by Iman Verjee
‘Are you ready?’ Judy is waiting by the door, impatiently shifting from one foot to the other. ‘We can’t be late.’
I don’t have a bag, so I carry the pencil case tucked under my arm. ‘Yes. Let’s go.’ As I am leaving, I step on the disfigured note and feel a mean pleasure go off in my spine, one spiteful spark at a time.
St David’s. I discover the name of the building I saw last night from my window and it’s where all the classes and daily assemblies are held. It’s also where most of the staff sleeps, Judy tells me.
‘Not the teachers, of course. They sleep in the same building as us.’ She grins sideways at me, and her breath frosts in the chill morning air. ‘I mean the kitchen staff and cleaners.’
The grassy wetness gathers beneath my feet, collecting in the hem of my socks, making my ankles itch. A shiver works its way up my legs and makes the hairs on my neck stand up. The white shirt is too thin to keep me warm, even in this easy cold, and the blue cardigan that Judy gave me is the same material as my woolen blanket and just as rough against my skin. I unbutton it and tie it around my waist.
‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you,’ Judy says. We come up to the building and that’s when I hear the singing. Judy reaches out and undoes the sweater from around me and hands it back, telling me to put it on. When she sees the quick irritation pulse at my face, she shrugs and says, ‘Trust me.’ I put it back on reluctantly and she pushes open the heavy oak door by its ringed, metal handle. ‘You’ll get used to it,’ she whispers, as I knew she would. Don’t worry, Frances. You’ll get used to being without him.
The singing welcomes us in, rising higher and louder until it reaches and would surpass the ceiling if it weren’t for the stained glass keeping it down. The morning light filters through the glass pattern in gold, green and yellow particles that fall upon the immaculate rows of girls that have formed, drifting and floating above the strong, firm choir. Judy leads me to the second-last row and we join the end of it. She starts to sing and I envy her because I cannot. I don’t know this hymn and yet there is something magical about the group of voices coming together; accommodating and forgiving of each other’s flaws; up, down, sideways and into each other, creating something that goes far beyond the meaning of the words they form.
I look around the open, spreading hall. The teachers are standing along either wall, straight and still as statues, none of their backs touching the dark oak behind them. They are staring over us, hands folded neatly to their bodies. When I find Sister Ann, I stare at her and want her to look back and acknowledge me, but she doesn’t. She is the only teacher not looking at us; her eyes are closed and her fingers hold up her rosary that shimmers in the light. The singing finishes too soon and there is a second or two of inspired silence before a woman walks up onto the stage in front of us. She is dressed in a black habit and she is so large and broad-shouldered that the podium she stands at seems to shrink in her presence. She begins with a prayer which the girls follow in perfect unison.
Direct me now, O gracious Lord,
To hear aright thy holy Word;
Assist thy Minster to preach,
And let Thy Holy Spirit teach,
And let eternal life be found
By all who hear the joyful sound.
Direct us now, O gracious Lord.
The simple and silly rhyme makes me want to laugh; small tickles of sound that I struggle to hold in. My ears fill with it so that I can’t hear what the woman on stage is saying in her rough voice, but it also makes me angry. They finish off the prayer with a quick crossing; forehead, chest, left shoulder, right shoulder, hands together.
Amen.
The students leave the assembly; everything here is done in straight lines and rows and small groups. I hang back in the crowd but I am pushed forward and jolted out into the now sunny morning. My pencil case drops from under my arm and I lose it in all the feet going by me. I start to reach down for it but stop. I think about all those pencils and rulers getting crushed, splintered into small pieces that will be easier to throw away.
‘I believe this is what you’re looking for?’
The crowd has faded, spread away into another door in the building and the tall man from last night stands in front of me. He is holding the still intact case and he smiles, his teeth a row of stars against his dark skin. I try to remember his name, Joseph, and when he moves to hand me my case, his scent is unfamiliar and inviting; a mixture of grass and soap. I notice some of the girls looking my way before disappearing back into the building.
‘Yes, thank you.’ I take it from him while staring down at the perfectly polished wing-tips of his black shoes. My eyes move slowly up long legs in navy wool, round a thin belt on a surprisingly slim waist and finally resting on the white shirt rolled up to reveal his forearms and a gold gleam at his finger. He is too smartly dressed; too clean and combed. I tell him this without realizing it, how come you look so fancy for a driver? He laughs at me and puts a light hand on my shoulder, lapsing into a seriousness.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Frances.’
‘Well, Frances, do you know what my mother always told me?’ I stare up at him, waiting. He continues. ‘There are only two things that make a man; his clothes and his manners.’ He laughs again but I’m not sure at what. He has crouched down so that he can look in my eyes and now he straightens out my sweatshirt and dusts imaginary creases off my shoulders. He glances up at someone over my head and his eyes crinkle in the corners as he rises back to his full height.
‘And that goes for ladies too.’
