The Eliot Girls (3 page)

The girls stepped into cubicles simultaneously, then locked the doors and dropped the seats of the just-cleaned toilets, their earlier titters resurfacing.

“Listen, Whit, listen,” came the voice from the dark-haired girl's cubicle. “Your pee is soprano and mine's alto.

They listened without laughing for a second.

Then came the voice again. “Whit, you have, like, the opera singer of pees.”

“Then yours is, like,
R&B
,” returned the blonde. “Your pee has soul.”

They flushed at the same time and emerged from their cubicles, delighted by their synchronicity. As they washed their hands, they smirked at each other's reflections in the mirror, then left without giving Audrey another glance. The second the door swung shut, they burst into laughter out in the hall.

Audrey planted her hands on either side of the sink and stared down her reflection again, enjoying the briefly empowering flicker of anger that illuminated her features. A gush of nostalgia for her old school came over her. How she missed the very featurelessness her mother had taught her to deplore. The homely serviceability of the building itself, the banana-yellow lockers and speckled linoleum floors, the smell of pot lingering in the back hallways, the worn and scratched surfaces. The harmless indifference of the crowd, its exchange of apathetic chit-chat. All the things that had inspired her scorn now kindled a spasm of sadness. It had been a forgivable offence, being a forgettable girl there.

But a good school was the key to everything. Before she even knew how to read, she was taught this essential fact of life. There was no getting around it. Here she would have to stay.

 

IN THE CLASSROOM, THE
mood was the frantic joy of a drunk just before he spills over into belligerence. It was a madhouse of noise. Nothing so discernible as conversation was taking place. Girls were perched on desktops or standing in clusters, flooding each other with incoherent delight. As Audrey was gathering her nerve to enter, a series of hoots preceded a happy gasp, and a girl with her hair in pigtails toppled ecstatically off a desk to a swell of applause.

There came a shout from the other end of the hall and Audrey turned to see Moira Loughlin, the art teacher and a former friend of her mother's (the allegation, never voiced directly to Moira herself, was that she had become intolerably conceited since finally selling a painting and introducing the term “fan base” to her everyday vocabulary), bouncing towards her, nearly tripping over her long purple peasant skirt, tousling the asymmetrical bob she considered her trademark.

“Audrey!” she cried, clapping. “Check
you
out!” She came to a skipping halt in front of Audrey and placed her hands on her hips, nodding with exaggerated approval. “Looks like I didn't get the bulletin! So…you excited?”

Audrey smiled uncomfortably. “I guess.”

“Well, you're about to become part of one heck of a group,” she said, beaming into the classroom and then back at Audrey. “I can't tell you how good it is to see you here, finally.”

Audrey glanced away, willing Moira to stop talking. All the effort she'd put into getting accepted at Eliot only made her feel less deserving of her spot. This was the secret, the shame she imagined written all over her. It was the blemish no uniform could hide. A girl seated just inside the doorway cast an aloof gaze out at them. Audrey tried to judge how much of the exchange she might have heard.

“I kept reassuring your mom that you'd show that Ms. McAllister what you were made of when you were good and ready. She may have been worried, but I never was, not for a second.” She thumped her hand insistently against her chest, drawing attention to the creased, sunburned cleavage visible through the unbuttoned front of her oversized denim shirt. Suddenly, a thunderbolt seemed to rip through her body, and she exclaimed, “Suze!” Her eyes leapt to the girl just inside the door. “Did you have a good summer?”

“Awesome,” said Suze lifelessly.

“You been taking your sketch pad with you everywhere, like we talked about?”

“Absolutely!” Suze replied, her voice now dripping with sarcastic enthusiasm that seemed to escape Moira, who continued to smile with uncontainable pleasure.

“Will you do me a favour, kiddo?” asked Moira, now gripping Audrey's shoulders and shoving her in the direction of Suze. “You take care of my friend here. It's her first day, and we all know how those can be.”

Offering an apologetic half smile, Audrey allowed herself to be foisted on the reluctantly rising Suze, and they stood there staring at each other helplessly until Moira, happy with her matchmaking, finally retreated. Upon Audrey's entry, the room went instantly quiet. A funeral procession of two, Audrey and Suze made their way slowly across the front of the room under the now-whispering scrutiny of the surrounding girls.

