The Divine Economy of Salvation

by Priscila Uppal

  When Karl Z. the Third asked me to dance, I was thrilled but afraid. Disco was too fast for my taste, and I couldn’t imagine myself tempting him with my static moves. Caroline had tried to teach me before we headed out to the dance, saying her sister, Aimée, had taught her and it wasn’t difficult once you found the rhythm. I told her I couldn’t hold a tune. “You don’t have to sing,” she replied and I knew it was true, but I figured my deficiencies in one area would surely transfer to the next. Caroline plugged in her transistor radio, keeping it on low and adjusting the antenna when the signal faded. The four of us had spent Saturday afternoon in the washroom examining our hips and calves in the mirror, rotating our pelvises and swinging our arms, invisible hula hoops wiggling down our bodies. When a girl came in to use the toilet, Caroline would shut the radio off and we’d turn on the taps, pretending to wash our hands, though it was apparent we were up to something, our laughter giving us away.

  “How do you know we’ll be able to get in?” Francine asked.

  “Aimée told me it’s easy. She used to do it all the time,” Caroline replied, demonstrating how to bend my knees a little when I swivelled my hips. The previous weekend, a boy in the Market had approached us while we were sitting near a flower stand. He said he recognized us from somewhere. We didn’t know if he was lying or not. He said he went to J. High, which wasn’t far from the Market, and they were having a dance next Saturday. We were immediately transfixed, imagining what it would be like to go. Caroline called her sister to find out if there was any way we could attend. “We’ll just wait outside all together and some boys will ask us if we need tickets,” she explained. “They want girls who don’t go to their school there. They’re bored with the ones they already know. And they’ll pay for them too. The tickets, I mean.”

  “Foreigners,” Rachel joked, pushing her developing breasts together in her hands, appreciating the effects of a forced cleavage. “We’ll be foreigners for the night. Exotic belly dancers and snake charmers.” She lifted her shirt, displaying her midriff, and tried to make her stomach undulate, grunting with frustration. “How do they get their skin so loose?” she said, letting her shirt fall back down.

  “Ask Esperanza,” I said.

  “Do you think she can?” Caroline asked.

  “She’s Spanish, isn’t she?” Francine replied.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Rachel. “She was born here. I asked my mother once when she had an old Irish jig on the record player if she could still do any of the moves . . .” She gave Francine a silencing look. “She can barely remember the name of her grandmother’s village, let alone the dance lessons she took here when she was young.”

  “Takes practice,” continued Caroline, each of us imitating the other in the mirror, bouncing and jumping up and down.

  “They might play older music. I don’t know. Isn’t it supposed to be a semi-formal?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” said Caroline. “But it’s different at mixed schools. They don’t bother with all the old stuff—waltzes and foxtrots and boring junk like that. They’ve got better music, let the kids pick the music, you know. Same as the clubs.” She hiked up her skirt so that a line of skin just beneath her buttocks was showing. “There’s a whole other world outside of St. X. School for Girls. Here they treat us like nothing has changed at all. Sexual Re-vo-lu-tion never happened or anything.”

  We had read about it in one of the Playboy magazines Rachel had stolen off a stand. An article entitled “Why the Sexual Revolution Was Good for Men and Women,” with photographs of women without bras, dancing in the open fields of California rock concerts, and muscular and tanned men running along the beach, playing volleyball. We practically peed our pants flipping through the pages of the magazine, hysterical with curiosity, never a picture without a woman in it, showing off a curve or staging a sexy pose. We imitated those poses for hours afterwards, asking each other “Do I look like her?” “Do I?” “Do I look like a tramp?”

  “Did you grow up in a barn or something, Virgin?” Caroline jeered at my lack of knowledge about school dances.

  “I guess so,” I replied, sensing my face turning red. They all knew my family had moved to Ottawa from the country. My old school had fewer than fifty students in it. “I’ve never been to a dance before.”

  “Well, neither have I,” admitted Caroline. “Aimée took me to a club once, but she made me stay quiet so no one would ask my age. And I wasn’t allowed to dance. She told me I could just watch and tell Maman she had taken me to the movies.” She wrapped her arms around my neck and moved close to me, her hips rubbing against my waist. “Aimée dances like this,” she said. “She dances shameful, as Maman would call it. One of her boyfriends danced with me like this when she went to the store. He even kissed me, but I could hear Maman coming up the front stairs so I stepped hard on his foot.”

  Caroline was so close to me I could see a tiny brown mole between her nublike breasts. I was uncomfortable and pulled slowly away. She twirled around the floor, paying little attention to my withdrawal.

  “Living in a barn,” I told them confidently, “I’ve seen a few things.”

  “Oh, have you, Virgin?” taunted Rachel, tuning the radio to reduce the static.

  “What did you see?” Francine asked warily.

  “Well,” I responded, turning Francine around so her back was facing me, feeling slightly dizzy at how I might shock them, “animals do it from behind,” and I jerked against Francine’s backside, tripping her as she moved forward to regain her balance.

