The Eliot Girls

 

THE ELIOT GIRLS

 

 

 

Th
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Douglas & McIntyre

 

Copyright © 2013 by Krista Bridge

 

All rights reserved
. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

 

Douglas and McIntyre (2013) Ltd.

P.O. Box 219, Madeira Park,
BC, V0N 2H0

www.douglas-mcintyre.com

 

Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada

isbn
978-1-55365-982-2 (pbk.)

isbn
978-1-55365-983-9 (epub)

 

Editing by Barbara Berson

Copy editing by Pam Robertson

Proofreading by Shirarose Wilensky

Cover design by Anna Comfort O'Keeffe and Carleton Wilson

Cover chalkboard background courtesy of freestock.ca

Print edition text design by Carleton Wilson

 

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Province of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

 

 

 

For Peter

 

 

 

The light there was like a blow, and the air smelled as if many wonderful girls had just wandered across the lawn.

 

—John Cheever, “The Common Day”

 

 

 

P
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THE STAFF TEA PARTY
carried on down the hall—at a reassuring distance she could hear the clinking of china, the music of voices and laughter—but she had made her escape, unnoticed, to the solitude of her cool office. She was not altogether against the niceties, the polite mirth, of such gatherings. Parties were necessary procedures, she understood. The teachers needed to bond (how she despised that treacly word), to recognize in the eyes of virtual strangers the intimacy of shared purpose, the elevating ambition that had built the very walls that held them. She had stood to the side, observing the delicate dance, sipping her tea at rhythmic intervals in an effort to calm her fraught nerves. And then she had slipped out, made her retreat across the gleaming hardwood of the corridor as quietly as she could manage.

In her office, her breaths slowed to their ordinary tempo. The copious leaves outside made shadows on the window, and she was drawn to them. In moments of wildest emotion, she tried to stay quite still. Happiness was a state she distrusted. Too hinged did it seem on the external, too erratically greedy, too connected to childish indulgences ill-suited to a woman of her station. But she had to grant that no other word sufficed at present to describe the replete pleasure inside her, this queer and bridal feeling. Everything was coming together. Construction had been completed, the last of the trucks cleared out, the mounds of mud replaced by tidy flower beds. The edifice that now housed her was not merely a school. It was George Eliot Academy. Her vision brought splendidly into being.

Looking out over the grounds, she braced her gaze against delights too numerous to be met with moderation. (Had she been happy in quite this way since those Sunday afternoons across the ocean long ago, when her mother had allowed her one chocolate-covered biscuit at tea time?) The long, tree-lined driveway stretched out before her, the freshly mowed lawns on either side lapping the distance to the high wrought-iron fences. In her heart, she felt certain that her school had already achieved in its infancy the standing of its future, an irrefutable place in history.

It was just for a second that her eyes wandered, to the kaleidoscopic film of glass cleaner lining the borders of the windows, but it was then that two small figures appeared at the top of the driveway. The phone rang, startling her back into acuity. That was when she saw them. Ruth Brindle and the girl. (What was her name? Amy? Emma?) She frowned. Although she was not entirely surprised to see Ruth—she had remarked Ruth's absence from the tea party, made a mental note to have a word—she couldn't imagine what had possessed her to appear so tardily, and toting her daughter. She had put the girl on the waiting list simply as a kindness. But really, there was no question of her acceptance. During her entrance exam, she had tried to place an edge piece in the centre of a puzzle.

Ruth was gesturing to Devon Hall, smiling nervously, trying to draw the girl in, but of course the girl was looking the wrong way. Up at the sky, it seemed. She let go of her mother's hand and set off on an unfortunate, disorganized sort of run, then stopped. What damn thing was she looking at, her mouth agape?

From the bulwark of her office, Larissa McAllister leaned very close to the window, so close that her nose nearly grazed the glass, and peered out. A red balloon, caught up by a weak wind, was drifting over the sparse pink rose bushes. It paused mid-air, then floated over the giant willow tree, lingering above the highest branches. Ruth followed the girl to the edge of the lawn and looked up, her face a prism of wonder. Then she kissed the top of her daughter's head.