“You can sit there, I guess,” offered Suze, biting her thumbnail while listlessly gesturing with her head at a pair of unoccupied seats. “Most of the seats are taken. The thing is, like, pretty much everybody has planned already who to sit with.”

“This is okay,” said Audrey, setting down her knapsack.

Suze nodded and, considering her duty discharged, her unfairly extracted pledge to Moira honoured, retreated sluggishly to her own desk. There, still chewing on her nails, she became embroiled in an intense, low-voiced conversation with her deskmate.

As Audrey sat and began to unpack her bag, there came from the hall a stampeding sound, and the two girls from the bathroom burst in, dancing around the front of the room in a frenzied tango. They twirled each other like drugged ballerinas, then finished with the blonde lowering the brunette into a low and wobbly dip.

“My unmentionables!” she shrieked. “Everyone will see my unmentionables!”

“Your unmentionables get mentioned pretty often,” replied the blonde. “Especially at St. George's.”

Bunches of girls scattered around the front of the room made an appreciatively hysterical audience.

“Oh, oh! The bitterness! And not even nine o'clock!” said the brunette, pulling herself up. “Don't worry, Whit, there's someone for everyone. Some guys like girls with dicks.”

As Audrey watched them, the hazy alarm of the preceding weeks came into focus. She had never been good at this brand of teasing. Nor was she the adult teen, precociously challenging her teachers on the finer points of various philosophical or political ideologies. At her former school, she had once sat in glazed awe as a fellow student engaged the history teacher in a half-hour debate about whether the roots of communism and fascism were ultimately the same. But the kind of safe vacancy she had relied on before wouldn't go over at Eliot. There was more to life, surely, than the fear of being embarrassed. Ruth was forever telling her that now was her chance, and though the precise character of this chance was never articulated, Audrey sensed that her mother was talking about a lot more than education. It was a matter of reinvention. No one knew her at Eliot. A new life, a new identity, seemed almost to be within her reach. Now was her opportunity to be something other than herself. She could choose to be more than the girl who sat quietly in the middle of the room. The difficulty was that the means of creating the delicate details of that persona were as murky as ever.

With five minutes remaining before the bell, the dancing girls began to lead a crew of others in the creation of a list of cryptic reasons grade ten was to be the most awesome year yet. After deciding amicably upon number ten, “Après-school aerobics with you know who,” the group was now fighting over number nine. Audrey was pretending to have some important matter at hand in the bottom of her knapsack when a voice from above offered an enthusiastic, “Hey!”

Audrey looked up with wary hope. Leaning towards her with an intimacy that suggested long acquaintance was a petite girl smiling so assertively that her presence commanded the space between them and bestowed the illusion of considerable height. She asked if Audrey minded if she took the seat beside her, and entrapped by her own politeness, Audrey nodded weakly. The girl set a shiny black briefcase on the desktop and snapped it open as she settled herself. From its organized interior she drew a Ziploc bag of dried apricots, which she offered to share. “I'm Seeta!” she said, digging apricot out of a molar with her tongue. She extended a hand, which Audrey stared at in momentary confusion, never having had someone her own age suggest shaking hands. “Are you new here too?” Seeta asked.

Audrey nodded, glancing away. She tried to project a certain distractedness, not wanting to engage too fully with this new seatmate. (Was it really settled then? Was this to be her lot for the rest of the year?) She supposed there should be some comfort in the neighbouring desk not remaining empty, but emptiness at least meant possibility, whereas this felt shatteringly like the end of possibility. Futures were decided in a split second. Alliances, even if unwillingly formed, were hard to shake.

The one-sided conversation that followed confirmed Audrey's gloomiest suspicions. With the volume, both of voice and gesture, of someone wanting very much to be noticed, Seeta offered a detailed comparison between George Eliot Academy and her old high school in Scarborough. There was very little about this old school that didn't inspire her derision, from the perpetual smell of egg salad in the classroom to the buffoonish males who insisted on taking over every class with their stupidity: “I mean, how could any person over the age of twelve not know what existentialism is?” Taking in her surroundings with rapturous glances, she marvelled in her escape from that hell of mediocrity. “At least everyone knew I was a serious scholar,” she said. “No one bothered me.”

