The Eliot Girls (20 page)

Audrey usually avoided the bakery, painfully aware of her outsider status, but she had forgotten her lunch at home. She considered going without food, but the prospect of her stomach growling noisily during the afternoon periods was more humiliating than venturing out alone. She pushed open the door and was swallowed by a bubble of heat. At the front of the line, Arabella, Whitney, and Dougie were flirting with Al. He chuckled bashfully at everything they said, as though unaware of the irony in their compliments. (“Have you been working out, dude? You look strong enough to snap Dougie's neck with your baby finger.” “Al, can you teach me how to say ‘I love sausages' in Ukrainian?”) The line began backing up to the door, and Kate Gibson called out, “Yo, Al. There are some other lovelies back here who want some of your time.”

“Al and I have a special relationship,” replied Arabella. “Don't be jealous.” She turned back to Al and blew him a kiss.

When her turn came, Audrey bought a plain bun and left, gasping as she opened the door into the biting wind. She hurried back to the school and collected her French textbook from her locker, then made her way to the drafty emergency stairwell near the classroom. She had taken to eating there lately as a way of hiding her solitude and dissociating herself from Seeta. As she rounded the corner, though, she saw that her spot had already been claimed.

“May we help you?” Arabella asked.

“Your fly is down,” said Dougie.

Audrey looked down at her skirt, confused.

“Just kidding!”

She was just about to leave when she thought of the afternoon Arabella showed her the note, that moment when the contours of a tangible possibility began to materialize. She fumbled with her bun. “Is it all right if I sit?”

The girls looked at each other.

“Password,” said Arabella.

Audrey covered her panic with a smile. “Groovy?”

They parted to make room for her, and she stepped tentatively over their legs and took a seat several steps down. Arabella, apparently recovered from her ordeal with the flasher, sat at the top with her usual arch smile.

“Did I tell you guys that Audrey is Ms. Brindle's daughter?” Arabella said. “Isn't that wild?”

“You don't really look like her,” Whitney said.

Audrey put her bun in her knapsack, knowing she would never willingly eat in front of Arabella. “I guess I look more like my father.”

Dougie took a long drink from a water bottle and passed it back to Arabella. “You better not have mono,” Arabella said.

“Or herpes,” added Whitney.

Textbooks were spread out on the stairs around them. Audrey was relieved to be able to focus on a task as benign as studying, and the thudding of her heart began to abate. Her request to join them counted as perhaps the only expression of true nerve in her life. Now she had to be equal to that boldness, but she was clueless. She pulled her math book and a pencil out of her bag and was about to ask a question about a polynomial function when Dougie passed a piece of paper to Whitney.

Whitney cast a skeptical glance over the page, then said, “I think you've been generous. I'd give Julie a five point five at most.”

When Audrey thought about it later, what amazed her was how she had understood the nature of the discussion at once. Yes, the paper had been somewhat visible over the partial shield of Whitney's arm, but she had not needed to decipher the pencil scribbles, to see each name printed down the left-hand column, or the crudely executed accompanying cartoon faces, to know that their classmates were being rated. Female cattiness was a knowledge into which women were born, like the formation of language, the thousands of words saturating infant brains, lodging there with growing meaning until they are ready to emerge, allusive and unquestioning labels on an already known world. The surprise lay in how much it thrilled her, how its heat enfolded her: the unifying sensation of scorn, the closeness of it almost indistinguishable from love. Even more intimate, perhaps, than love. 

At the bottom corner of Whitney's paper was a figure with a red dot between the eyebrows, a guitar in hand, and a large number three next to it. Audrey felt an impulse take flight within her. “I think three is generous,” she said. “Don't you think Seeta is more of a two?”

A kind of darkness fell, clarifying everything. Audrey could see the constellation of expectations realigning themselves.

Arabella drew a pencil out of her bun and cocked her head. “Give the new girl the paper, Whit. You're being too
PC
.”