Larissa blushed, leaning back into the asylum of the long crimson curtain. She stifled an urge to rap on the window, to remind them of themselves. But they were breaking no rules. The girl wasn't streaking through the flower beds. No blaze of hyperactivity had thrown her feet into anarchy. They were simply looking at the wrong thing. The marvel here was the buildings, their grand poetic decree. Ruth ought to have known better. Yet how close she stood to her daughter, mirroring the drift of her quiet disobedience. Even after the balloon had vanished behind the modest steeple of the chapel, they continued to watch the invisible path it had taken.

Larissa closed her eyes against the interlopers. The acoustics of her empty chamber were such that the silence was dense, almost tactile, and she let her mind stray, just for a second, to her mother's best parlour, those perfectly round biscuits on the lily-of-the-valley plate (she had not meant to chip it, she had been so careful), the smell of rainy summer days and the spines of her favourite books. Then, crouching, she opened the roomy bottom drawer of her desk and beheld the old record player she had secretly stored there. The records, well kept in their cardboard sleeves, were still in a box, and she sifted through them until she found just the one she had in mind. Gilbert and Sullivan, always, when she wanted a lift. She wouldn't go so far as to dance, no, but she could allow herself a little music, here in the place she alone had brought to life.

 

 

Cha
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O
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THE FLOWERS WERE CONGRATULATORY
,
but seemed to point to an irony. Audrey Brindle's acceptance letter from George Eliot came late, in early August, after she'd spent several wearying months on the waiting list. While the two women of the house danced around the kitchen, Richard Brindle, who had submitted, albeit beneath his breath, that his daughter should sneer at Eliot's belated approval, had stood stiffly by the refrigerator, despairing of her lack of pride. The following day, however, a lavish bouquet was delivered. On the card was simply “Congratulations,” written in Richard's sloping lefty penmanship and punctuated with an austere period. Without the exclamation point that gave
congratulations
its customary zeal, the celebratory gesture seemed somehow insincere, a sly allusion to the silliness of her excitement over a place that didn't much want her. The flowers carried the whiff of paternal censure. They were a raised eyebrow at a slutty dress.

But because she had never received flowers before and feared she might never again, Audrey kept the arrangement long past the decline of its blooming health, until the water in the glass vase was a putrid green cloud and the petals came away in her hands. In spite of their provenance, the flowers felt like an ode to hope, and though officially dead, they were still sitting in the middle of the kitchen table on the first day of school.

The early morning light was pooling on the long marble counter, but the room was far from peaceful. The family dogs, Stevie, Marlow, and McGill, surrounded Audrey like shameless sycophants, brightly engaging her in eye contact to convey their hunger, felt at every meal as passionately as if for the first time. Spotting a squirrel in the backyard, Stevie suddenly broke away from the pack and flew at the back door, barking. Audrey gave the lingering animals noncommittal taps on the head and turned an unfriendly back to the din. She had been up long before her alarm, and the amount of day that still lay before her was vast enough as to seem almost cosmically unfathomable. By seven o'clock, she was already dressed in her uniform and staring at her reflection in the streaky mirror of her dressing table. She had run through the day in her mind countless times, each attempt at positive imagery challenged by a more compelling scenario of disaster. Every moment alone made her less convinced that things would turn out well. Yet in the public light of the kitchen, matters were no better. The heat of the September morning was already seeping through the tall windows. Moisture gathered at her neck, tightly bound in her new tie. She was no better than a child playing dress-up. If she couldn't even make herself believe that she was an Eliot girl, how could she hope to persuade anyone else?

“Look at you!” came the exclamation from the stairs.

Light-footed and smiling, in a white silk bathrobe that added to her oppressively seraphic glow, Ruth descended. As she entered the kitchen, she held her arms out as though presenting Audrey to an audience. “Wow,” she whispered, shaking her head. “Just look at you.”

“Oh, please,” Audrey said disagreeably.

Ruth cocked her head and frowned. “What's the problem?”

But Audrey couldn't articulate the problem. She understood her own ill humour too poorly to explain it lucidly to herself, let alone to her expectant, beaming mother. A decade was a long time to want something out of reach; she had grown used to looking at George Eliot through the eyes of a marginalized lover.

