The Divine Economy of Salvation

by Priscila Uppal

  I sat listening in the toilet stall, peeking through the crack between the door and the hinge, dreading the thought of another night by myself, reading and catching up on class material the nuns had produced for me in piles. They claimed I was behind in school because I hadn’t received a proper education in the country. I felt like a dog they needed to house-train. I wasn’t sure if the girls knew I was in the stall, finished but holding my breath, hoping to come up with a way to interrupt them, step out without making myself unwelcome.

  “What’s your sister up to?” The question was directed to Caroline.

  “She’s got a date tonight. She left me a note in the wall. A tall Frenchman who works at a club.”

  Rachel sighed. “Oh, well. I guess she’ll have a good time.”

  I could see Caroline applying powder to her face in the mirror. “She tells me French guys are for the birds. But she does make exceptions. She’ll get free drinks and stuff.”

  “Can we get in?” asked Rachel, nudging Francine, who looked a bit afraid at the possibility of older men and alcoholic drinks.

  “Not tonight. I already asked. There’s a lot of cops around the Market lately. Some fights. She’s going to do LSD.”

  “What’s LSD?” asked Francine.

  “A drug that makes you see colours and stuff,” Caroline replied proudly. “She says you feel like you are in another world. A pretty place where you feel good.” She bent over the sink, examining her face close up, and frowned. “I wish I was as pretty as Aimée. Maman calls her dangerously pretty.”

  “Maybe the boys from G. will be in the Market. We could check,” Francine piped up.

  Rachel rapped her fingers on the sink in agitation. “You’re right, Caroline. It’s no fun to go without any money.”

  I flushed and quickly opened the door. The girls looked me over the way you might a scab on your elbow. Francine chuckled and Rachel held her lipstick tube in front of her like a potential weapon. Caroline continued to powder her face and splash some water on her eyebrows, brushing the hair with her fingertips into an even line. She was like a stick figure, a straight back and long legs, her hair equally straight along her backside.

  My father had slipped twenty-five dollars into my jacket pocket, which he told me only to use in an emergency, when I left to get on the bus for the school. I hid the money underneath my mattress. The guilt I knew I would feel spending it, weighed against my loneliness, seemed justified. I took a breath, wishing the girls would miraculously change their expressions of annoyance. Their strength in numbers drew me towards them. Their makeup bags filled with cosmetics also fascinated me. I had only used makeup on special occasions. My mother would apply a little blush to my cheeks and a clear lip gloss across my lips. I wasn’t allowed to wear it outside.

  “I have some money,” I said, still dressed in my uniform and feeling a little childish compared to their framed eyes and shiny lips. “If you want . . . I don’t know what there is around here.... I’m new . . . and . . . anyway.” I tried to appear casual, but my hands were shaking. My fingers linked around the back of my skirt, and I checked to make sure my zipper was closed.

  Rachel and Caroline turned towards each other like twin marionettes and shrugged in unison. Francine pushed her heel against the wall, waiting for them to decide. At this point I had no idea whether we were even allowed outside the walls of the school or whether the girls had to sneak out. Getting into trouble so soon would not bode well for my time here, I surmised, but I also didn’t want to appear to be afraid of following them. For all I could judge, they might be applying makeup to pass the time and would then wash their faces and go to bed fantasizing about LSD, colourful places, and boys who bought you drinks in bars.

  “Yeah, OK,” Rachel said. “We could show you around.” She smiled then, and I was struck by the softness of her face, the way her smile caused her green eyes to beckon warmth. Some of my nervousness left me. They’re just girls, I thought, like me. They want to go out and look at dresses and pick out makeup and bracelets. They want to talk about boys. They are nothing to be afraid of. Still, my hands continued to shake as I returned Rachel’s smile. Heat ran through my body in a rush. I may even have blushed.

  “Great,” I said, a little too eagerly. “I’ll change then and come back here?”

