft,” Alice says, dismissing his concern, but Frances doesn't trust that
phhft.

An hour later, after the car is packed and they're about to walk out the door, Frances turns back to her father, who is still sitting at the table, a cup of coffee in front of him, and she says, “Hey, Dad, how did the blind man meet his wife?”

He doesn't answer at first, and then he says, simply, “That old joke.” As though the days of jokes are over.

Once they're on the road, Frances watches her mother pretending: that she isn't worried Frances will change her mind and come running home to Elliot; that she's not afraid to be on her way back to the city where she'd once been carjacked; that she doesn't care about the snow that's beginning to fall, even though it's windy and the visibility is reduced. Alice says, “What's a little drifting snow? We're used to that, are we not? Say something, Frances. Are we not used to drifting snow?”

“Yes,” Frances says. “We are.”

Everything grows white with new snow. Tammy Wynette is on the radio, singing that sad old song about the woman following her man to Utah and Texas and Alaska. The landscape is a blur of passing fence posts, and Frances can't stop looking at them. She tries to focus on one fence post, but they're passing too quickly. The snow lets up once they're on the other side of Yellowhead. Thankfully, the wind has also died down. If it were still blowing, they wouldn't be able to see a thing.

Frances looks out at the white world, the ditches level
with the roadway, hay bales and sheds and machinery obscured by mounds of white, and says, “I wonder if we'll know when we pass the place where we stopped the car when Tobias died.”

“I wouldn't have a clue,” her mother says. “But we're not going to ruin the day by talking about that, are we?”

Frances goes back to staring at passing fence posts. Every so often they pass one with a magpie sitting on it. She thinks about the way she'd left her father, sitting with his coffee at the kitchen table. She feels convinced that he's given up on her.

When they reach the city, Frances tries to pick out the strip mall where they'd been carjacked. As they pass a familiar-looking convenience store, Frances sees her mother looking at it, thinking the same thing she is, but Alice says, “Keep your eyes open for our turn. The third set of lights. Here's the first.”

They follow the instructions they've been given and find the address they're looking for, the downtown home of a Greek family with a one-room furnished suite for rent in their third-storey attic (her mother calls it a flat). After Frances's belongings and Alice's white overnight case are inside and up the stairs, Alice is desperate for a cup of tea. She pulls a little container of teabags out of her purse, makes tea in an aluminum pot, and drinks it without milk. Then she finds the landlord and asks him to draw a map of the route from the house to the university campus, and they drive there with Frances navigating. They find the business office, and then take a walk around the campus while Alice babbles about the world that Frances is entering—what she will learn, the smart people she will meet. Frances only half-listens.

After a quick stop in the cafeteria to check the prices
(reasonable, Frances's mother proclaims), they drive to a grocery store and find a bank near the apartment. Once Alice has set Frances up with a chequing account, they drive back to the apartment with the groceries and cook macaroni and cheese on the hot plate, and afterward Alice insists on making hot chocolate (
as though they are roommates
, Frances thinks). Then they go to bed, the two of them squeezed onto the twin-size mattress. In the early morning, Alice cooks oatmeal and then packs up her nightgown and toothbrush, and says, “We'll see you at Easter. You can tell us what you've learned. I know you'll do us proud.”

She leaves when the sun is barely up, so used to an early start to her day. Frances goes back to bed and falls asleep thinking about Easter. She already knows she doesn't want to go home at Easter. She may never go back to Elliot again.

Later, the Greek couple look in on her and give her a lesson on the old house's fragile plumbing system, and also how to say hello in Greek at different times of the day. That night, she wakes up in the dark and doesn't know where she is. She thinks she's on the top bunk of her bed at home and is surprised when she sits on the edge and feels the floor under her bare feet. Then she sees the outline of her suitcase across the room and remembers.

The sound of children in the house wakes her the next morning. She bundles up against the cold and walks to the university for orientation day. It takes her almost an hour to get there. Once she arrives, there's a tour of the campus, classes to choose, more forms to fill in. When she sees “legal name” as the first question on all the forms, she is sickened that her legal name is now Frances Fletcher. She writes Frances Moon anyway, since the application was in that name, and
after she's completed everything that is required of her, she finds a phone book hanging from a chain under a payphone and pores through the government listings until she finds the vital statistics office, and she takes a taxi there. She provides identification, writes a cheque (the first in her life), and fills out another form that will change her name again, back to Moon. The official name change will take time, they tell her. She doesn't care. She already feels a weight lifted, the weight of Joe Fletcher's name. She walks home from the government building, and when she passes a lawyer's office—J.C. Homan, the name on the sign says—she goes inside and asks for an appointment. J.C. Homan is free that very minute. She tells him the bare bones of her story, and how she doesn't want the man she married to get her parents' farm. He says he couldn't anyway—“He didn't marry your parents, did he?”—but he tells her about de facto separations. He creates a file with her name on it and puts a statement inside. Come and see him again, he says, when she's ready for a divorce. She writes him a cheque. She leaves his office and stops at a corner store and buys a bag of ripple chips. There's a rough-looking man—a drug addict?—hanging around the drink cooler, and she wonders if he will follow her and try to steal her purse, but he doesn't. She gets all the way back to her apartment without anything bad happening. She locks the door after herself and sits on the side of the bed and eats the chips without even taking her coat off.