I turn my head with his gaze and see Sister Ann standing behind me, her hands joined at her waist. She is smiling at him and then looks down at me.
‘Good morning, Frances.’
‘Good morning.’ My eyes and ears are still full of this laughing man with the confident, comforting charm, sunlight glimmering at his back.
‘Hello, Joseph.’ Sister Ann’s hands are on my shoulders, gripping them too tightly. He tilts his head to the side and grins down at us.
‘I guess I better be going then.’ He points to my case, now held like something precious in my hands. ‘Careful with that now, Frances,’ and he is gone, gracefully striding down the field, his shirt billowing out behind him like a balloon. Sister Ann turns me around and we start to walk in the other direction.
‘Frances, we follow a timed schedule here,’ she says to me as we reach the door, ‘and it’s important that you respect that. Do you understand?’
‘Yes.’ But I am hardly paying attention and as she walks in front of me, I look back quickly, hoping to catch one last glimpse of him bounding across the grass.
12
St Albert. November 1973
Proposing to Marienne was the arc that completed the cycle of a terrible adolescence; those four, defiant words bringing it to its end in adulthood, providing him with the final assurance that the goodness he had been brought up with still resided strong within him. He was so relieved, he couldn’t finish his sentence.
‘Will you—’ he didn’t have to. She saw the ring he held out to her and fell on top of him with a heated yes.
‘Of course, yes. Took your time, didn’t you?’ Marienne, with her dark eyes, her every kiss a promise to bring him out of this nightmare and lift him into the white picket-fenced, flower-gardened life he knew they were heading toward. Just the two of them.
A few weeks before, under the influence of a strong wine and the unusual warmth of that particular November night, Marienne had told him she never wanted to have any children. It had become a habit of theirs, to talk about their future together as if it were a certain thing. As if they were only waiting, prolonging the moment of their youth, before they made the commitment.
‘Why not?’ he had asked.
‘I had the worst kind of parents,’ she reminded him. ‘Not like yours, James. You’re very lucky.’ The wine had stained her feelings and her words were punchy and fast. ‘I mean, w
hat kind of people abandon their daughter for a group of singers? I never want to turn out that way.’
After spending a few months in New York, her parents had decided to settle there permanently. He still remembered when she had got the news. More than halfway through her first year in Edmonton. It was a phone call rather than a letter and she played with the wire, twisting it within her hands. She was silent for most of the conversation and when she did speak, it was with a low tremble accentuating her words—a nervousness he was unused to hearing from her.
‘I’ve forgotten how to talk to my parents, can you believe that?’ she had said to him afterward. ‘I thought my mother was a stranger. A loud, obnoxious woman I wouldn’t want to speak to again if I met her on the street.’
‘Are you going to go?’ he had asked.
‘To New York?’
‘Yes,’ he said, his anxiety making him impatient.
‘It sounds exciting, doesn’t it?’ She brought her knees up to her chin and hunched her shoulders, her sweater large and enclosing around her small frame. ‘All that life and noise—sometimes I miss it. It would be nice to have something else to do apart from going to Millie’s Milkshake or Suicide Hill.’
‘You never seemed to have a problem with it before.’ He had bristled, despite her neutral tone.
‘It’s not that I have a problem,’ she explained patiently. ‘It’s just,’ shrugging, ‘sometimes, I get it—what my parents are doing. There’s a whole world out there to see, you know what I mean?’ She picked at her fingernails, flakes of blue paint falling into her lap. ‘So many opportunities. I always wanted to be a singer.’
‘You would be a great singer.’ Something sick was closing over his heart. He hadn’t known she thought of those things; that there could be something he was holding her back from.
She watched him carefully. ‘Would you be sad if I decided to leave?’
‘I would be heartbroken,’ he said simply.
She flushed with pleasure, kissed him and took his hand, putting it under her shirt.
‘No.’ He was across the room in a fast moment. ‘Not now. I told you, I want to wait.’
‘Sorry,’ she sighed, chastened but not suspicious. ‘To answer your question,’ her voice was loaded with meaning, ‘they said I can join them if I want after I finish the two years here and visit over the holidays in between, so I’m staying exactly where I am. With you.’
‘I’m okay with that.’ They smiled at each other and he went back to doing his homework at her desk.
After several moments of silence, she asked, ‘Don’t you want to know why I’m staying?’
‘Why?’
‘Because I’m in love with you.’
‘I love you too,’ he said and in a way, it was true. It had scared him, how easy it could be to lose her. How much was at stake if she walked out of his life and that made him more grateful to her than ever.
By the time, close to a year later, that Marienne’s Aunt Dolly, drug-free and love-ready, got married to a dairy farmer and moved away to lead a ‘simple and quiet life’ as she put it, Marienne and her parents had become so absorbed in their separate lives that she no longer felt the need for their support. Instead, they had continued to communicate sparsely, and even less so in the last two years, through letter and lyric.
