The Eliot Girls (31 page)

So she had turned her hands under the water, pumping that awful soap again and again, and looking at her face, studying it even though she knew she couldn't really see it. She could never see what others saw, never see her true face, only its reflection. She stared and stared, the way she stared at herself as a girl, thinking she'd discover the trick of how to be beautiful, the angle that would show her as her best self, her true self. But she had never mastered the control that consistent beauty required. The best she could do was accept familiarity. And sometimes in rooms with lighting this awful she could bear how ugly she was, sometimes she could ignore it and go about her day, sometimes she could forget about the shadows and wrinkles, the incipient drooping, the failing radiance. And sometimes she couldn't.

She could only get used to things.

What things had Audrey grown used to? Across the car, she was silent, whether in shame or in anger Ruth couldn't say. There was no telling what Audrey was thinking. Her daughter had become as opaque to her as any girl on the street—more, in fact. Girls revealed something of their desires, as they rode their bicycles in sweet summer dresses, as they rambled down the sidewalk in cut-offs–clad packs. Even the hidden ones, clothed drably, blemished faces cast down, betrayed a flicker of selfhood, a prejudice, a proclivity, in their hiding. Ruth had spent her life around young people. Yet the most basic drift of her daughter's mind was a mystery to her. Audrey still looked like Audrey, but the face Ruth had once considered so expressive—too expressive (how helpless she had felt, observing its dazzling nakedness)—had gone blank. Somehow Audrey had disappeared behind the cloak of her school uniform.

As they descended the Bayview Extension, cars sped past on the right, a white
SUV
bore down from behind. At the light, Ruth glanced at Audrey staring out the passenger window, and her heart began to thud wildly. A fearful, cornered feeling overtook her. Was life as she knew it over?

She turned onto Pottery Road. Just past the small bridge over the Don River, she pulled abruptly into the gravelly crescent fronting the converted stables of Todmorden Mills. There she got out of the car and paced for a moment by the bumper before going around to Audrey's side and opening the door.

“Get out,” Ruth said. “I don't trust myself to drive while we're having this conversation.”

Looking stunned, Audrey obeyed.

In the distance behind them, the hazy grey rectangles of downtown, relieved by the peak of the
CN
Tower, spread across the horizon. Restlessly, Ruth took several steps away, then back, churning the gravel under her silly stilettos. “Tell me,” she said.

For a moment, Audrey looked chastened, perhaps on the brink of tears, but then a flicker of resolve steeled her features. “As if any of it matters now anyway.”

“Tell me! I know you weren't alone in this.”

Audrey looked around, as though fearing witnesses, but the only people nearby were faceless figures contained in the cars slowly ascending the long hill. A cyclist, made safely anonymous, androgynous, by a spandex one-piece and a bike helmet, whizzed down the opposite side of the road at breakneck speed. “Ms. McAllister already told you everything,” she said.

“Do you think I'm buying that?”

The only response Audrey produced was one infuriating shrug.

“God!” Ruth exclaimed. “Can this apathy be real?” She felt a flash of rage, but too quickly it was succeeded by despair. Was Audrey's neutrality not final confirmation of her own irrelevance? How could Audrey not feel as trapped and petrified as she did? In mere months, she'd overturned the life they'd spent years building towards. Did she not balk at the unknown that lay before her? Ruth threw her arms up. “I can't believe it. I don't! Do you completely lack the capacity for forethought? Have you not thought about going back to your old school, months before the end of the year? Are you not aware of how that smacks of failure? Have you considered what it will be like to tell your father? You're acting like you just got fired from the Gap!”

The more listless Audrey's expression, the more Ruth felt her own pulse quickening. She couldn't tell whether Audrey was even listening to her. No word seemed to penetrate. “We worked so hard to get you into Eliot,” she continued.

“Did
we
?” And now it seemed that Audrey might even be smirking.

“Oh, wonderful!” Ruth said. “I'm so glad my emotion has provided you with some pleasure on one of the worst days of my life!”

“The worst day of
your
life?” Audrey laughed. “Look, you think there's so much to say. But there's nothing to say. Let it go.”

“How can I do that? I don't even care, not really, about the notes. Seeta's a pain. I see that. But why do you have to be so unemotional? Why are you so secretive?”

“I really think it would be best for you to let this go,” Audrey said in a low voice.