F
OR THE FIRST
several days of classes, Frances walks to the campus because she doesn't know how to take a city bus, is afraid she won't know how to tell the driver to stop the bus and let her off. After three days of enduring the January cold,
she decides she's being ridiculous—daft as a wagon horse, her mother would say—and she stands at a bus stop and tries to look hopeful when the next university bus comes along, and it works because the bus stops and the door opens for her. There's a sign on the coin box that tells her how much change to deposit, and she doesn't have to do anything when they get to the university. The bus pulls up in front of the library and the doors open and all the students with their armloads of books spill out the doors and push their way into the building against the bitter wind. Boys with long hair. Girls wearing workboots and colourful scarves. No one she recognizes, not one person. No one from home—not even Jimmy Gulka, who has gone off to a bigger university in Alberta.

She finds herself walking next to a dark-skinned boy she thinks might be in one of her classes, and for some reason that she cannot fathom, she speaks to him. She assumes he is a foreign student from some primitive village even smaller than the place she is from.

“That was my first time on a city bus,” she says.

“Really?” he says. “I thought everyone took buses in a city like this. Where there are no trains, I mean.” He has perfect English, with only the slightest accent, which sounds British, if anything.

She says, “I'm from a small town,” and then she looks away and hurries off down the long, crowded hallway to her lecture hall, which is the same one that the boy, Rudy Bustani, enters. He sits in an empty chair beside her.

The instructor is late, as usual. Rudy Bustani is talkative. He tells Frances that Rudy is the western version of his given name, not the name his mother knows him by, and he is, as she'd assumed, a foreign student. His father is guest
lecturing at a prestigious university in New England. The family is from London, and before that Egypt—yes, he says, where the pyramids are, and the Nile River, and the Sphinx. He's in his first year of university, like Frances, and is at this school because it's where his parents sent him. There are no extra costs for foreign students. The entrance requirements are modest, and he is not, he says, a genius like his father. He'd applied to go to the university where his father is but had not been accepted. His parents are separated, and his mother has gone back to her family in Egypt.

“My parents are English,” Frances says. “From the north, I think, but they lived in London during the war.”

“Have you been there?” he asks. “To London?”

She says that she hasn't been anywhere. She asks Rudy what he's studying, and he says, “Not much.” He's pretending to be in pre-law, but he has no intention of becoming a lawyer. Law school sounds like too much work. Frances doesn't know what to say about why she is here, her choice of career. She tells him she is in first-year arts but is going to switch to science and find a cure for cancer. It's not a direction she has previously considered, but suddenly cancer research sounds like a good idea, or at least good enough.

The class they are in together is an introductory biology course that involves endless memorization of plant and animal taxonomies. Frances doesn't find it hard—memorization has never been a problem for her—but as the weeks pass, she hears the other students complaining. The course is too difficult, they say. The instructor marks unfairly. Although Frances has not spoken to Rudy since the day of the first bus ride (she now has her own student transit pass), she notes his dejected look every time one of the Friday quizzes is handed back the
following Monday. When she leaves the lecture hall beside him on one of these days, she again speaks to him.

“So how bad is it?” she asks.

“Me?” he says, not sure that he's the one she's speaking to.

“I guess you're not doing so well in this one, huh?”

“Failing,” he acknowledges. “You?”

“Pretty good, actually,” she says.

“That makes sense for a science major.”

A science major. He remembered what she'd said. Well, she isn't a science major just yet, but she doesn't point that out.

“I could maybe help you if you want,” she offers. She can't believe herself, but she does believe she can help someone pass biology. They agree to meet in the cafeteria at the end of the day. Afterward, they take a bus downtown to a movie. They begin meeting every day for lunch, and before long they're sleeping together and Frances goes back on the pill. At first, they sneak up the stairs to her apartment in the attic, avoiding the Greek family because she's pretty certain she'd be kicked out if they knew Rudy was spending the night. Rudy has a similar third-floor apartment in an old house—he calls it a flat, like her mother had—but the owners don't live in the building, so they begin spending more and more nights there, and by the time spring comes and the city lawns are turning green, Frances has stopped paying the rent at her own apartment and moved her things to Rudy's, which is bigger, although still one room.

She and Rudy don't tell their parents that they're living together, or even that they're seeing each other. Frances is able to transfer the phone number that she'd had at the Greek family's house to Rudy's apartment, and only she answers the phone when it rings. Rudy has not given his parents the new
number and is careful to phone each of them weekly so they won't try to get in touch with him. Frances leases a post office box at a nearby drugstore and tells her parents that her letters were going missing at the Greeks' house. She begins to write them short weekly notes about things she sees around the university, such as the crazy French professor who talks to herself in the hallways, the flea-market clothing worn by the hippies, and the flyers posted constantly by the campus activists: “End the Oppression of the Proletariat,” “Marriage Is an Institution,” “Let the Ruling Classes Tremble.” She hopes that her parents, especially her father, will find her anecdotes amusing, and that they will keep them from wanting to check up on her. She doesn't go home for Easter, or at the end of the semester. She tells her parents she's staying in the city for the summer term and making up for the time she missed by starting after Christmas instead of in the fall. Her mother seems pleased with that idea. She writes in a letter,
We're so happy that you've buckled down, Frances. You will never regret having a good education. But please . . . take a weekend soon and come home on the bus. Your father is eager to see you. And I am too, of course.