The history of her long-withheld acceptance to Eliot was not easy for Audrey to consider. Because Ruth taught in the Junior School, the Brindle family had taken for granted Audrey's uneventful acceptance. Yet the most explicit warnings had failed to prepare them for the tangle of rejection that obstructed their path. Having conceived of a school that would be a breeding ground for enlightened thinkers, that would honour the flavour and appearance of tradition while liberating girls from the mind-shrivelling path of learning set by men and for men, Larissa McAllister, Eliot's principal and creator, had installed as a barrier the most suitably gruelling entrance exams her team of writers could devise. At five, Audrey had insisted in the interview portion that one plus two equalled zero; at nine, she had proven unable to write a satisfactory five-hundred-word exposition about her favourite book. On round three, after several years of after-school tutoring, she had finally made it onto the waiting list for grade ten. Today was meant to be the reward for all her hard work. But whatever inadequacy the admissions procedure had been designed either to awaken or expose, it had done its job. How could she have known that dread was to be the consequence of so much hope?

“I can't get this tie right.”

“It looks perfect,” Ruth said. “So. Breakfast then.”

Ruth was not a breakfast person, but in recognition of Audrey's first day she had resolved to make something special. She had been torn about how to handle the morning. Although she would never have confessed her own nerves to Audrey, she had been awake for most of the night. For as long as she'd taught in Eliot's Junior School, she had always loved the first day of the school year. Nothing made her feel younger, more brimming with a sense of possibility. She wanted that feeling for Audrey but had seen with an almost visual clarity, like the systematic movement of the second hand of a clock, the decline of her daughter's happiness the closer they got to Labour Day.

That morning she had stayed in bed, her anxiety and excitement overlapping, until light began to escape out the sides of the closed curtains. Then she leapt up, grabbed the bathrobe—a gift from Richard, not at all her style, with
“Mi amor”
sewn in loping white cursive onto the chest—and threw it on in an effort to convey that this would be a morning of leisure. Still, she doubted herself. Was it better to honour or ignore the momentousness of the occasion? Celebration ought to have seemed fitting, but Ruth worried, especially confronted with Audrey's dispirited face, that revelry only underscored the years of failure. Ruth didn't want to contribute to her daughter's jitters, yet she felt she ought to do something. She couldn't keep herself from doing something.

As she breezed past Audrey to the stove, the light material of her bathrobe flapped open below the waist, revealing that she had not yet put on underwear.

“Mother, come on,” Audrey said, shielding her eyes.

They were watched by their own images, lining the stairs in a parade of moments better worth preserving. Audrey graced the gallery wall with a doting frequency befitting her only-child status, in various posed and candid photographs: being pushed on a swing by her grandmother, sitting in the park as a toddler with fists of grass on the way to her mouth, dressing Marlow in an apron and a shower cap. She and Ruth smiled outside the house of Charlotte Brontë on a rainy day in England; they lounged in their bathing suits on the deck of a catamaran in Antigua; they lugged their own Christmas tree on a farm in Mount Albert; they jumped off a cliff into a lake at a friend's cottage in Parry Sound. Richard despised being photographed and so often ruined pictures by lurking in the shadows at the edge of the frame, his mouth pursed sourly, that Ruth finally gave up trying to include him. He appeared in only three pictures: in a black-and-white high school shot, his wavy hair neatly cropped in the style of the fifties, though he graduated in the seventies; in a morning suit under a blossoming pear tree on his wedding day; exhausted and perturbed in a hospital chair as he held his newborn daughter.

And then there was Ruth, who, unlike her husband, loved looking at photographs of herself. She didn't care whether an image was flattering. For her a photo album was a map of her emotional world, and she could often remember exactly what she had been thinking as she sat before the indifferent gaze of the lens. And so she appeared on the wall not only in the requisite photographs—smiling conventionally in her graduation cap and gown, taking wedding vows in a dreadful lacy concoction, cradling her baby below newly immense breasts—but also in moments seemingly irrelevant—drinking iced tea on the porch of her mother's house, sitting on a lawn chair with their dogs at her feet—moments when images of tranquility belied the turbulent thoughts in her head.

Standing now over the stove, she pushed her long hair out of her face and twisted it up into a precarious, loosening bun, then lifted a cookbook from the shelf and opened it to a hardened, batter-speckled page. “Okay. A cup and a half, a cup and a half.” Scowling, she rooted around inside a cupboard, then let the door bang shut as she moved to its neighbour and began a search there. “Am I losing my mind? Where on earth is the flour?”

