About the only advantage to this life of strain was that I gained a thorough knowledge of a portion of my future audience: those who got married too young, who had babies too early, who wanted princes and castles and ended up with cramped apartments and grudging husbands. But I couldn't foresee that at the time.
Monica dropped out of school as soon as she could. So did Theresa, in order to get married to a garage mechanic, an older man who didn't go to my school or any other. It was said she was pregnant, though as one of my friends remarked, how could you tell? I hung on, grimly; I wanted to graduate in order to be finished with it, but I had no idea what I was going to do next. My mother wished me to go to Trinity College at the University of Toronto, which was prestigious, and I almost wanted to myself, I wanted to study archaeology or perhaps history; but I couldn't bear the thought of four more years of acute concealed misery, with the horrors of sororities, engagements, football games and spring weddings thrown in. I started taking parttime jobs; I opened a bank account. I told Aunt Lou, but no one else, that as soon as I had enough money I was going to leave home.
"Do you think that's wise, dear?" she said.
"Do you think staying there would be wise?" I asked. She knew my mother, she should have sympathized with me. Perhaps she was worried about what would happen to me, out there in the world. I was worried about that too. I wanted to leave, but I was also afraid to.
I'd been feeling guilty about Aunt Lou: I hadn't been going to the movies with her as much as I used to. The truth was that I was afraid one of my friends, Barbara or Carole-Ann (who was a cheerleader) or Valerie, done up in a cashmere sweater, with little trussed breasts sticking out jaunty as cocked thumbs, a wreath of artificial flowers twined around the elastic band which held the ponytail, towing a boy wearing a jacket with the letter B on it, would turn up at the same movie and see me sniveling beside my fur-draped, hefty aunt.
"Don't go before you're ready," said Aunt Lou sagely, and as usual it could have meant anything.
The kinds of jobs I was able to get were unskilled and not very pleasant. Employers as a rule didn't want to hire anyone so fat, but some were too embarrassed to turn me away completely, especially when they'd advertised. I would look at them accusingly from between my bloated eyelids and say, "Here's the advertisement, right here," and they would take me on for a couple of weeks, making up a lie about one of their regular staff being away on holiday. Thus I worked in the five-and-dime for three weeks, as a theater usher for two, a cashier in a restaurant for three, and so on. Some employers welcomed me: I was as cheap as a woman but didn't cause the disruption among male employees and customers other women did. However, these were often hard, disagreeable jobs, like washing dishes, and I didn't stay at them long.
My mother was baffled by these jobs. "What do you have to work for?" she asked, many times. "We give you all the money you need." She found the jobs I took degrading to her personally, which was a bonus. They must have reminded her, also, of her own early life.
When sexual frankness became fashionable, I read a lot of accounts of other people's first sexual experiences: masturbation with doorknobs, water faucets and the handles of electric shavers, gropings in the back seats of cars at drive-in movies, scramblings among bushes and so forth. None of these were like mine. I myself did have two early sexual experiences, though for the most part I suppressed my interest in sex as completely as I suppressed my interest in war films. There was no available role for me, so I ignored the whole thing as much as possible. Although I pretended to, I didn't really join in my friends' collective passion for male singers. The most I would permit myself was an idealized lust for the figure of Mercury, with winged hat and sandals, impressive muscles and a telephone cable wrapped discreetly around his loins, that used to appear on the front of the Toronto telephone directory. It disappeared years ago. Perhaps the phone company discovered that he was the god of thieves and trickery as well as speed.
But I had vicarious access to the sexual mysteries through the Barbaras and Valeries with whom I ate lunch and walked home, though they tended to discuss such things more with each other than they did with me. They excluded me out of respect, as one would exclude a nun or a saint. Sexually they were prudish, doling themselves out in approved amounts, a kiss after the third date, more serious kissing only if you were going steady, protection below the neck. It was before the pill, and there were enough dismal examples held in front of their eyes, by mothers and by gossip about girls who had to get married, or even worse, who had to get married but couldn't, to keep them rigid. If they went further than you were supposed to, they didn't tell.
