by Wendy Orr
But she remained nervous of Winston. She’d always thought of herself as bright enough; some people were smarter and many stupider, but Winston’s brain moved on another level, not simply gathering information with an inexorable logic and formidable memory, but leaping from concept to concept, across chasms she couldn’t imagine bridging. It was pointless to argue with him and difficult not to. Listening to him debate, she told her mother, was the best entertainment the school offered: building up arguments against himself only to scatter them all at the last moment with one telling deathblow, so that his opponent, bemused at appearing to be bettering the formidable Winston, hadn’t the slightest hope of picking up the pieces. She didn’t describe her own vacillation between fascination and fear of that wounding wit; he had a knack for picking out her secrets and showing them to the world and herself. (‘How do you know me so well?’ she asked one night the following summer, when she was lying in his arms out of sight of a campfire, out of earshot of friends, but he’d had half a bottle of Southern Comfort and what he wanted of her that night was not intellectual.)
That was later. All through grade 10 they continued to spar, the yearning for physical contact sublimated into verbal dancing and feinting. Then came summer, vacation time, the North Mountain suddenly a long way from town, the farm an outpost where Jane burned restless energy making hay, mucking out the winter barn, and riding. Riding bony Bold Brennon bareback till their sweat mingled and the dark patches on the bay’s back left the girl’s inner thighs coated with dark hair, sticky and suggestively obscene.
The evening before the exhibition fair Patsy phoned—‘Talk your parents into letting you go, I’ll meet you at the gate. What are you going to wear?’ Jane chose her new summer dress, white to show off her tan, and they met and exclaimed over one another, but Patsy’s eyes were restless. It was Randy McLeod she wanted to see and be seen by, and when she found him, she ensnared him in her chatter and drifted him off into the crowd, losing Jane as if by accident.
Jane hardly noticed. She’d spotted Winston coming towards her, also as if by chance, and was busy studying the strung-up prizes above the floating ducklings until she could turn in surprise: ‘I didn’t see you!’
‘I was practising merging into the crowd. In case I decide to be a private investigator instead of a lawyer.’
He was so obviously the only black face in sight that she didn’t know what to say; she never would when he joked about his colour. Without further discussion they drifted away from the ducklings and found themselves in line for the Ferris wheel.
Jane’s mind whirled. If they each bought their own tickets they were friends; if he paid for both it was a date.
Winston stepped ahead to the booth. ‘Two adults.’
Two adults—now the possibilities were endless. If she could just get the first step right (How do you learn this? Who teaches the rules?).
‘I love the Ferris wheel,’ she said.
They sat carefully separate as the bar was locked in place, but when the ride jammed on its second circle Winston stretched his arm over the back and she relaxed slightly against his side.
The seat rocked gently, triumphant over the summer crowd, above the hot sweet smell of candy floss and hot dogs, a tiny child in a frilled dress leading a pair of enormous oxen, barns crowded with champion heifers and squealing piglets. Impossible not to feel a certain smugness that fate had been so kind.
‘I’d hate to be in one of the bottom seats,’ Winston said. ‘You’d feel too stupid—you’d have to jump out.’
Jane felt surprised and ridiculously honoured at learning that Winston could feel stupid. It was something she’d never considered. ‘I like being up here anyway,’ she said gratefully. She smiled, and he lowered his arm to her shoulders. Jane moved imperceptibly closer.
They sat, and rocked, and stared out over the exhibition ground with sudden exclamations of excitement, as if determined to ignore the way that their bodies had wiggled to the centre of the seat, glued side by side while Winston’s arm tightened around her bare shoulders.
The rest of the fair passed in a blur. They rode over and over on the Scrambler, in thrall to the centrifugal force that pressed their bodies together, and the thrill of joyful terror that made it equally impossible not to scream. Couples in the other cars blurred past: Patsy, her mouth an O as she clung to Randy’s side, quiet Heather O’Neill screaming into Jim Lightfoot’s shoulder. And us, Jane thought. Winston and Jane. Jane and Winston.
