But all he said was, "Anyone with you?"
"No," I said. He looked over my shoulder and around the gilded lobby to make sure I was telling the truth. It didn't strike me at the time that he might have suspected I was a prostitute. I attributed my success not to the fact that the lobby was empty, but to the white gloves I'd worn as a symbol of adulthood and social status. "A lady never goes out of the house without putting on her gloves," said my mother. Aunt Lou lost gloves continually.
(Perhaps it was to the Royal York Hotel, that bogus fairyland of nineteenth-century delights, red carpeting and chandeliers, moldings and cornices, floor-to-ceiling mirrors and worn plush sofas and brass-trimmed elevators, that the first stirrings of my creative impulse could be traced. To me, such a building seemed designed for quite other beings than the stodgy businessmen and their indistinct wives who were actually to be found there. It demanded ball gowns and decorum and fans, dresses with off-the-shoulder necklines, like those on the Laura Secord chocolate boxes, Summer Selection, crinolines and dapper gentlemen. I was upset when they remodeled it.)
Once the bellhop was finally gone - he hung around for a long time turning the lights on and off and opening and closing the Venetian blinds until I remembered what I'd read about tipping - I opened all the bureau drawers. I longed to write an elegant note on the aristocratic stationery, but there was no one at all I could write to. I took a bath, using up all the monogrammed towels. I washed my hair and rolled it up in a set of plastic-mesh-covered rollers. All the time I was fat I'd worn my hair cropped short, which emphasized the roundness of my face. My mother kept making proposals for improvement; she'd wanted me to wear a pageboy, then a poodle cut, but I'd rejected everything. Now, however, I'd been growing my hair for a year and it was shoulder-length, dark red and straight. I didn't wear it loose but kept it back with a bobby pin behind each ear. When my hair was neatly rolled, I stood in front of the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door and examined myself, much as a real estate agent might examine a swamp, with an eye to future development. I was still overweight and I was still baggy. There were stretch marks on my thighs, and my face was that of a thirty-five-year-old housewife with four kids and a wandering husband: I looked worn down. But I had green eyes and small white teeth, and luckily I didn't have pimples. I had only eighteen pounds to go.
In the morning I bought a paper and went through the want ads, looking for a room. I found one on Isabella Street, called up the landlady and represented myself over the phone as a twenty-five-year-old office girl, non-drinking and non-smoking. I pinned my hair back, put on my white gloves and went off to inspect it. I gave my name as Miss L. Delacourt, and I used this name also when I opened a new bank account later in the day. I withdrew all my money from my other account and closed it; I didn't want my mother tracking me down. This was the formal beginning of my second self. I was amazed at how easily everyone believed me, but then, why should they suspect?
That afternoon I went to the hospital to see my father. I'd never been inside it before, so I had no idea how to find him. I asked receptionists and they asked each other until they discovered he was in an operating room. They wanted me to make an appointment or stay in the reception area - I hadn't told them I was his daughter - and I said I would. But I'd heard the floor number, and when none of them was watching I got up quietly and went to the elevator.
I stood outside the door, waiting, and finally he came out. I'd never seen him dressed in his official uniform: he had a white cap on and a gown, and a mask over the lower half of his face, which he was in the act of pulling down. He looked much more impressive than he ever had at home, he looked like someone with power. He was talking with two other doctors. I had to call out to him before he noticed me.
"Your mother's been worried sick," he said without annoyance.
"She's been worried sick all my life," I said. "I just wanted to tell. you that I'm all right. I'm not coming back, I have a room and enough money."
He stared down at me with an expression I could not place then because I'd rarely had it directed my way. It was admiration, and perhaps even envy: I had done what he couldn't bring himself to do, I had run away. "Are you sure you're all right?" he said. When I nodded, he said, "I don't suppose I could persuade you to go around and see her?"
"She tried to kill me," I said. "Did she tell you that?" I was exaggerating, as the knife hadn't gone in very far, but I wanted to impress on him the fact that it wasn't my fault. "She stuck a knife in my arm." I rolled up my sleeve to show him the scratch.