  “You’re gross!” cried Caroline.

  “Not as gross as kissing your sister’s boyfriend!” I snapped at her, helping Francine up from the floor and patting her shoulder to show I hadn’t meant any harm.

  “That’s grown-up,” Caroline replied, her voice quivering. “He wanted me as much as he wanted Aimée. That’s what I know.”

  “Forget about him,” Rachel interrupted. “There are plenty of other guys out there for us to pick from. Five for each of us.”

  Caroline turned up the radio and we practised for a while longer, then went to pick out our clothes. Rachel lent me a plain yellow dress and a blue scarf with a bit of silver glitter on it. I thought I looked like a pencil crayon, curveless and ordinary. Francine, with her mousy hair, had much more cleavage. I had two nipples that stuck out like purple grapes. I was sure the boys at the dance would know I was younger than them, and not in high school at all. Rachel told me to stop worrying and just think older. I pouted as Rachel applied lipstick to me, aching to kiss another as Rachel and Caroline had. Francine hadn’t either, but I didn’t want to be the last one. So, in spite of my initial disgust at Caroline’s admission, I told myself I was grown-up and had kissed my older sister’s boyfriend when she went out shopping. Since the boys at the dance would practically be men, I conjured up the only two girls I’d seen talk to men in a comfortable manner: Esperanza and Bella. But when I imagined imitating Bella, I laughed. She would never go to a dance and let a boy touch her. She would never be a woman in the way Esperanza was a woman. I felt satisfaction at the thought.

  “You’ve got nice hair,” Rachel said, brushing it out as I brooded in the mirror. “And pretty eyes too. You’ll be fine.”

  I’d already learned to feel pleased when I received a compliment from another girl. It could make me believe in my own beauty, as men’s admiration, even Mr. M.’s comments, never seemed to. I was beginning to sense that a man will always want something from you, whereas when women compliment, it’s because they mean it. As Rachel brushed my hair, my heart swelled with love.

  My confidence buoyed by Rachel’s words, when Karl Z. the Third approached me as I stood against the gymnasium wall, I ran my fingers through my hair, batting my eyelashes to show off the effect of my mascara, bought at Woolworth’s, hoping my hazel eyes were framed as the girl who worked there had promised. He walked past me initially, and I was about to forget about him, figuring he was on his way to speak to an older, prettie
r girl, as a few boys had already done, when he turned on his heel dramatically and held out his hand for me to shake.

  “Karl Z.,” he said in a low gruff voice followed by a pause. “The Third.”

  I shook his outstretched hand, unsure of how else to respond. “The Third?” I asked, noticing a silver ring with a red stone on his index finger. He was dressed in black slacks and an aquamarine shirt, one button open at the collar, sleeves rolled up to his elbows. When he smiled, one corner of his lip lifted higher than the other and his opposite eyebrow rose. His blond hair, with streaks of darker brown on the top and sides, hung just past his ears, layered to a straight edge across his neck. In the sporadic lights of the gymnasium, his eyes appeared to switch colour depending on where he stood. They were either blue, or green, or grey; it was difficult to tell.

  “The Third,” he said again, dropping my hand and inserting both of his into his pants pockets, his head angled downwards a few inches to my height. “My father and my grandfather were both named Karl. That’s a nice dress you’re wearing.”

  I felt an ache when he spoke, a desire to believe him. I had imagined Nathaniel, the white-haired boy at the convenience store, giving me a compliment, but it never happened, and then he’d lost interest. I wondered if it was because I hadn’t let him do anything to me. I had never invited him to leave me notes in the school wall. I liked talking, just talking with him and hearing about his homework or the hockey team he played on.

  I had no idea what to say to Karl Z. the Third, so I just stared, biting my lip, and tried to act nonchalant and grown-up, the way Rachel was. I could see her watching me with him. She waved, her jaw lowered in an exaggerated gawk for my benefit, urging me on. I told myself again that I had kissed a boy before. That I could be as special as anyone.

  “Would you like to dance?”

  “No,” I said quickly, afraid I wouldn’t dance as well as the other girls. Then I regretted saying no. His head turned to scan the dance floor and I thought that maybe he was going to approach someone else.

  “It’s just a bit hot in here,” I said. “I’m taking a break. But I’d like to dance a little later.” He had light-brown stubble on his chin, and his face was pleasantly oval, his cheeks pinched. I thought I could smell cologne when he bent down to speak with me, his voice raised over the music. I started to fiddle with the scarf around my neck, and I knew, as it moved across my chest, he was envisioning my body underneath the dress. He lingered. I breathed in deeply, punching out my chest.

  “You’re right,” he said, shaking his shirt from the sweat, and I caught a peek of his white hairless chest, the bones of his rib cage visible. He was skinnier than I’d thought when he first approached me. He was almost all bone. The strands of hair falling behind his ears helped draw the eye away from the gauntness of his cheeks and chin. This observation made him a little less intimidating to me. “It is hot in here. Do you want to go outside? There’s something I want to show you.”