That was the beginning. It built up quickly once school went back, through conventions of school dances and movie dates, waiting for the long-short-long ring of the phone. Dreaming of a phone of her own, like the privileged girls of American TV, whose phone calls didn’t have to be whispered against a backdrop of teasing brothers or Mrs MacLeod’s asthmatic breathing over the party line.
Another summer, another fair, filled now with memory and romance, and on to grade 12. The future loomed closer; as they clung to each other in the back seat of his parents’ car, in the woods behind the house, on the beach, once in the hayloft of the old barn, the sweetness of his weight on hers, hay prickling her bare legs, Jane would have given whatever he wanted. ‘All the way,’ the girls whispered on Monday mornings. ‘Do you think they go all the way? I won’t go all the way till I’m married. Guys don’t respect you if you go all the way.’
Winston had decided they wouldn’t go all the way. Not yet. Not in school. Not unprotected. Touching, stroking, nibbling, yes, pressing, moaning, please, tongues and fingers, another button, another inch of bare flesh . . . Not fair that she should be the one to stop, to stay in control, saying no while his body pleaded to hers, while she melted and swirled, drunk with longing and exultation.
‘Be careful,’ her mother warned, ‘this is getting serious. You’ve got your whole lives ahead of you, don’t cut off your options.’
‘Racist!’ Jane flared, turning gladly from the frustration of saying no, the wondering if there was a way of getting to Halifax and finding a doctor who’d give her the pill, that wonderful, liberating pill, read of and never seen. ‘You’re only saying that because he’s black.’
‘You’re quite right,’ Ruth smiled, sarcasm heightening her accent, or accent sharpening sarcasm, Jane was never sure. ‘Find a nice pimply boy with pink skin and I won’t mind at all if you get pregnant and drop out of school.’
Jane skated carefully around the dangerously rounded word. ‘College isn’t the only thing in the world—Dad never went.’
‘And neither did Winston’s parents, nor millions of other people who have nothing to do with this argument, which is that you both intend to, and that it would be a sin against nature if that young man didn’t get to where he wants to go. Besides which, my dear, I don’t think he’d ever forgive you.’
‘So if we go to college, if one day . . .’ She couldn’t say it, switched back to triteness and challenge, ‘You’d let a Negro marry your daughter?’
‘Ah, the fear of decent white folk, the big black penis—Is it black? Or pink like palms?—but you know what I mean. Big black man in my little white girl.’
I will never, Jane vowed, argue with my mother again. She’s insane. To actually say it, big black penis; for crying out loud she’s my mother, she’s not supposed to talk like that. Jane scrunched her knees to her chest, hiding her face.
‘That part, my dear, doesn’t bother me at all, not if you wait till the right time—which, by the way, is not grade 12 and was all I was talking about in the first place. Though I can tell you that any mixed marriage is hard—’
But a mixed marriage like her own, she said (a clash of culture rather than race, and Jane’s own eventual destiny), was difficult only for the people concerned, the children seaming invisibly into the society in which they were born. Which would not be true for Winston’s black children born of white Jane.
Easier to call her mother racist. Uncomfortable to hear a parent’s fears of pain for her, for her and unborn, unthought-of
grandchildren.
‘If the world was kinder . . . I would hope that your children’s generation will find it easier, surely they will, but it’s not easy to be the pioneers. And a shotgun wedding is no way to start.’
‘No chance,’ Jane mumbled, still against her knees.
‘You know what took me by surprise?’ Ruth went on, as if she hadn’t heard. ‘No one ever told me that it would be so hard to say no. I was taught that nice girls didn’t, but no one told me that nice girls wanted to.’
She loved him for his wit, his humour, his wry view of the world, and of course whatever invisible chemistry breeds love’s insanity, and if the dark gleam of his skin was part of that, it was in the same way that features of a beloved always become part of the lover’s mythology. But when shadows of his blackness and its blacker history intruded, she felt herself rubbed raw and open to wounds, as if layers of her own skin had been peeled back in recompense for its pallidity.