"She shouldn't have done that," he said, as if she'd made a left-hand turn where a right was required. "I'm sure she didn't mean to."
I agreed to keep in touch with him - I kept this promise, more or less - but I refused to have anything more to do with my mother. He understood my position. He said it in those words exactly, like a man who has spent a lot of time understanding people's positions. I've remembered that phrase, and it occurred to me a long time afterwards that no one ever understood his position; not me, not my mother or Aunt Lou, not anyone. I don't think it was because he didn't have one. His position was the position of a man who has killed people and brought them back to life, though not the same ones, and these mysteries are hard to communicate. Other than that, his position was that of a man who wears maroon leather slippers and fiddles with house plants on weekends, and for this reason is thought of as an inconsequential fool by his wife. He was a man in a cage, like most men; but what made him different was his dabbling in lives and deaths.
For the next couple of months I lived in my Isabella Street room, for which I paid fourteen dollars a week. That included a change of sheets and towels and a hot plate, on which I boiled cups of tea and prepared low-calorie snacks. The house itself was a red-brick Victorian one - they've torn it down since and built a highrise - with dark, creaky wooden-floored hallways, a staircase which has been useful to me on several occasions ("She glided up the staircase, one hand on the banister ..."), and a smell of furniture polish. Undercutting the furniture polish was another smell, probably vomit. Both the house and the neighborhood had gone downhill; but the landlady was a Scot and severe, so whatever vomiting went on was done behind closed doors.
Other people lived in the house but I seldom saw them, partly because I was out a lot. I trotted briskly down the steps every morning as if I had a job, but actually I was starving myself so I would be able to collect Aunt Lou's money. In the evenings I would return to my room and boil up a package of peas or some corned beef on the single hot plate. While I ate I mourned Aunt Lou. Now that she was dead I had no one to talk to; I'd get out her fox fur, which smelled of mothballs, and stare at it, hoping it would miraculously open its mouth and speak, in the voice of Aunt Lou, as it had during my childhood. I tried going to the movies, by myself, but it only depressed me more, and with Aunt Lou absent I had to deal with the attentions of strange men, which interrupted the films. In August I went to the Canadian National Exhibition, a melancholy pilgrimage. I hadn't been there with Aunt Lou for three years - she must've felt I was getting too old for it - and it seemed different, shoddier somehow, the gaiety forced and raucous.
I went to the museum a lot, and the art gallery, places where I could walk around and look as if I was doing something, places where I would not be tempted by food. I took bus trips: to St. Catharines, to London, Ontario, to Windsor, and to Buffalo and Syracuse and Albany. I was searching for a city I could move to, where I would be free not to be myself. I didn't want anything too different or startling, I just wanted to fit in without being known.
It was on these bus trips that I first discovered there was something missing in me. This lack came from having been fat; it was like being without a sense of pain, and pain and fear are protective, up to a point. I'd never developed the usual female fears: fear of intruders, fear of the dark, fear of gasping noises over the phone, fear of bus stops and slowing cars, fear of anyone or anything outside whatever magic circle defines safety.
I wasn't whistled at or pinched on elevators, I was never followed down lonely streets. I didn't experience men as aggressive lechers but as bashful, elusive creatures who could think of nothing to say to me and who faded away at my approach. Although my mother had warned me about bad men in the ravine, by the time I reached puberty her warnings rung hollow. She clearly didn't believe I would ever be molested, and neither did I. It would have been like molesting a giant basketball, and secretly, though I treasured images of myself exuding melting femininity and soft surrender, I knew I would be able to squash any potential molester against a wall merely by breathing out. So when I shrank to normal size I had none of these fears, and I had to develop them artificially. I had to keep reminding myself: Don't go there alone. Don't go out at night. Eyes front. Don't look, even if it interests you. Don't stop. Don't get out of the car. Keep going.