From around the corner came the sound of humming, and before Audrey had a chance to meet Whitney's glacial half smile, Arabella's cheeks flushed. She put a finger over her lips, then reached into her knapsack and pulled out a sheet of orange construction paper. “Behold,” she whispered. With ironic demureness, she held up what was clearly another note to Seeta. The message was again made up of magazine letters pasted messily together: “The sweetest songs have the saddest endings. Parsley, sage, rosemary, and turmeric…” She smiled at the note fondly, with a mother's soft affection for her child's handiwork.

“Awesome!” squealed Dougie.

Whitney shushed her angrily.

Arabella looked around to make sure no one had heard. “A little discretion, Ms. Douglas?” she said, lowering the note face down into her lap. She held out a gallant hand to Audrey. “Luckily, we have the master of discretion with us today.”

The bell rang, and Arabella held out the note. Audrey made no pretense of contemplation. Alongside her habitual fear had lit something much more alive. In Arabella's smile was the perverse resurrection of all the things Eliot had once meant to her.

As Audrey slid the note into her knapsack, Dougie sprinted to the top of the stairwell, where she let out a muffled whoop. Seeta was standing outside the classroom door, ukulele in hand. “Fuck me, it's music now,” Whitney said.

Arabella strode towards the classroom. “So tell me, Seeta,” she said. “Is it true, what they say about a man with perfect pitch?”

Seeta looked puzzled.

“'Cause I was going to ask your bro to the semi, but, you know, you seem to have a pretty special bond.”

“She wouldn't want to get in the way,” Whitney added.

But before Seeta had a chance to respond, they galloped off down the hallway, leaving Audrey behind them, as they laughed with deranged delight.

 

“WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?”
said Richard, advancing on Ruth from the kitchen before she'd even closed the front door.

“What do you mean?” she said, looking studiously away as she hung her coat.

Her cheeks were flushed from the attacking wind outside, the redness conveniently masking the burn left by Henry's stubble. There had been no question in her mind, until that second, that she had been safe. Henry had been to the house just once, and she was certain they hadn't been sighted. Even if a neighbour had seen him coming or going, there would have been no cause for suspicion. Yet as carefree as she had been when she left Eliot with Henry that afternoon (for the parking lot of a nearby Shoppers Drug Mart, as it turned out), as insulated in her certainty that there had been no fractures in the shell of her protectiveness, all the way home she had worried that she had made a mistake.

With artificial gaiety, she rubbed her numb hands together and faced Richard. “What's up?” she asked.

“Well, gee. Think about it for a minute, Ruth.”

She frowned in reflection.

“Where were you at lunch?”

“I was at work, of course. Where else might I be?”

Richard's words were clipped. “Well, you were supposed to be here, if you'll recall. I came home at six o'clock, thinking I had made a very clear arrangement with my wife that she would come home at lunch and let the dogs out, and what did I find but Marlow lying by the back door next to a pool of his own urine. Wagging his tail apologetically, might I add.”

“Oh!” Ruth clapped a hand over her mouth.

“Oops,” said Richard.

“I totally forgot. I'm sorry. I am. You know I am. I have all this extra work, the lit mag Larissa is making me do, end of term marking. It's been crazy.”

Richard withdrew to the kitchen. “I don't want to hear it,” he said.

“Richard, give me a break. I made a mistake,” she said. But her protest was feeble; she didn't truly want to come home at lunch.

She noticed Marlow, lying in the middle of the living room, thumping his tail ardently. His molten brown eyes were locked on her, unreservedly welcoming. She crumpled beside him, patting his ear and resting her cheek against the top of his head. The steady thudding of his tail accelerated.

“I'm so sorry,” she said. “I'm so sorry, my boy.”

With effort, he rolled onto his back, his tail still oscillating with undiminished happiness between his hind legs, where the feathers were still damp with what she assumed was urine.

“I'm so sorry,” she said.

She rubbed his belly for several minutes, until she heard Richard collecting cutlery to set the table. “I'm not hungry,” she called out, heading up the stairs. “You and Audrey go ahead and eat without me.”

Richard's voice, returning from the dining room, was too far away for her to make out his reply.