She might have been pretty, had there not been so many elements of her appearance that defied prettiness. Her black hair was thick and shiny, but greasy at the roots, and so long it reminded Audrey of a horse's tail. In the corner of her eyes was a dusting of sleep. Her full lips were slightly chapped. As her monologue continued, her tone grew somewhat shrill in proportion to her escalating enthusiasm, and she began to draw the attention of girls seated nearby. The general consensus seemed to be that ignoring her would be safest, but she proved difficult to ignore. Her roving eyes sought the other girls out, and she aimed a forceful smile of good cheer at anyone whose gaze drifted towards her. Glances were exchanged behind her head, but she noticed nothing.

Finally, she stopped talking and let out a long sigh, as though her outrageous admiration of everything in sight had exhausted even her. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I completely forgot to ask your name.”

Audrey unwillingly released the information.

“It's fate, then!
Breakfast at Tiffany's
happens to be one of my favourite films.”

Audrey's stomach made a screeching sound like a car racing around a bend.

“What was that?” cried Seeta, looking around excitedly.

The second bell rang then, and the stragglers in the hallway rushed in and took their seats, followed by the homeroom teacher, who would shepherd the class to assembly. The day was just beginning, but Audrey had a bad feeling that something had already been decided.

 

 

Cha
p
ter
Th
ree

THE ENDURING MONOTONY OF
the morning staff meeting was one of Ruth's most reliable pleasures. In that half hour were housed the only mindless minutes of her day. As announcements got underway and handouts were distributed, Ruth sank into a quasi-attentive trance, grateful to be cradled in others' more competent palms. Nothing was required of her but to listen, or to appear to listen. She could be the audience rather than the guide, the student rather than the teacher. In her many years at the school, she had never ceased to be uplifted and amazed by the elegant proficiency of the machine of Eliot running around her.

But on this morning, as she headed to the staff room, her body resisted the usual decompression. Anxiety about Audrey had been plaguing her from the moment they left the house. In the car, they had listened to the news and exchanged few words. Ruth had fought the urge to reach out and grab her daughter—whether to embrace her or shake her she wasn't sure. Ruth hated silence, and during that drive, even more than usual, she felt crushed by it. No words of encouragement, it seemed, could disarm Audrey's malaise.

When they had reached Eliot, Ruth let Audrey out at the base of the driveway. Her impulse was to hover, shadowing Audrey to the classroom, making introductions, but she knew that that would be the worst thing she could do. It was a kind of agony: her hopes for her daughter were immeasurably outsized by her helplessness. After they parted, Ruth parked in the lot behind the school, then doubled back to the front and took up a partially hidden post by an old oak tree so that she could observe Audrey's approach. It was a moment before Audrey came into view, dawdling up the long driveway, then weaving her way through the constellations of girls spread across the circular drop-off area. She walked without purpose, as though uncertain she was even in the right place.

Outwardly, there ought to have been little to distinguish Audrey from the other girls, but Ruth noticed, even more than she usually did, how the old-fashioned school uniform made Audrey seem as though she had stepped out of another generation. In August, she had cut her wavy brown hair into a twenties-style bob, which accentuated the elegant length of her neck. (Audrey received compliments so poorly that Ruth was reluctant to tell her this.) In the past year she had grown noticeably taller—though her posture was terrible, perhaps to compensate for her unease at this new height. Yet Ruth's heart broke at the sight of her, looking not straight ahead, but wonderingly up into the sky, as though marvelling at the clouds.

Now fifteen, Audrey was losing the unawareness that, in childhood, had given her a kind of unaffected charm. In its place had grown an almost insistent awkwardness. Ill at ease in her body, she was perpetually slouching and fidgeting, glancing away from eye contact. Ruth was sad to witness the change, though she knew that she shouldn't be surprised by it. A part of her was even grateful for it. She had always thought there was something a little vulgar about supremely confident teenagers. She could not help thinking that there was something beautiful in such awkwardness.

Audrey stood out as one of the few solitary girls. The sight made Ruth realize—she couldn't believe that she had never thought of it before—that she had rarely seen Audrey in one of those happily squealing girl groups. On the occasions that she had fetched Audrey from her former school, she would sometimes find her on the less crowded side of the school, in conference with one other girl. Ruth had interpreted the seeming smallness of Audrey's social world as her response to the chaos of the overpopulated public school. Ruth herself disliked large groups. If there were other signs of mild melancholy in her daughter, she chose to read them as the typical disaffection of adolescence. But where, then, she wondered, was the equally typical ebullience, the giddiness that descended abruptly, brilliantly, leaving girls inarticulate with outrageous joy?