  Rachel and Caroline didn’t respond, but Francine nodded enthusiastically. Rachel was already conjuring up a map of where we would go. “We’ve got three hours before we have to be back,” she said, and the girls tallied up on their fingers places we might visit. I was trying to think of whether I had any clothes that might impress them—a bright scarf or an interesting necklace—but I knew I didn’t. The dresses I had brought with me were mostly ones my mother had sewn, and they went down to my ankles. She was afraid I would outgrow them too quickly and made all my dresses long so they could last me a couple of years. This was before her fingers had begun to burn. She stopped sewing after that, and a few of the dresses weren’t even hemmed; I couldn’t wear them without tripping. The dresses that didn’t fall to my ankles and were bought at stores had frills on the hems and bows in front and were meant for church. I hadn’t packed everything, I thought bitterly to myself, because I thought I’d be going home to pick up more things. I’d have to cut up one of the longer dresses some night, one that would leave a straight clean edge, I decided, taking note of how these girls rolled up the material on the waists of their skirts to bring the hems above their knees. I owned a single tube of lipstick my mother had let me keep, ground down to a stub and dried up. I could barely get any colour from it to transfer onto my fingers. It wouldn’t do. But I couldn’t do everything in one night, and I accepted that I’d just have to catch up to them later. There were other things besides “proper” schooling that I had missed out on in the country. Back home there were rumours of what certain girls did, ones who were already wearing makeup and short skirts and running around at night near the strip of restaurants and bars in the nearby town that fancied itself a city. Those girls were condemned. Here, it was clear, the opposite held true. I was upset that I’d never had the experiences these girls obviously had; they’d aged ahead of me. On the morning I’d left my parents, before taking the bus and entering the school unchaperoned, my mother had commented: “You are such a young lady now. A real young lady.” Maybe this was part of what she knew I would come to learn. Why hadn’t she prepared me? How would I be able to handle it all at once?

  “I didn’t know you were a Leftover,” Caroline said just as I was about to go to my room and rummage through the clothes I’d only recently unpacked. She held out her makeup brush to me and I applied a little powder to my cheeks, which made me look pale because her complexion was naturally lighter than mine.

  “A Leftover?” I replied, handing back the brush, worried they might be making fun of me.

  “Someone who stays on the weekends. Your parents don’t come for you?”

  “Oh? No,” I said, feeling worse that they knew I had been abandoned. “My mother doesn’t leave the house.”

  I don’t know why I didn’t mention my father instead of my mother as I had to Bella. I certainly didn’t want to have to explain that my mother was ill and none of the doctors had been able to help her and my father had to work harder to afford life in the city. I didn’t want to get into it with them. I was ashamed. But no one asked me for an explanation. I wondered why each of them, especially Rachel, was here.

  “Mine doesn’t leave the house either,” said Rachel to the mirror without turning around, pressing her index finger against her eyelashes to curl them.

  But her father did. She said he was going to take the girls to a movie the following day. Bella’s mention of a Mr. M. came to mind, and I concluded it must be Rachel’s father who liked to treat the girls who stayed on the weekends. I wanted him to take me too, so I knew I’d have to make Rachel think I was worthy of their company. If I couldn’t do this with clothes and makeup, I’d do it another way. I was determined to be
one of them. To latch on to their group. Leftover or not. It hadn’t yet occurred to me to think of them as Leftovers too. They had each other. All I had was a dormitory room with concrete walls and a carpet that curled at the corners, worn out and ill-installed. The room was furnished (as the pamphlet for the school had promised), and I had a bed and a single mattress (lumpy in parts, which I was slowly adjusting to by curling up on my right side when I slept), a black-painted table made out of cork and used as a desk, a bedside lamp, and a dresser with two drawers. My closet was half the size of the other girls’ because my room was in a corner and the angle had cut off space during the dormitory’s construction. There was enough room for a few hangers, and I had stashed the rest of my things on the floor in three shoeboxes left by the last occupant. A large maple tree whose leaves slashed against the glass whenever the wind blew blocked my view from the window. Oddly, although the room had been scrubbed clean with disinfectants and vacuumed before I moved in, it still smelled of dust. There was nothing I desired more than to avoid being confined to my cramped quarters for another evening, staring at that bulky tree.