My first sexual experience went like this. I was walking home with Valerie, who has since made several guest appearances in the pages of my Costume Gothics, once dressed in a farthingale, once in an ersatz-Grecian dress of the Regency, cut low on the bosom. This day, however, she was wearing a red sweater with a poodle pin on it, a matching red plaid skirt and penny loafers, with a navy-blue trench coat over all. She was telling me about an important phone call she'd had the evening before, when she was in the middle of washing her hair. Several blocks before the street where I usually turned off, we were intercepted by a boy who had been trying to get Valerie to go out with him for weeks. She wasn't interested - in her opinion, as I knew, he was a pill - but etiquette dictated that she not be too openly rude to him, as that might get her the reputation of being stuck-up. So he strolled along beside us, making nervous conversation to Valerie and ignoring me as much as he could.
Valerie gave me a significant look so I didn't turn off down my street. Instead I walked with her all the way to her house, knowing she would call later and thank me for having caught on. At her driveway she said goodbye, then turned and lilted up the walk, her ponytail swinging. The back door closed behind her. I stood there on the sidewalk, my feet bulging over the sides of my penny loafers. My ankles hurt, I'd gone three blocks out of my way and would now have to retrace them, it was time for me to go home and make myself a triple-decker Kraft Cheese and peanut butter sandwich and get ready for my usherette job at the Starlite Theater, where Natalie Wood was playing in Splendor in the Grass. The boy, whom even I judged unacceptable, was now supposed to say, "See ya," and stride away from me as fast as he could go. But instead he did a curious thing. He knelt down in front of me, right in a mud puddle - it was April and had been raining - and buried his face against my enormous stomach.
What did I do? I was stupefied; I was compassionate; I stroked his hair. My hand smelled of Brylcreem for days.
After a few minutes of this he got up, the knees of his pants dripping wet, and walked away. That was my first sexual experience. I went home and ate my sandwich.
As to why this particular boy, whose name I could never remember, though I could picture quite clearly the strained, even agonized expression on his face, performed this grotesque though almost ritual act on a muddy sidewalk in the suburb of Braeside Park in front of an ordinary house of red brick with white trim and two clipped cedars, one on either side of the front door, I had no clue. Perhaps it was sorrow over thwarted love and he was looking for consolation. Then again, it might have been an instinctive act of belly worship; or perhaps, judging from the way he threw his arms around me as far as they could go, his chemistry textbook lying forgotten on the sod, and dug in his fingers, he might have perceived me as a single enormous breast. But this is later speculation. At the time I was so shocked by the novelty of being touched by a boy that I forgot about the incident as soon as possible. It hadn't been very pleasant. I didn't even use it to make fun of him, as I might have if I had been thinner. On his part, he avoided me and didn't try to get Valerie to go out with him again.
My second sexual experience took place during one of my parttime jobs. It was when I was working as a cashier in a restaurant, a small, mediocre one called the Bite-A-Bit. It served hot dogs, hamburgers, milk shakes, coffee, pieces of pie; and if you wanted a full-course dinner, fried chicken and shrimp,
minute steaks, grilled pork chops and roast beef. I worked from four-thirty to nine-thirty, when it closed, and part of my pay was a free meal, from the lower price ranges. I perched on a high stool behind the cash register and took in the money. I also looked after the customers who sat at the counter beside my stool, and for this purpose I had a telephone connected with the cooking area, over which I gave the orders.
The cooking area was at the back, with a pass-through hatchway decorated in fake-brick wallpaper and several copper pans which were never used. There were two cooks, a lethargic, resentful Canadian and a sprightly, bright-eyed foreigner, either Italian or Greek, I wasn't sure which. This was always the way, in my experience with jobs. The Canadians who had jobs like that didn't expect to rise any higher: despite the advantage of knowing the language and the terrain, this was the best they could do. The foreigners, on the other hand, were on the way up, they were saving money and learning, they didn't intend to stay on the menial level. The foreign cook took half the time of the other and was twice as polite. He beamed as he handed the waitresses their plates of food, he scampered around in his ovenlike enclosure like a baking chipmunk, humming snatches of exotic song, and you could see the other man would have liked to kill him.