I would be sitting near the center of the bus. Behind me would be a man smoking a cigar, beside me a stranger. Every couple of hours we would stop at a roadside restaurant where I would make sleepwalking trips to the Ladies', which smelled always of disinfectant and liquid soap. There I would wipe from my face with dampened paper towels the bus fumes, oily and brownish; and later, when the side of my head was bumping against the cold metal of the window frame and my body itched with the desire to sleep, a hand would appear on my thigh, stealthy, not moving, an exploratory hand, tense with the knowledge of its solitary mission.
When the hands appeared I couldn't cope with them. They took me by surprise. Men didn't make passes at fat girls, so I had no experience, and I was acutely uncomfortable. The hands didn't frighten or arouse me, they simply made me aware that I didn't know what to do. So I would pretend I didn't notice the hand; I would gaze out the window at the pitch-black landscape, while deft fingers crept up my thigh. At the next stop I would excuse myself politely and stumble off the bus, without much idea of what to do next.
Sometimes I would look for a motel; more often, though, I'd head for the bus-station restaurant and eat all the dry doughnuts and pieces of fish-glue pie I could afford. At these times I felt very lonely; I also longed to be fat again. It would be an insulation, a cocoon. Also it would be a disguise. I could be merely an onlooker again, with nothing too much expected of me. Without my magic cloak of blubber and invisibility I felt naked, pruned, as though some essential covering was missing.
Despite these relapses I dwindled. Suddenly I was down to the required weight, and I was face to face with the rest of my life. I was now a different person, and it was like being born fully grown at the age of nineteen: I was the right shape, but I had the wrong past. I'd have to get rid of it entirely and construct a different one for myself, a more agreeable one. And I decided against any of the places I'd visited. Living in a rented room in Albany would be the same, finally, as living in a rented room in Toronto, except that there would be less chance of running into my mother on the street. Or anyone else who might recognize me.
The thought of going on with the same kind of life for ever and ever depressed me. I wanted to have more than one life, and when at last I stepped triumphantly down from the scales in Mr. Morrisey's office and collected the money, I went straight to a travel agency and bought a plane ticket for England.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
"You have the body of a goddess," the Polish Count used to say, in moments of contemplative passion. (Did he rehearse?)
"Do I have the head of one too?" I replied once, archly.
"Do not make such jokes," he said. "You must believe me. Why do you refuse to believe in your own beauty?"
But which goddess did he mean? There was more than one, I knew. The one on the Venus pencil package, for instance, with no arms and all covered with cracks. Some goddesses didn't have bodies at all; there was one in the museum, three heads on top of a pillar, like a fire hydrant. Many were shaped like vases, many like stones. I found his compliment ambiguous.
The Polish Count was an accident. I met him first when I fell off a double-decker bus near Trafalgar Square. Luckily I didn't fall from the upper deck; I had one foot halfway to the ground, but I wasn't used to having the bus start before people were safely off it and it leapt from under me, sending me sprawling onto the sidewalk. The Polish Count happened to be passing by, and he picked me up.
At the time I was living in a damp bed-sitter in Willesden Green. I found it through Canada House, which was the first place I went when I got to London. I was homesick already. I knew no one, I had nowhere to stay, and I was disappointed by what I'd seen of England on the bus from the airport. So far it was too much like what I had left, except that everything looked as though two giant hands had compressed each object and then shoved them all closer together. The cars were smaller, the houses were crowded, the people were shorter; only the trees were bigger. And things were not as old as I'd expected them to be. I wanted castles and princesses, the Lady of Shalott floating down a winding river in a boat, as in Narrative Poems for Juniors, which I studied in Grade Nine. I'd looked up shalott, fatally, in the dictionary: shallot, kind of small onion. The spelling was different but not different enough.
I am half-sick of shadows, said
The Lady of Small Onion.
Then there was that other line, which caused much tittering among the boys and embarrassment among the girls:
The curse is come upon me, cried
The Lady of Shalott.