  “I’ll go get the money,” I said and sprinted down the hallway, nearly tripping over my own feet.

  The market’s stores were lit up in the dying light of the day as we strolled by. Rachel and Caroline linked arms in front, and Francine and I exchanged awkward smiles and giggles following behind. We had our jackets on, but the air was humid enough for us to leave the zippers and buttons undone, or at least the other girls were more interested in showing off their shirts and accessories than in fending off cold. The Market comprised a square area enclosed by four roads in the downtown core. Cars moved slowly to accommodate the people who didn’t wait for “Walk” signs or streetlights to cross over, crowds who were strolling around and browsing merchandise in the windows or in booths erected outside, their owners bundled up and sipping coffee, children and adults with snacks in their hands: a glass of lemonade, a caramel apple, a chocolate bar, or a fried pastry. The Market was buzzing, and we swarmed around the clusters of fresh foods and handmade jewellery, tourist shops full of postcards and T-shirts, the cafés and restaurants lining the square, the electric lights with their hum calling us in. I was mesmerized. A night out in the city, and I was without an adult and with a group of girls I desperately wanted to call my friends. My need was as immense as the city itself, with its hand-to-hand exchanges of money and goods and services. My father had said that the city of Ottawa was built in a valley. It had become the capital of Canada because it was a centre geographically. Anything that gets inside, stays inside, he said. The cold, the heat. The city contains it. The city grew in front of me, in the dark-blue twilight, opening its hungry mouth.

  Rachel and Caroline tried on silver jewellery in front of an old woman who sat stiffly behind the table, counting out change in her pockets, a baggy beige coat puffed out around her. She kept one eye on the change in her hand and her other eye on them. Francine and I rifled through a rack of colourful cotton dresses from India, monitored by a dark-skinned man who wore a white turban on his head and smelled of strong spice. There were so many things to attract my eye that I couldn’t concentrate, unlike Francine, who picked out an orange and purple dress with embroidered stitches resembling fruit along the hem and edges of the sleeves. She paraded in front of the mirror nailed to the makeshift wall of the booth with the dress held in her arms, dancing with the cloth as if it were an invisible woman. Rachel and Caroline laughed, discarding their jewellery to circle around her mockingly. “I’m an Indian princess,” they chanted. “Look at me!” The dark-skinned man rose from his seat, agitated at first, but relaxed when he saw their jabs weren’t directed at him.

  I had my money in my pocket. Twenty-five dollars. I didn’t know how to spend it, if I should offer it up all at once, or if they would ask me for it when they wanted to purchase something. Everything in the Market was for sale, and everything pleased me with its novelty and up-to-date style: the synthetic fabrics and cheap designer copies, the pungent food fare encapsulating all. I had been to the city nearest our old town and realized that markets in all cities were probably alike, but to me this was the grandest and most exotic market I had ever seen. It was Rachel’s market, and she and her friends were showing it to me. The girls were content just to look for a while, retracing steps from previous weeks, accustomed to the regular merchandise and searching out newer, just-in necklaces or shirts. We walked around the square, past flower stands of irises and pink roses, carnations and sunflowers, and vegetable stands with baskets of squash and corn, large pumpkins lining the sidewalk waiting for holiday tarts and pies and salted seeds.

  Rachel suggested we visit an Italian café on the corner where they had desserts and coffee, and which was one of the few establishments besides the restaurants that would admit underage girls in the evening. The circular glass case in the window turned electrically and was filled with treats, the slices carefully removed by the young woman behind the counter, who seemed less interested in the chocolate and caramel cheesecakes and the bowl of whipped cream into which she dipped her spoon to top off the slices than in two young men who flirted with her each time she strode by, which was often.