Upstairs, Ruth ran a hot bath and tried to set the scene for relaxation. She lit freesia candles and put on a meditation
CD
playing music that wasn't really music, but birdsong and trickling water set against a bland tune played by an echoing electronic flute. Once she was immersed, her unease grew. The water was too hot, and within minutes she was sweating. The candles, too far away to blow out, produced a sickeningly sweet smell, and the music—how could people listen to this stuff? She had not listened to meditation music in fifteen years, not since Richard had played it for her during thirty-five hours of labour, and now she remembered why, shocked by how viscerally her body recalled the connection. But she felt too lazy to get out of the water and correct any of these blunders. The bath was irrelevant.

What she was really doing was avoiding the disapproving gaze of her family. Cloistered in the bathroom, she had stopped time, in a sense, removed herself from its passage, thereby securing a respite from the consequences of her actions, and her equally odious inaction. She was doing everything poorly—being a wife, a mother, a dog owner. Yet on top of her unrest still floated that guiltless high, an unfaltering selfishness. (In self-forgiving moments, she hoped that admitting her own selfishness somewhat mitigated the vileness of its presence.) She felt far worse about what she had done to Marlow than anything she had done to Richard. But she knew how despicable she was. Nobody, hearing the things she'd done over the past months, would deny that she was a terrible person.

With her toe, she rubbed at the water spots on the faucet. The fixtures had been a mistake, the result of overreaching: brushed nickel, easily stained, intolerant of regular cleaner. She had been warned away from them by the man in the store. The marble countertop of the bathroom vanity was also covered in subtle stains. Why had she bought so many expensive things for the bathroom? She had been so sure they would make her happy. On the floor was the bath mat, white and plush, she had bought for Marlow, so that he could lie by her while she took baths. But it had been some time since Marlow had kept her company by the tub. His hips were too weak to propel him up the stairs; at night, he waited in the front hall for Richard to carry him up to the bedroom.

She pushed these thoughts from her head. Before her lay the Christmas holidays, a stretch of Henry-less time. How would she conjure the requisite festive spirit? Ruth had always placed a great onus on Richard and herself to generate unparalleled levels of merriment. She bought so many presents for Audrey that she often felt embarrassed by the abundance as she descended the stairs in the morning. She dressed the dogs in Santa hats and presented them with a special cake made of carob. In the week leading up to the day, they baked enough cookies for a family of ten. Richard had sometimes resisted the extravagance, but Ruth had insisted upon it. Without this vaguely offensive level of decadence, it was too easy to be aware of certain absences.

There came a knock on the door, and Richard entered before she had a chance to deter him. He lowered the toilet seat and sat down.

“We missed you at dinner,” he said. “Couldn't you have taken your bath after eating?”

“I've had a long day.”

“Why don't you tell me about it?”

“Later.”

“You may have missed your one chance to see Audrey in a good mood,” he said.

She attempted to smile, but there was no levity to be found in that subject. Audrey moved on the margins of her consciousness, always, like a nagging and imperative task that needed to be addressed, that could not be delegated, and yet that she continued to procrastinate with a fluttering anxiety in her stomach. “That's nice.”

“Listen,” he said. “We need to talk about Marlow. You know that.”

“Can't I just take a bath?” she moaned.

“His health is not an issue that can be avoided indefinitely.”

“No! I'm not talking about that. Not yet.”

“No decisions need to be made. But we need to review the situation if only so that we know we've reviewed it. Our actions have to be a choice, not an evasion.”

“He still loves his food,” Ruth said. “He's still happy. End of conversation.”

“That's not a conversation at all.”

“Richard, it's just stained rugs.”

“You think I care about stained rugs?” Richard's voice rose in anger.

She had never liked being naked in front of Richard when they argued, but her sense of vulnerability had evaporated. She was barely aware of her body. She could have stood, naked and dripping, screaming, and it wouldn't have bothered her. “Look, he's happy,” she said. “If you could ask him, he would not choose that. You know that. What about that other drug you mentioned? I met a woman in the park who said it took years off her dog.”