‘When did your family come to Nova Scotia?’ her mother, ever avid for family stories, asked, and Jane waited for Winston to explode—she’d heard his views on anyone who suggested that he must be newly arrived in this bastion of Anglo–Celtic society.
‘My father’s family claims it was in the American Revolution when the British offered freedom to slaves who made it up here. My mother’s family doesn’t know; probably the same way unless they’d been brought here as slaves before that. I can’t see it matters much either way now.’
‘It has to matter!’ Ruth protested. ‘What we know of our history is what makes us who we are!’
‘I make who I am.’
‘Spoken as someone with history behind them. Without ancestors and their stories, there are no guidelines, no solidity to the past. One’s own history begins with one’s first memory—a rather fluid base at best.’
‘So knowing my great-grandparents’ story makes everything that happened to them okay?’
‘“He was in logic a great critic,
Profoundly skilled in analytic,” ’ Ruth quoted.
‘“He could distinguish, and divide
A hair ’twixt south and south-west side . . .” Naturally it doesn’t make it okay! Of course you should be filled with horror, grief, rage at what they went through. But if you know it, you can know that it shaped you; it’s part of you. You can choose what you look at and be proud of them—after all, they all must have survived, at least to childbearing age—and that strength has shaped you too. It seems to me that even people who have well-documented family histories choose their ancestors.’
‘Ancestors must mean something different in England. In Canada they’re the people who lived before you, which makes it tough to choose them.’
‘Rubbish! You know perfectly well what I mean. Think about it—all those hundreds, thousands of ancestors bearing down on each individual. People choose the one or two who are interesting; nobody remembers the ninety-nine great-grandmothers who were scullery maids; it’s the one who kissed Bonnie Prince Charlie who’s claimed by her descendants.’
‘I can guarantee that none of my great-grandmothers kissed Bonnie Prince Charlie!’
‘And there,’ Ruth said with a fluid leap of logic, ‘you have the advantage of me. You can choose whether or not to be proud of your ancestors, but at least knowing who they are gives you that choice, whereas the only certainty for someone like me is the guess that their parents are unlikely to have had any stories to boast of.’
‘What was wrong with our Townsend grandparents?’ Jane asked.
‘Nothing, except that they weren’t my parents and wouldn’t tell me who were.’
‘We don’t have English grandparents?’
‘Probably—I just don’t know who they were.’
‘You should have told us!’ Properly, she meant; calmly. Not to score a point in an argument.
‘I was just waiting,’ said Ruth, with a bizarre expression that Jane later realised was shame, ‘for the right moment.’
Inappropriate timing in revealing family secrets, it seems, is not entirely dependent on heredity.
Jane couldn’t share her mother’s selective view of history. Loving Winston meant being excluded from parties at some homes that she used to go to; meant suffering the poisoned, genuine kindness of the economics teacher as he double-checked that Winston’s sharp brain had understood what the dullest member of the class had easily followed; meant hating the careers teacher for her obvious shock that this black boy hadn’t waited for her advice on a suitable trade and had already applied to university. Not, however, for law. In one of his interminable debates with Ruth he had been suddenly struck with the full realisation of the ephemeral nature of the spoken word. (Why are they arguing? Jane wondered. They both believe in the same thing. She had never been competitive enough to enjoy argument for the sake of it and, watching the fire in her boyfriend’s and her mother’s eyes, was unable to control a small pang of jealousy.) The only way to share his ideals and ensure that they were remembered, Winston decided now, was to write. ‘Journalism isn’t just reporting,’ he proclaimed, as if he were talking to a wider audience than one adoring girl and her mother, ‘it’s a chance to say things that will change the way people see their world, which is the only way to change the world.’