  As soon as I saw the double-chocolate cheesecake with carved chocolate flowers on top, I knew I had to have it. Rachel had one too, I remember. I felt as if we had shared a secret when we both pointed to the same cake and smiled with anticipation at the same time. Again, I was struck by her beauty: the way her cheekbones lifted when she smiled and how the skin around her eyes stretched into half moons. She had the brightest blonde hair I’d ever seen, like gold thread, without a hint of white or brown. When she looked directly at me, I could feel myself go slightly numb.

  The young woman served us our cakes and milkshakes and we dove in, hardly speaking for a few moments as we enjoyed our dessert. The music from a couple of the clubs had started, taunting us a little, but for the moment we were happy where we were. I was beginning to relax in their company, not to feel so guarded, when Caroline asked about my mother and father again.

  “So what do they do?”

  “My father’s a carpenter,” I said, placing the cloth napkin over my lips so as not to talk with my mouth full and wide open. “My mother doesn’t work.”

  I hoped my answer pleased them. I had no idea what their parents did for a living, and I still didn’t want them to know about my mother’s illness.

  “My mom works on the weekends. She’s also taking a class to learn English. She can get by around here. Ottawa’s full of French people anyway, but she wants a promotion,” Caroline said. “It doesn’t matter that she knows English. Because of the rules she has to have a certificate.”

  I was relieved that they might not all be as well off as I’d first thought. I knew the school was expensive, but it was evidently not out of reach for parents who really wanted their children to go there, if they made sacrifices. Like my own parents had supposedly done.

  “Maman says she doesn’t want me to turn out like my sister. That’s why I’m getting a solid Catholic education.” Caroline tightened her lips and pointed her finger at me in imitation of her mother as she furrowed her brow. The girls laughed so I joined them.

  “Aimée’s not so bad,” Francine blurted between mouthfuls. “I mean, from what you’ve told us.”

  “No, but Maman thinks she is. Says it’s why she’s all over the boys. That she’s never going to get anywhere wasting her time working in a store and going to the clubs at night. Maman’s old-fashioned.”

  “You should hear my mother,” Francine said, putting her fork down and speaking quickly as if afraid she wouldn’t get another chance. “My mother wants me to become a nun. She said that would be her greatest achievement, if I became a nun like her Aunt Madeline!”

  Rachel folded her napkin around her head like a wimple. Caroline followed suit. As I didn’t want to offend Rachel and Caroline by assuming I could participate in their teasing, I simply chuc
kled. Francine took it well.

  “Who wants to be like them? Sister Marguerite’s freaky and Sister Aline’s a bore! I don’t even want to know what Mother Superior does in that office of hers all day.”

  “You’ll see,” added Caroline to me. “Those nuns are nuts! All they do is think about God and keeping their fingernails clean. Maman says they should tell us about their lives and we’d be fascinated, but I tell her they don’t do anything, so what do they have to tell except spelling lessons and choir sheets?” Caroline placed her makeshift wimple back down on the table.

  “Well, my mom’s probably never thought about it,” Rachel said and then went silent, as if she didn’t like where the conversation was headed. She didn’t pout, but she used her fork to poke through the layers in her cake without eating her icing. I hadn’t yet learned what Mr. M. did for a living or what kind of relationship Rachel had with her mother. I couldn’t imagine her having any troubles, though. Her mother wasn’t going blind and losing all her energy like mine was, of that I was sure. And her father probably didn’t have conversations with his wife about what God might be punishing her for. Rachel seemed to have everything she wanted. I got up to use the washroom.

  By the time I returned, they were speaking about a girl named Adrienne. I sat down and Rachel eyed me up and down. I checked to see if I had any crumbs on my shirt, but there weren’t any. She snickered.

  “Adrienne was a good friend of ours,” she said. “You have her room.”

  “Oh,” I replied, wondering if they resented me taking her place, filling her room with new things except for the shoeboxes. “Where did she go?”

  “Her mother won the lottery, took her out of school that very week. School just started.”

  Caroline thumped her hand on the table, shaking the sugar dispenser. “Maman’s played ever since I can remember, and Adrienne’s mother wins the first time she plays. Can you beat that?”