My relationship with him began when he started to reach for the phone every time I called in an order. He had a clear view of me through the hatchway.
"Alloo," he would sing sweetly.
"A cheeseburger and a side of french fries," I would say.
"For you, I make it extra special."
I thought he was teasing me and ignored him, but one day he asked over the intercom, "You have coffee with me, eh? After work?"
I was too startled to say no. No one had ever asked me for coffee before.
He helped me on with my coat and opened the door for me, darting around me like a tugboat around the Queen Elizabeth; he was five inches shorter than I was and probably eighty pounds lighter. Once we were sitting across from each other in a nearby coffee shop, he got straight to the point.
"I require for you to marry me."
"What?" I said.
He leaned across the table, gazing at me with his sparkling black eyes. "I am serious. I want to meet with your father, and look, I show you my bank account." To my consternation he pushed a little blue bankbook towards me.
"My father?" I stammered. "Your bank account...."
"See," he said, "I have right intentions. I wish to open restaurant of my own now soon, I have saved enough. You are a serious girl, you are not like many in this country, you are a good girl, I have watched you, and I do not know how to speak. You would work the cash register for me, and welcome the people. I would cook, much better things than in there." He gestured across the street towards the Bite-A-Bit. "I will serve the wine, who but a pig can eat without wine?"
"But," I said. Just for a moment I could not think of any reason why not. Then I imagined the expression on my mother's face as I loomed down the aisle in white satin with this tiny foreign man slung over my arm like a purse.
"I will give you babies," he said, "lots of babies, I see you like the babies. You are a good girl. Then, when we have enough money, we go and visit my country. You will like."
"But," I said, "I'm not the same religion as you."
He waved his hand. "You will change."
When I first visited Terremoto it was more obvious what he saw in me: I was the shape of a wife already, I was the shape it took most women several years to become. I had just started a little early, that was all. But at the time I couldn't overcome the suspicion that he was making fun of me; either that, or it was simply a commercial proposition. How easy it would be, though; for despite his size he was obviously used to making decisions, I myself would not have to make any ever again. However, I did not want to be a cashier for much more of my life. I wasn't good at adding.
"Thank you very much," I said, "but I'm afraid it's impossible."
He was not discouraged. Over the next few weeks he behaved as if he'd been expecting a rejection, as a matter of form. It was proper and modest of me to have refused him and now all I needed was persuasion; after the correct amount I would give in. He flirted with me through the hatchway when I went to pick up my orders, making cat's eyes and wiggling his small brown moustache at me, he called me over the intercom to sigh and plead, watching me all the while from his post at the griddle. When it was time for me to take my break and eat dinner he cooked expensive, forbidden things for me, piling my plate high with shrimps, which he knew I liked, and topping the mound with a sprig of parsley. My appetite, usually gargantuan, began to fall off, partly from the effects of being in contact with other people's food for hours at a time, but partly because at every meal I felt I was being bribed.
The whole thing had the air of a ceremony, a performance that it was necessary to go through before I gave in and did what he wanted; yet like all ceremonies that are believed in, it was sincere and oddly touching. I liked him, but he was disturbing me. I knew I didn't merit such attentions, and besides, there was something absurd about them; it was like being pursued by Charlie Chaplin. I was relieved when the permanent cashier returned and I could quit.
For a while I daydreamed about this man in school (I never did learn his real name; in his determination to become Canadian, he insisted that it was John). For the most part I saw him merely as a landscape, a region of blue skies and balmy climate, with white sand beaches and a stately classical ruin on a cliff, with pillars; a place that would be in marked contrast to dour Toronto and its gritty winter winds, its salt slush that decayed your boots, or its humid, oppressive summers; a place where I would fit in at last, where I would be the right shape. Sometimes I thought it would be pleasant to have married him, it would be as good as having a pet, for with his black eyes and his soft moustache he would be like a friendly animal, a squirrel or an otter, scurrying over my body, enormous to him as a peninsula. But gradually these images faded and as I tuned out the drone of the history teacher, talking monotonously about natural resources and other things that didn't interest me, I returned to an earlier fantasy.