She had moved in with James and his family by the time they were nineteen, looking after his parents when he went away to college. They accepted her eagerly; their dead daughter in another form.
That winter night, the snow and cold suspended temporarily, he said to her, ‘You would never turn out that way. I think you would make a great mother.’ She was his best friend and he didn’t want to see her hurting and it was at times like these, when he had something to offer, that he thought he might one day feel something stronger for her.
‘What about you?’ she asked. ‘Do you want children?’ The question, posed so innocently, made his breath turn airy and come out in light, shivering whispers.
‘I never really thought about it,’ he lied, taking a quick sip of the lukewarm wine. ‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘I guess that won’t be a problem for us then,’ she teased lightly, but he stayed quiet and the wine clumped in his stomach, making him queasy.
He asked her again the next morning, just to make sure, and when she gave him the same answer, ‘Yes, I’m positive. It’s just not something I want or think I’ll ever need,’ he had almost laughed out loud at his outrageous luck.
So, made bolder by the fact that there would be no future obstacle in the form of his own child, he asked Marienne to marry him. Terrified she might meet someone who offered to give her what he could not, or even worse, that he would allow his doubts and conscience to creep in, he persuaded her to marry him within a few months of his proposal and she was more than happy to oblige. As James left the church with his new bride, he saw his parents look at each other and he knew they were thinking, at least we still have our son.
They moved into their first house within the next few weeks, the deposit being a guilty gift from Marienne’s parents for not making the wedding.
‘I don’t know how they have any money left after all the fucking drugs they use.’ It was the first time he had heard her speak that way.
The house was a pretty, off-white squarish structure that sat on the outskirts of town and as Marienne filled their home with matching plates and paintings and perfectly ironed sheets, James planted a sapling. A cherry-blossom tree, which in its prime would bend over the fence facing the street; it would grow to drop its folded flowers on passers-by, gently boasting the happiness contained within the four walls just beyond.
They settled quickly and easily into their roles as husband and wife and James found a job at one of the local tobacco companies as an assistant accountant. The title made him proud and he carried his business cards around in a small, silver case that Marienne had given him, always held in his breast pocket.
Marienne made friends almost instantly with the women living within the square. They flocked to her, this delicate, plump-lipped woman with no family except for a silent husband who looked more like a young boy. They offered to help her in any way they could and every day there would be another fresh-faced housewife, or a seasoned veteran in James’s kitchen, teaching Marienne the tricks of their trade. He watched as she starched his shirts before washing them, used a solution of warm water and vinegar to remove the stains from the cotton and if that didn’t work, she tore the shirts into strips and used them to scrub the walls and floors, reaching into places he assured her no one would ever look. They taught her how to make dishes guaranteed to ‘drive him crazy’ and, within a month of their marriage, James began to come home to the crisp scent of an apple pie or a cold bottle of beer as they waited for Marienne’s meatloaf and garlic mashed potatoes. Her natural talent in the kitchen landed her on the weekly rotary of dinner parties held around the square and James would watch as she smiled and served her guests.
On their wedding night, as she had pressed close to him and slowly unbuttoned his shirt, he hadn’t recoiled at the touch of her fingers. It wasn’t difficult because she was small; tiny and straight and he just closed his eyes and pretended. Afterward, he couldn’t look at her because she was slick and gleaming with fulfillment while his stomach ached with emptiness; it craved a release it hadn’t quite reached and he felt something close to jealousy spark at his cheeks. He wanted so badly to feel a fraction of what she had felt in the moment after; to be real and present and sure in his own mind. But he cared about her and was guilty of not being in love with her, so he couldn’t begrudge her this. It got easier over time, the horrible nothingness he felt, even as she pushed so close to him, they could have been the same person. After weeks spent watching her derive the kind of pleasure he ached for, he learned to steal a little bit of it, watching her face and movements closely, trying to recall what it felt like.
But he tried not to linger on things he couldn’t have. He
was lucky to have found her; to have a life that kept on growing and which every day, he found easier to fit into. A few weeks after they had moved into the neighborhood, they had a picnic in a nearby park to celebrate someone’s birthday. He lay across the red-and-white checkered cloth, a beer in one hand and his wife tucked under the other, her body resting against the length of his. Discarded paper plates lay scattered all around him, with pieces of crumbling black forest cake, the icing melting and sticky in the sun. Half-empty glasses of wine balanced precariously on the grass, threatening to spill over at the slightest movement. Behind him, where the trees gave way to an open, flat space, some of the men had started up a football game.
‘You coming or what, McDermott?’ one of them had shouted.
‘In a bit,’ he had answered, not turning around, closing his eyes against the soft breeze that lifted his shirt off his back, cooling his skin. He inhaled the scent of his wife’s hair; for as long as he had known her, she had always smelled lovely. ‘I just want to stay here a moment longer.’