Ruth wrung her hands. “Just tell me who else was in on it. We can start from there. Why are you making me beg? Does it give you pleasure to see me this way? Are you trying to be honourable? I think you're well past that.”

Audrey rolled her eyes.

“Was it really the only way you could make friends?”

Audrey looked at the ground, and Ruth thought perhaps she had scored a victory. But then Audrey raised her eyes again. In them had awakened an anger unlike any Ruth had ever seen in her daughter. Without a word, Audrey turned around and slammed her car door so hard that Ruth expected the window glass to shatter. Then she turned on her heel and began walking up the hill.

“What are you doing?” Ruth yelled.

Audrey didn't break her powerful stride.

Tripping over the gravel, Ruth started to run after her daughter. But on the most basic level, this was problematic. Those heels again. How was she to run in them? Certainly not with dignity, if running after one's daughter could ever be done with dignity. At the end of the driveway, she took the shoes off and, holding one in each hand, started up the hill in her stocking feet.

“Stop!” she shouted. “Audrey!”

To Ruth's surprise, Audrey did stop, though her desire to avoid a scene was the clear motivation for this obedience. Glaring, she gestured for Ruth to be quiet.

“What are you doing?” Ruth called.

“I'm going home.”

“You're walking home? From here?”

“I refuse to sit in that car with you for one more second.”

“That's ridiculous!”

“No,” Audrey said. “You're the one who's ridiculous.”

“Don't speak to me that way, Audrey. I don't deserve that. You know I've only ever wanted the best for you.”

Audrey laughed again, that dismal, knowing little laugh. “The best for me? It's amazing to me that you can still make that argument.”

Audrey's face danced with defiance. Ruth prayed that this was just empty bravado.

“Is that what you've been doing these past months, Mother? Working on what's best for me?”

“I don't know what you're getting at.” But her voice was always her undoing. She had no control over its strange electricity, its preteen male disorder, its haywire leaps and somersaults.

“Oh, give it up,” Audrey said. “I know about Henry Winter.”

Ruth paused. “Whatever you think you know, you're mistaken.”

“I saw you in the library. At the dance. I'm not an idiot.”

Ruth was about to deny the charge, but denial suddenly seemed useless on so many levels. She knew she should fight for her life, as any sane person would, but she had that queer, floating feeling she sometimes got during arguments. A portion of her cared about nothing. If she was found out, then so be it. She looked at the sky with damp eyes. “What do you want from me, Audrey? I'm a horrible person, okay?”

“I don't want anything from you. I just want you to leave me alone.”

“How can I leave you alone?

“I'm not a child. I can get home by myself.”

“And then what? You have to talk to me sometime. Look, I'm sorry for everything I've done, but the Henry thing…it has nothing to do with you.”

Audrey's cheeks flushed. “You're a liar! How can that have nothing to do with me?”

Now came Ruth's turn to smirk. “I'm sorry, I had no idea honesty was the value you held most dear.”

“You made me go to that school! Whatever happened there—”

“Oh, yes, it's all my fault,” Ruth interrupted. “Audrey, you wanted to go to Eliot.”

“How could I even know what I wanted?” Tears had begun to pour down Audrey's face, and she took rapid, clumsy swipes at them. “Just leave me alone. Leave me alone!”

A woman, looking discreetly down, moved to the side of the walkway to pass them. From behind, Ruth watched her steady ascent. The woman's straight brown hair was tied into a ponytail, loosened like a sagging mood, and over her hunched shoulder was slung a heavy-looking black leather purse. But there was purpose in her march, a sturdy metre that spoke to Ruth of efficiency, dependability, despite the unattractive black-heeled boots (poor quality, uncomfortable, polished and repolished, made to last beyond their lifespan) that suggested an outdated sense of style. A narrow flash of light blinked for a second at the side of the woman's head: a dangling silver earring catching the sun. Ruth had an urge to overtake the woman and glimpse her face. Something about the twinkle of the earring against the general drabness. She felt as though she had just missed something she was supposed to see, that the woman's face would somehow have given her strength, that, in embodying everything unlike her, it would be something she could hold on to, like the sight of a Muskoka chair at the end of a long dock by the lake, an image she could recall later when she needed to manage her disordered feelings. A restorative breath. Not emotion recollected in tranquility, but tranquility, recollected in emotion.