In this one I was sitting in a circus tent. It was dark, something was about to happen, the audience was tense with expectation. I was eating popcorn. Suddenly a spotlight cut through the blackness and focused on a tiny platform at the top of the tent. Upon it stood the Fat Lady from the freak show at the Canadian National Exhibition. She was even fatter than I had imagined her, fatter than the crude picture of her painted on the hoarding, much fatter than me. She was wearing pink tights with spangles, a short fluffy pink skirt, satin ballet slippers and, on her head, a sparkling tiara. She carried a diminutive pink umbrella; this was a substitute for the wings which I longed to pin on her. Even in my fantasies I remained faithful to a few ground rules of reality.
The crowd burst out laughing. They howled, pointed and jeered; they chanted insulting songs. But the Fat Lady, oblivious, began to walk carefully out onto the high wire, while the band played a slow, stately melody. At this the crowd stilled, and a murmur of dismay arose. It was obvious this was a dangerous thing for her to be doing, she was so enormously fat, how could she keep her balance, she would topple and fall. "She'll be killed," they whispered, for there was no safety net.
Gradually, inch by inch, the Fat Lady proceeded along the wire, pausing to make sure of her balance, her pink umbrella raised defiantly above her head. Step by step I took her across, past the lumbering enterprises of the West Coast, over the wheatlands of the prairies, walking high above the mines and smokestacks of Ontario, appearing in the clouds like a pink vision to the poor farmers of the St. Lawrence Valley and the mackerel fishermen of the Maritimes. "Good Christ, what is it?" they muttered, pausing in the endless hauling-in of their nets. Several times she faltered and the crowd drew in its breath; the wire oscillated, she concentrated all her forces on this perilous crossing, for a fall meant death. Then, just before the bell went and the period was over - this was the trick - s
he would step to safety on the other side and the people would rise to their feet, the roar of their voices her tribute. A large crane would appear and lower her to the ground.
You'd think I would have given this Fat Lady my own face, but it wasn't so simple. Instead she had the face of Theresa, my despised fellow-sufferer. At school I avoided her, but I wasn't altogether a heartless monster, I wished to make reparation, I had good intentions.
I knew how Arthur would analyze this fantasy. What a shame, he'd say, how destructive to me were the attitudes of society, forcing me into a mold of femininity that I could never fit, stuffing me into those ridiculous pink tights, those spangles, those outmoded, cramping ballet slippers. How much better for me if I'd been accepted for what I was and had learned to accept myself, too. Very true, very right, very pious. But it's still not so simple. I wanted those things, that fluffy skirt, that glittering tiara. I liked them.
As for the Fat Lady, I knew perfectly well that after her death-defying feat she had to return to the freak show, to sit in her oversized chair with her knitting and be gaped at by the ticket-buyers. That was her real life.
CHAPTER TEN
When I was in my third year at Braeside High, Aunt Lou invited me to dinner one Sunday. I was surprised, as I knew she reserved Sunday evenings for Robert, the accountant from her company. But when she said, "Wear something nice, dear," I realized she was going to let me meet him. I didn't have anything nice to wear, but it was like Aunt Lou not to acknowledge this. I wore my felt skirt with the telephone on it.
I was prepared to be jealous of Robert. I'd pictured him as tall, overpowering and a little sinister, taking advantage of my Aunt Lou's affections. But instead he was small and dapper, the most trimly dressed man I'd ever seen. Aunt Lou had even cleaned up the apartment for him, more or less; though I could see the toe of a nylon stocking nosing out from under the best chair, where he sat sipping at the edge of his martini.
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