At Audrey's age, Ruth had been brimming with the kind of reckless confidence that was the hallmark of happy youth. Her mother, who had made it her personal mission to extinguish the power associated with good looks, had never told Ruth that she was pretty. Ruth still remembered the moment when she was fourteen: she had glanced in the bathroom mirror and seen her face as if for the first time. The recognition was petty, yet transformative. She saw herself, then, rushing headlong into life with a spirited resolve that no one would be able to destroy. Of course she had met obstacles to her self-esteem, but that was part of the point. In her was a secret, almost furtive, fund of strength.

Ruth had never been inclined to look for herself in her daughter. When Audrey was a child, Ruth had watched her little girl picking her way around the garden singing to herself like a benevolent drunk and understood that this was why people became parents. Surely there lay the magic of creating a life. To observe the distinctness of your child was to discover the power of sorcery in yourself.
She didn't understand those parents who boasted total genetic ownership of their children's every frown and blink, assigning the son's laboured pedalling of his bicycle to the long line of maternal incoordination, the daughter's refusal to take baths to that bullish pinprick midway down the winding Y strand, until eventually their children's entire repertoire of mannerisms were conveniently done away with, checked off like items on a grocery list. Ruth had adored Audrey with the kind of fascination borne of bewilderment. Even as her fear for Audrey's vulnerability grew, Ruth couldn't fail to be stirred by the beauty her daughter so weakly, so skeptically grasped. Although her meeting awaited, she had continued to stand by the tree, her stomach in knots, after Audrey was lost within the spirited mob.

The staff room was a large rectangular room at the front of the school with two tall bay windows that overlooked the long driveway leading up to the school's entrance. Larissa McAllister had wanted the room to feel like a luxurious library, so she had furnished it with several deep red leather wingback chairs and two matching couches, as well as two heavy rectangular oak tables, at which teachers could eat their lunches or mark papers. The walls were mahogany panelled and unadorned—not for Larissa the jovial inanity of educational posters of students partaking in school activities like soccer, reading, and cooperation, colourful photographs of spirited staff events, a bulletin board bursting with outdated messages. She deplored overly personal spaces, so she had allotted one cupboard, beneath the microwave, to teacher's mugs from home and other personal kitchen effects. The refrigerator, which she reluctantly conceded as necessary, though it undermined the library effect, was tucked away in a corner where it would least interfere with the desired atmosphere.

Most of the teachers had already arrived and were criss-crossing the grid of the staff room, brightly conducting loud-voiced, far-reaching conversations about their summers. Ruth headed straight for the coffee pot. It was not yet eight o'clock, an hour she hadn't witnessed in over two months. She reached for her mug and found that the handle had broken off and a large crack zigzagged down the side. She crouched at the cupboard, at a loss for how to proceed. Years ago, Larissa had complained about the teachers bringing their own mugs from home and then showing unabashed possessiveness of them: how could her colleagues, people she admired, not understand that such attachments were infantile? Ruth had voted against Larissa's suggestion that they stock the staff room with sensible brown mugs like her own, and now she regretted it. She scanned the shelves of mugs and settled on the plainest one, poured herself a cup of coffee, then shielded the mug with her hand as she moved to the sitting area.

Ruth sat in an armchair, slightly removed, feeling herself come back to life at the taste of coffee. Sunlight streamed through the freshly washed windows. The chatter around her was lively enough to be pleasantly indistinct. Several teachers nodded to her affably but no one seemed to expect anything of her. Ruth had known most of these colleagues for years, and their familiarity, though sometimes irksome, was a comfort on mornings like this. The feeling of being alone in company was a pleasure as timeless and unexceptional as a warm breeze across the face.

She was nearing the end of her coffee and contemplating another cup when Michael Curtis, who taught biology, stepped grandly into the seating circle, sipping water from a glass bottle. “It's so good to be back!” she exclaimed, throwing her arms out. “I had a beastly holiday!” She sank dramatically into one of the couches and began regaling her audience with stories of a horrific August cottage rental.