“It's over, you know, with Henry,” Ruth said.

Audrey was silent.

“Are you planning to tell your father?”

Still swatting at her wet eyes, Audrey glanced down to the valley below, her face bounding with uncertainty.

Ruth shielded her eyes against the setting sun and its blinding reflection off the hard surface of the cars still moving past. “I used to know you,” she said.

“Just leave me alone.”

Ruth sighed. She supposed she had no choice but to let Audrey walk. “Do you want my scarf?” she asked.

Audrey shook her head and set off up the hill towards Broadview.

Ruth waited for a minute, hoping Audrey would relent, then put her shoes back on and returned to the car. Her hands trembled as she started up the engine, but she couldn't bring herself to drive away. She saw that from the beginning, she had worried about all the wrong things: child killers, car accidents, rare diseases. She worried about what would happen to Audrey if she didn't go to Eliot, if she went to Eliot. She worried that Audrey was too conventional, not conventional enough. She should have been worrying about herself. What pain she would cause to the being she had created. What damage she would do in the name of love.

She craned around to the back to retrieve her gloves, but they were lost in the chaos of papers spread across the seats. She searched the floor, dug around in the piles. So much work, the accumulation of everything she'd been ignoring. Just that afternoon, Sheila had delivered a folder of
Pomegranate
submissions to Ruth's desk. She had gotten her class to write their own version of William Carlos Williams's “This Is Just to Say,” and she had excitedly asked Ruth to look at the poems then and there. Ruth had nearly dumped the entire pack into the garbage.

The thick folder lay on top of the others, held shut by a long blue elastic. Even as she opened it, Ruth reminded herself how little she cared. She would just take the smallest peek. The poem on top was written in tiny, neat, green cursive. Ruth's eyes passed over the words once quickly, then again more slowly, then again, and again.

 

This is just to say

I cut off all the hair

of your favourite Barbie

 

the one you

had hidden

in the back of your closet

 

Forgive me

I always hated that doll

and the hair looked like gold

coming away in my hands

 

 

Cha
p
ter
S
eventeen

AUDREY RETURNED TO ELIOT
for the last time at the end of the week. Her parents would have forbidden the trip, had they known, but Ruth was out doing errands as Audrey boarded the bus and set forth. The day had been mild, a half-hearted struggle between rain and sunshine, and spreading across the sky over the top of Eliot were heavy charcoal thunderclouds made dazzling by blurry golden outlines from the sun they obstructed. The grounds were quiet: it was after four o'clock already.

From her position on the sidewalk, Audrey couldn't get a clear view of the school. And perhaps she didn't need to see it after all, its elegant stance on that minor hill, waiting for her in the compromised light of late day. Had she been closer, she might have seen the dirty snow melting in the troughs on each side of the driveway. She might have seen the softball game the Eliot girls would never win. Her own reflection in the windows, her eyes taking a measure of everything she was leaving behind. A part of her was glad she could no longer get this view. She wanted to keep it as it was, as it never was. The windows just washed. The red balloon floating overhead. The weather verging on autumn, on the beginning. If she had approached, she might have seen the little girl on her knees, drawing a chalk hopscotch board as her friends looked on. The girl that was never her. Already memory was forming a protective seal around imprecision. With her merciful removal in time, what could ever correct her? How easy it was to fall out of your own tiny history.

A black car swished out through the open gates. Through its rear window, an old English sheepdog regarded her dolefully. Two prefects came down the driveway, carrying props from a morning skit. Seeing Audrey there, they cast their eyes away. She was about to turn and leave when she noticed, at the far end of the driveway, a known figure, approaching with light, pretty precision, as though her feet didn't quite touch the ground. Retreat was the smartest option, the only option for someone of her criminal condition, but Audrey was stupefied, as ever, by the radiant force of that figure. It put her in mind of a fairy tale character, stepping tenuously out of the pages of a storybook into the fallen world she couldn't quite resist.

“What are you doing here?” Arabella said cautiously, drawing near.

In Arabella's face for the first time was fear. Never before had her glow faltered, never had it been smothered even for a second by the tenebrous unease that crossed her face now. The sight of it filled Audrey with new strength. It was the one thing that had never occurred to her during the accumulating humiliations of the past days. All of her focus had been on the fitting injustice of the fact that she had been caught on the one occasion she had tried to do the right thing. But she saw now that she was not exclusively the pathetic picture of herself presented in Ms. McAllister's office. She was not as powerless as she had believed.