Why did boys think blood running down a girl's leg was funny? Or was it terror that made them laugh? But none of it put me off, I was a romantic despite myself, and I really wanted, then, to have someone, anyone, say that I had a lovely face, even if I had to turn into a corpse in a barge-bottom first.
Instead of the castles and ladies, though, there was only a lot of traffic and a large number of squat people with bad teeth.
Canada House, when I got there, was a marble mausoleum, impressive but silent. A woman behind a dark wooden counter in a cavernous, dimly lit room, in which a few dour Canadians were reading week-old Toronto newspapers and collecting their mail, handed me a list of rooms to let. Since I knew nothing about the topography of London I took the first one I could get. Unfortunately it was an hour's ride from the center via the underground, which was like a traveling front parlor lined in purple plush; I kept expecting to see footstools and potted palms. Toronto's new subway, on the other hand, with its pastel tiles and smell of Dust-Bane, was more like a traveling bathroom. Already I was feeling provincial.
When I came up from the underground, I walked along a street lined with tiny shops; an unhealthy number of them were candy stores. The woman at Canada House had drawn me a rough map; she had also advised me to purchase a small Maple Leaf and wear it on my lapel, so as not to be mistaken for an American.
The house was a Tudor cottage, the same as all the others on the street, fake Tudor, fake cottage, with a walled front garden. The landlord was a surly man in shirtsleeves and braces who seemed to be afraid I would have orgiastic parties and skip without paying the rent. The room itself was on the ground floor and smelled of rotting wood; it was so damp that the furniture actually was rotting, though very slowly. As I lay in my clammy bed the first night, wondering if I had taken off so much weight and come so far for nothing, a black man climbed in through the front window. But all he said was, "Wrong window, sorry," and climbed out again. I could hear faint sounds of a lively party going on farther down the street. I was disgustingly lonely. I was already thinking about moving somewhere else, a flat would be better, I would have more space; but this room was inexpensive and I wanted Aunt Lou's money to last as long as possible. When it was gone I would have to make a decision, choose what I was going to do, get a job (I could touch-type) or go back to school (perhaps I could be an archeologist after all), but I wasn't ready yet, I wasn't adjusted. I'd spent all my life learning to be one person and now I was a different one. I had been an exception, with the limitations that imposed; now I was average, and I was far from used to it.
I wasn
't supposed to cook in my room - the landlord felt his tenants were conspiring to set his house on fire, though this would have been difficult as it was so damp - but I was permitted to boil a kettle on the single gas ring. I took to drinking tea and eating Peek Frean biscuits, in bed, with all the covers pulled up around me. It was the end of October and piercingly chilly, and the heat in my room was controlled by shillings in the slot. So was the hot water in the shared bathroom; I took few baths. I began to understand why people on the underground smelled the way they did: not dirty exactly, but cooped-up. Aside from the tea and biscuits, I ate in cheap restaurants and soon learned to avoid the things I would ordinarily have eaten. "Hot dog," I found out, meant a reddish, thin object fried in lamb fat. "Hamburger" was a square, sawdusty-beige thing between two halves of a hard bun, and "milk shakes" tasted like chalk. I ate fish and chips, or eggs, peas and chips, or sausage and mash. I bought an undershirt.
I began to feel I should be doing something besides watching my stash of traveler's checks dwindle. Travel was supposed to be broadening; why did I feel narrower? So I bought a map of England and picked out names that sounded familiar from high school, like York, or names that intrigued me, like Ripon. I would go to these places on the British Railway, stay overnight in a second-rate inn or a bed-and-breakfast, and come back the next day. I looked at historic buildings. I inspected churches and collected the pamphlets they had on racks with a slot for a sixpence, which I didn't always contribute. I learned what a "clerestory" was, and bought postcards, which made me feel I had been somewhere. These postcards I sent to my father, addressed to the hospital, with cryptic notes on them like, "Big Ben's not so big," and, "Why do they call it the Lake District? They should call it the Puddle District, ha ha." I began to feel that England was a message in code which I didn't know how to decipher, and that I would have to read a lot of books in order to understand it.
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