  The music switched to a love song, and I kicked myself for refusing to dance. Slow dancing was far easier and more dangerous, as Caroline would say. But I agreed to go outside with him, after momentarily glancing longingly at the floor full of young men and women holding each other, resting their heads on shoulders, moving in rhythm.

  “You never asked me my name,” I said as we walked through the couples on the dance floor to get to the exit.

  He stopped and offered his hand again for me to shake. I didn’t take it this time, nervous about the female teacher roaming around, supervising the dance floor. He shrugged and put his hands back in their pockets. “So, what’s your name?”

  “Angela,” I called into his ear. “Angela!”

  “Ever meet a war hero, Angela?”

  I was confused. He wasn’t even old enough to enlist in the army. Karl Z. the Third strode along with confidence, inspecting the doorway for teachers before shuffling me quickly outside into the winter air.

  Under the electric lights of the entranceway, the parking lot before us full of cars and vans and motorcycles, the skin on his face and hands glowed. I wondered if mine did too, hugging myself with my arms to keep the cold from my flesh.

  “I should have brought my jacket,” I said, annoyed at the weather. I imagined in the spring it might be more romantic to be outside with a boy.

  “Nah,” he replied. “Don’t worry about it. It’s just a little wind. It’s not even snowing.”

  He wasn’t cold at all, his shirt open and his stance relatively relaxed. He walked towards the snow-covered soccer field, the goal posts void of nets, and I followed, increasingly afraid of being alone with him and even more afraid of getting caught.

  “I don’t go to school here,” I said as he kicked an imaginary soccer ball through the metal bars and raised his arms in success. “This looks like a big field. We just have a corner lot and—” I cut myself off. I might have been giving away that I went to St. X. School for Girls, a junior school.

  “I know,” he replied. “I mean, I would have noticed you if you did.”

  I wanted Rachel to come out and save me from what might happen. I wanted her to witness what might happen. I’m not sure what I wanted exactly, but I wanted Rachel to hear this boy who knew I didn’t go to his high school because he would have noticed me.

  I was getting cold and shivering, but wouldn’t permit myself to show it; he wasn’t wearing a jacket or blazer and might offer me his arms in default. Then he might feel me tremble and know I wasn’t used to a boy’s arms. We walked back to the parking lot, towards one of the concrete dividers. He patted the space beside him for me to sit. I did, gently pulling the skirt of my dress underneath me, my legs spread out straight in front, the same posture as he assumed. The concrete was cold but the hardness of the seat made it easier for me to curl my upper body and conserve some warmth.

  “Are you the youngest in your family?” he asked.

  “No.” I said. “I have a sister. She’s younger.” I pulled up some frozen grass from the cracks in the concrete and started to sort it in my hands, letting the smaller strands fall through my fingers, keeping the longer ones, amazed that anything survived the winters here.

  “I am,” he said. “I’m the youngest by almost ten years. I wasn’t supposed to live.”

  “Really?” I tried to appear fascinated, as the magazines said a woman should during conversation with a man.

  “That’s why I’m named Karl. My father says it’s the name of a fighter.” He curled his hands into fists and struck the air with a few short jabs. “My father was a fighter too. And my grandfather.”

  He squeezed himself closer to me, the tips of his fingers touching my tailbone. I breathed deeply, letting go of the grass, pulling out a new bunch, watching the entrance to see if a teacher was coming outside to check for students like us, far from supervision. A few boys stood in the doorway, smoking, the grey air rising towards the lights.

  “The First and the Second,” I replied. “Right?”

  “Right,” he said. “I wanted to show you this.”

  He put his hand into his front pocket and for a split second, my eyes wide with astonishment, I thought he was going to pull out his thing for me to look at, the way a boy did when we walked by a basketball court one evening on our way to the Market, safe behind the fence, taunting us with his strange bulge of flesh, his friends laughing. Instead, Karl pulled out a war medal, evidently preserved with polish and care. A purple ribbon was attached to the silver disc, but the night was too dark for me to be able to read the engraving upon it. He plopped the medal into my palm, on top of the grass.

  “My dad helped save the Jews from Hitler,” he said proudly. “He saved a lot of lives.”

  “Oh.” I didn’t know what to do with the medal except stare at it in uncomprehending awe. I recalled my mother mentioning Hitler, saying he appealed to the worst in people. An instrument of the Devil. I remembered those words clearly, for my mother wasn’t the type to concentrate on the evils of the
world. She preferred to recount the joys, the good works missionaries were performing all over the world, the miraculous displays of human endurance and faith of the saints. She preferred the New Testament over the Old.

  “Did he save a lot of people?” I repeated back to him.

  “Yeah, he killed a lot of Germans.”

  “Oh—” I didn’t want to think about death or war, or what it must have been like to kill men in a foreign country. The conversation was getting away from me. I didn’t want to sit in the night air discussing Hitler.

  He started singing in an off-key bravado: “I got some medals from World War II. I wear ’em just like me granddad do.”