Ruth often griped about the newly renovated kitchen. It had been done according to Richard's specifications, and, in a fit of materialistic largesse, he had wanted to do everything as expensively as possible. The large kitchen, with a southern exposure overlooking the untended garden, and its white Shaker cabinets, white Carrara marble countertops, a custom stainless steel apron sink, gleaming steel appliances, was everything Ruth knew she should have desired in a kitchen, but its sleekness oppressed her. The perfection only made her feel as though she was a guest in someone else's house.

Audrey could find it in her to do nothing more than stare dejectedly at the pears piled high in the green glass art deco bowl too valuable for its current purpose as a holder of fruit. Ruth's efforts would oblige her to eat, but she was doubtful that she could manage a bite.

“Aren't you just so excited?” Ruth said. For days, she had been harping on how excited Audrey must be, irritated with herself for the repetition—especially when Audrey was clearly about as far from excited as a person could be—but unable to staunch the gush of her pleasure. She smiled. “You look so pretty.”

“Whatever.”

“You do! Haven't you looked at yourself?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“I wish you would trust me when I tell you how much you're going to love Eliot. We've worked for this for so long.”

Audrey nodded glumly.

As Ruth cracked two eggs into a bowl, the dogs, spotting Richard on the stairs, stirred in unison to mount a repeat performance of their best impersonation of starving animals. Ruth peered up into the cupboard again. “The flour has to be in here. Am I staring right at it?”

From the doorway, Richard cleared his throat. “This looks promising.”

Ruth looked at him and smiled, a hand on her hip. “Did you rearrange everything to irritate me?”

“Of course,” he said, kissing her on the cheek as he breezed into the kitchen.

The dogs bumped their noses eagerly against Richard's bottom as he poured out their food. He stood well back as they stormed their bowls, then sat down at the table and spread the
Globe and Mail
out before him. He laid his tie neatly beside his placemat and tried to settle in for a heartening read—there was an editorial on a minor
mp
scandal that was just the kind of item to inspire his enthusiastic scorn—but his usual cheer was absent. Mornings generally found him refreshed and sanguine, likely to whistle, emitting both the scent and the spirit of a man just out of the shower. Now he fidgeted with a corner of the paper. His eyes rested, inert, on a single spot, his usual running news commentary silenced by this global scowl.

“Why is everyone in such a bad mood?” Ruth cried. “I'm making a nice breakfast.”

Marlow, finished his food, approached, loudly licking his chops, anticipating the morning's next pleasure. Richard took a biscuit from his pocket and held it in his palm before Marlow's mouth. “I just don't think it's right to see a dog dead over one small snarl.”

“Oh,” Ruth said, her face falling. “I forgot about that.”

On Richard's agenda that day was the euthanizing of a pit bull who'd been adopted the year before by a young family in a fit of philanthropic idealism about the beleaguered breed. Less than an hour after the pit had growled at the four-year-old boy, the father had slammed it into the trunk of the car and dragged it by the scruff of its neck into Richard's vet clinic and demanded that he put an immediate end to its life. Richard had advised a night of reflection, but the man had called from home two hours later to say that he was terrified of the animal and it was spending the night in the garage.

Richard tried to be sympathetic to the family's anxiety: he knew that the worst a golden retriever could inflict couldn't rival the damage when a pit bull flipped. He had seen first-hand, luckily just one horrifying time, the permanent disfigurement. But still. The flimsiness of these owners' open-mindedness, their preening and ignorant saviour-complexes, made him angrier than if they'd never wanted to touch a pit bull in the first place. He understood why some people feared pits, but the self-importance of these paper-thin do-gooders inflamed his moral sensibilities. He had told this family many times that pits needed a firm, alpha hand. Everyone knew that children should be supervised around animals. Yet this child had a history of pulling the dog's tail and trying to ride it like a horse. The father had once laughed, recounting a story about the boy securing an elastic band around the dog's muzzle. The family had gotten it wrong in so many ways, yet vilified the dog for giving a mild warning. At the very least, he felt, the owners should have the decency to locate another family for the dog.

“I'm thinking about refusing to do it,” Richard said. “Force them to have the deed done elsewhere, if they insist. But if I do that every time I disagree with someone's choice…”

“You know people are awful. You've seen worse.”

“Mostly, I've seen better.”

“He might yet change his mind.”

“I hate pit bulls. They freak me out,” Audrey said.