Because there was no doubt that the world still did need changing. Occasional news reports crossed the border—the sheet-draped evil, the burning parody of Christianity, hangings, castrations. If they drove far enough south on their own continent, they’d be banned from entering a restaurant to eat together, from sitting side by side on a bus. If they crossed the water back to the southern tip of his forebears’ original land, their still-chaste love exploded from immoral to illegal. She would wake with nightmares of hanged men with Winston’s face.
He’d had years to accustom himself to these stories, to channel and control his rage, but touching her life for the first time, it rolled over her like an avalanche.
‘How can people think like that?’ she demanded.
‘They think the way they’re trained to,’ Winston said. ‘If we lived in one of the souths, we wouldn’t even want to be together. We’d just go along the way we were told to—you’d go out with a nice blond boy and I’d be a blacksmith like my dad or, since I hate horses, I could try something different, like a janitor. Who says we’d be the ones smart enough and brave enough to see what’s wrong with the way we’d been taught?’
She didn’t believe him. His gift of seeing the world had nothing to do with accidents of birth; whereas she—no, to think that in another place, another time, she could have accepted him as a servant, a nonbeing . . . it was unthinkable. She would have always seen him as he was, would have always loved him.
And did love him, finally, at the party after graduation. A bonfire on the rocky beach, the bottles of Southern Comfort and rye passed around the circle, but Jane and Winston were barely drinking that night, they were drunk on the end of school and exams and the unreality of the future spread dazzlingly and immediately before them. Surreptitious fingers in the dark, languorous, teasing kisses becoming urgent until the longing became overwhelming and the shelter of the driftwood log was no longer enough. Without a word they picked their way across the rocks, stumbling in their haste and inability to let each other go, tumbling to the softer, pine-needled ground in the privacy of the woods. The culmination of two year’s kissing, necking, making out and petting, feeling up and feeling down, the clumsy adolescent words a mockery of the glories of sensation, the tentative beauty of each new surrender, lips to lips, a touch of tongues, fingers on a well-clothed breast, a bare nipple, searching under jeans . . . It was over, the mystery gone, an instant of bare flesh on flesh, a quick, sharp pain and warmth, and Winston pulling wetly out, saying, ‘Shit, I’m sorry. Oh shit, why’d you let me do that?’ when she wanted to hold him and cry and lie in his arms forever.
She didn’t get pregnant; there was no drama, no abortion or adoption, just a week of tension and a period that
was so regular, so on-time and normal that it was as if her body hadn’t even noticed that her life had changed forever. Winston stood by her all week; he was a good man, a responsible boy, a person who would do the right thing and he loved her. But he was also going to be the first person in his family to go to university, to be a famous writer, to be known for what he said rather than the colour of his skin, and he was not going to risk that for a postponable ecstasy.
‘I think,’ he said, and his eyes were full of so much love and compassion that her mind whirled with confusion, because she’d known what he was going to say before he began to speak, ‘I think it’d be better to start university single. We don’t want to make . . .’
. . . love? thought Jane, but ‘mistakes,’ said Winston.
Babies, he meant, though it might have been more than that. He undoubtedly wanted freedom to explore and become the new person he was in the process of evolving into—but in the instant that he spoke, he still loved Jane and it was only the fear of fatherhood that made him desperate to leave her.
The baby in the seat in front begins crying as the plane leaves Jakarta and shows no sign of stopping as they begin the descent into Singapore. Jane envies the total lack of inhibition and ability to bellow troubles aloud but does not know how it feels, not really; the gap is too great. Her memory of travelling with a baby, however, is still so clear that she can recreate the exact mixture of frustration, embarrassment and sheer exhaustion that the young parents are demonstrating. Funny to think that while she doesn’t feel much different from the woman she was then, the only trace of the two year old Megan is the innate optimism and ready smile. Crying had not been the problem on that trip, or at least not until the wait in the grimly stuffy Los Angeles holding area, enough to make anyone howl. The main risk to sanity when travelling with Megan had been ceaseless chirpy questions.