“You'll get in trouble if someone notices you,” Arabella continued.

Audrey made a face. “I'm on a public sidewalk.”

“Why are you even here?” She glanced around, as though to summon psychic support from her absent entourage. “It's not like anyone misses you or wants to say goodbye.”

“Why do you care what I do?” Audrey said.

“I don't!”

Audrey wanted to laugh, so little did Arabella's contempt touch her. For her, it was over. Yet Arabella still had everything to lose. It should have been so obvious all along. The notes, for her, were a love letter to Eliot—yes, they went against what the institution stood for, but wasn't it the nature of love to go awry? The notes only revealed how intimately involved she was in every miniscule pulse of life within the place, how ardently she needed to create a whole dramatic life for herself there. Without Eliot, she was just a girl. A pretty girl. But not an Eliot girl.

“No one will believe you, if you try to give the rest of us away,” Arabella said too vehemently.

Audrey knew that this was probably true. But she also recognized the power an accusation would have. Ms. McAllister would dismiss it, in all likelihood. But it would be out there, a lasting disgrace, a malignancy no one could quite eradicate.

“You hope no one would believe me,” Audrey said.

“No one likes you enough to listen to you.”

The angrier Arabella sounded, the more liberated Audrey felt. She seemed to have poured all her fear into the girl facing her. She knew well that the worst thing to face was the unknown. Would Arabella be afraid for a week, a month? Always looking over her shoulder now?

“Enjoy your glory days,” Audrey said. “They'll be over soon.” She began to move away, then stopped. “Oh, and tell Henry I said hi.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a book,
The Rainbow
. “My mom, too. Actually, could you give this back to him for her? I guess he lent it to her when they were fucking.”

Audrey turned into the wind, her face as vivid and purified as if she had just splashed cold water on it.

 

THROUGH THE LONG OVAL
window of the front door, Audrey could see to the lit kitchen. Richard was cutting vegetables at the island, and Ruth was standing by the stove in her ratty old University of Toronto sweatshirt. Their backs were to each other, but their lips were moving. Soon they would sit down to dinner together, Ruth and Richard at either end, Audrey in the centre, at the spot some part of her thought she'd be sitting at for the rest of her life.

One day, she knew, she would probably long for just this. The time when she was still with them, contained in the perpetual childhood of the kitchen table. When she was barely able to remember the particulars of this life—the rhythms of the dogs' sleep-breathing on the couch, the water stain in the middle of the kitchen table, the smell of pencil shavings in her Eliot classroom, the configuration of veins on Ruth's hands—she would call for her mother. In history, they had learned about the soldiers dying on the beaches at Normandy: through the fog of confusion, the thicket of duress, from the deathbed comes the anguished request. That long-suppressed ache for a lost time, a phantom time: it always surfaces. Perhaps it only intensifies once you have finally forgotten your mother's distinctive tactility. The time past. The time that never was. Would Audrey's last thoughts be of her?

Audrey watched her parents, twisting the bottom of a lock of hair around her index finger. She realized Ruth was doing the same. The silhouette, in profile, was a familiar sight—a hip jutted, that restless hand—but for a second, the refrigerator light collaborated with Richard's penumbral form to turn Ruth into a reflection, a prediction.

Then Richard turned to the island and adjusted the volume button on the radio. He pulled Ruth away from the stove and into a clumsy embrace. A wooden spoon fell from her hand, and she bent to retrieve it, but he stopped her, pulling her body against his as he swayed. Grabbing her hand, he twirled her under the arch of his arm. She was shaking her head, but laughing too, probably protesting that she felt like an idiot. Dancing in the kitchen was for others, people who could let go of their pride enough to be foolish together, if only for the length of a song. Audrey imagined that when she opened the door, she would hear the tinny warmth of Edith Piaf singing “La Vie en Rose.” If she tried, she could almost make it out.

Marlow lay by the front door, his dozing head twitching slightly on his paws. Sensing her approach, he lifted his head. She knew exactly the way he smelled, the soft wave of his fur under her hands. She waved to let him know that she saw him there, that she loved him too, and his tail began to wag, welcoming her home.