Michael was the most striking woman on staff, tall and regal, with long, poker-straight, enviably Asiatic hair and unfortunately low-slung breasts. She dressed in layers of black and silky jewel-toned scarves wound in voluptuous piles around her neck. Ruth had never quite recovered from the idiocy of her first words to Michael. “Oh, I always wished to have a man's name! How fashionable!” Ruth had exclaimed, a patently false and bizarrely flirtatious comment, made worse when Michael icily informed her that she had been named after a would-be older brother who had died shortly after his birth. In the intervening decade, Ruth had done her best to make Michael like her—it was a compulsion, really, nothing to do with her feelings about Michael's own likeability—and had never gotten past her disappointment in the failure of her early endeavours.

Michael was the mother of six children, three of whom were adopted, and when people asked her which (yes, rudely), she liked to say that she couldn't remember. In spite of Michael's endless stories about family horseplay and cheerful chaos, Ruth had difficulty seeing Michael as the archetypal mother. She was too bony and ungainly, too stiffly magnificent. Her main mode of social interaction was to discredit how glamorous she looked as a paradoxical way of underscoring that glamour. “Oh, our kids think we're the biggest dorks on the planet,” she was always saying. “We spend our days in the mud digging for worms and looking for treasure.” When she was in the room, Ruth's eyes were drawn to her, sometimes much against her will.

“Flies everywhere!” Michael was saying now. “I'm as much a friend to the winged creatures as anyone, but it was bloody ridiculous.”

Michael's fondness for British vernacular when she had lived all her life in Canada had once been lambasted in a staff meeting by Larissa, who declared that she hadn't moved to Canada and dedicated her life to pedagogical scholarship to be surrounded by the vulgar slang of the Cockney proletariat.

“Did you have a good summer, Ruth?” asked Sheila Smith, the grade three teacher. She was sitting to Ruth's left, flipping through an old
Chatelaine
from the collection of ancient magazines piled in a wicker basket by the coffee table. Larissa also disapproved of the trivial content of such magazines, not to mention the grade-eight-level writing, but, in an environmentally conscious nod to the principle of reusing, she permitted their presence.

“Yes, thanks, Sheila,” Ruth said. “You?”

Sheila nodded vigorously. “But I'm happy to be back.”

“Of course.”

“You've got to read this article, Ruth,” Sheila said emphatically. “It may save your life.” She signalled to what she had been reading, a piece about breast cancer. Sheila always went straight for the disease articles and, when she was finished, left them in Ruth's mailbox.

Grey
was the word Ruth would have used to describe Sheila (grey hair, grey skin, even grey lips), who in a meeting during the early days of Eliot had used the word
phantasmagoric
to describe herself, prompting one of Larissa's forays into the twenty-pound dictionary installed like a hallowed, gleaming monument on a pedestal by the windows. (“Yes, our aim is to encourage lateral thinking,” Larissa had said before reading aloud the definition of phantasmagoric, “but let us honour, too, the strictest accuracy. Imagination, of course, but never at the expense of meticulousness.”)

It was partly because of the Sheilas of the world that Ruth had a tendency to let her hair grow too long, why she swept it up crudely into a rumpled chignon, even though she knew that such a look wasn't necessarily appropriate for work. During meetings that went long, Ruth often fell into a daze, looking around at the other teachers, and daydreamed that she had gone to the salon, fallen for the hairdresser's long-winded ramblings about a new mature look, and emerged an hour later with an overgrown bowl cut that was a page straight out of Sheila's style book. Awakening from these reveries with a jolt, she was ashamed, not by her wandering attention during work hours, but by the absurd superficiality of her imaginings. Didn't she have anything more substantial to daydream about?

As Sheila thrust the
Chatelaine
at her chest, Ruth nodded vaguely and began to rise for another cup of coffee. Then the door swung creakily open and Larissa McAllister entered the room.

“Oh!” cried Sheila. “We're on!”

Larissa shut the door firmly behind her. She felt that a teachers' staff room should be kept hidden from prying student eyes, much as a men's washroom should remain a zone of mystery to women. (She had never seen a urinal until the construction of the school had required her last-minute, on-site approval of a bathroom tile.) She offered a monarchic wave and stalked to one side of the room, her sensible, clunky pumps tapping out a marching beat that was distinctly hers. A white board draped in a black cloth was set up on the centre of the wall, and she stood next to it in her speech-giving stance. The air around her was charged with her severe ardour for Eliot generally and for meetings specifically, and with the stamina of her unchanging beliefs about the education of girls. Her presence was magnetized, it seemed, and Ruth found her own gaze locked on Larissa, paralyzed almost, as though she'd been hypnotized without her consent.