“Why are you moving to Elliot?” Frances asks Mrs. Bigalow.
Mrs. Bigalow says, “You have to swear to keep it a secret.”
“Oh, I don’t encourage Frances to make promises like that,” Alice says. “Not with strangers, no offence.”
Mrs. Bigalow says, “Very wise, a good rule.” Then she says, “Just between the three of us and the rocking chair, I was having a problem with my love life. There are a whole lot of old men out there who still think of themselves as Romeo. And old men are drawn to girls like me who can still cook. I’m a pretty good cook, if I do say so. Word gets out and they’re at your door. Like hounds to bacon. My advice to you, Miss Frances, is don’t learn to cook.”
That’s it. That’s the story. Not a story worth a promise of silence.
“Do you by any chance know a man named Tobias Sullivan?” Mrs. Bigalow asks Alice. “I believe he lives in Elliot.”
Tobias Sullivan. Now that catches Frances’s attention.
“The old school principal, you mean?” Alice says. “Yes, he’s still in Elliot. Why do you ask?”
“No reason. I knew him many years ago. I doubt he’d remember me.”
“Do you know Dooley?” Frances asks.
“Dooley. No, I don’t believe I know any Dooley.”
Frances starts to tell her about the crash—“He was driving drunk and almost died”—but her mother says, “Never mind that, it’s gossip,” so instead Frances asks Mrs. Bigalow, “Do you know Darlene Cyr? She lives in Yellowhead.”
“I don’t believe I know her either.”
Alice says, “Why would she know Darlene Cyr? Honestly, Frances.”
Then Mrs. Bigalow says, “Oh, I might be mad as a March hare, it’s possible,” and after that she falls asleep and snores with her mouth open. When they pull into a roadside station for gas a while later, she snores right through the stop.
Once they’re back on the road, Frances feels herself getting sleepy and leans her head against Mrs. Bigalow to avoid the spitting cat in the carry case. She closes her eyes and wonders if anyone will tell Mrs. Bigalow that she’s moving into a house that’s been on the news—one whose former tenants include a dead man and a runaway crook of a preacher. She falls asleep with the cat still spitting in the cage next to her, and she dreams about Dooley Sullivan for the first time in ages. She’s standing on the bank of a river and Dooley is waving at her from a bridge with his clothes on fire. She yells at him to jump, jump into the water, but he doesn’t.
When she wakes up her heart is pounding, and it’s two hours later and they’re already in Elliot and the car is mostly unpacked. Her mother is struggling to get the rocking chair out of the front seat.
“I had a bad dream,” she says to her mother, feeling cranky.
“Not now, Frances. Please be quiet unless you can see a way to get this infernal chair out of here.” Her mother pounds on one of the rockers to edge it below the doorframe.
“When can we go home?”
“Soon. Go into the house and fix Mrs. Bigalow a sandwich so she doesn’t starve on us tonight. I left a few groceries in the fridge.”
Frances goes inside and assembles a sandwich from the bread and lettuce and sliced meat in the fridge, but Mrs. Bigalow is now sound asleep on the couch, so she leaves the sandwich on a plate in the kitchen. Her mother finally gets the rocking chair into the house, and then she makes sure everything is hooked up and working—the phone, the hot water, the heat thermostat—and she wakes Mrs. Bigalow and tells her about the sandwich, then says that they’re leaving.
On the way home, she says, “I wish she had told me about the cat. I don’t like surprises.”
Frances says, “I told you I had a bad dream, you know.”
“I know. Stop pouting. What was it about?”
“Never mind. It’s too late to tell it now.”
“Suit yourself,” her mother says.
When they get in the house, Frances’s dad says, “That was a long day. How’s the Widow Bigalow?”
Alice says, “She’s eighty years old if she’s a day, and she might have lost her mind. She tells wild yarns. I’m going to have to go to town on Monday morning and get the woman’s groceries, and what she’ll do for food tomorrow, I don’t know. We’ll have to take her a meal.”
Basie says, “You’ve gone soft.”
“She’s here for Tobias Sullivan,” Alice says. “She didn’t actually say it, but you just wait and see.”
“I’m going to bed,” Frances says. “Since no one seems to care that I had a bad dream.”
When Frances is in her own bed she decides that if she dreams about Dooley on fire again, she will make him jump from the bridge into the water. If she has to, she’ll run onto the bridge and push him off.
She doesn’t dream about him, though. She has the most boring dream ever—about Mrs. Bigalow’s orange cat trying to catch a moth on the step of Uncle Vince’s house. It goes on and on.
FRANCES’S MOTHER IS right about Tobias Sullivan. Not long after Mrs. Bigalow moves in, she calls the farm and asks if Frances can walk to the house at noon hour one day that week and have lunch with her. Her parents have misgivings, but they agree. After grilled cheese sandwiches, Mrs. Bigalow asks Frances to run an errand—that is, deliver a note to Mr. Sullivan’s house, which is near the school.
“But don’t tell anyone,” she says.
Frances knocks on the side door of the house she knows is Tobias Sullivan’s, and when an old man answers, she hands him the envelope.
“What’s this?” he asks.
“It’s from Mrs. Bigalow.”
“I don’t know any Mrs. Bigalow,” he says, and then he insists that Frances come in while he reads the letter, which she is happy to do because this is where Dooley Sullivan used to live, before the accident. She doesn’t know where he lives now. Her mother says he moved away after they let him out of the hospital.
She steps inside and stands in the kitchen while Mr. Sullivan slits open the envelope and takes out the letter. There’s a bookcase full of cookbooks against the wall, and pots and pans of all different sizes hanging from a rack on the ceiling. She’s never seen such a thing. She looks for photographs or other signs of Dooley, but there are none.
When Mr. Sullivan has finished reading the letter, he turns to Frances and says, “Mrs. Bigalow, you say?” He wheezes when he breathes as though he has a bad cold.
She nods, and then he says, “Well, off you go, then,” and she walks back to school and gets there just in time for the bell.
She doesn’t tell her parents about the letter.
Six months later, Esme Bigalow becomes Esme Sullivan. It turns out that she and Tobias knew each other as young teachers over fifty years ago, and then he broke her heart and married the fiancée she didn’t know he had in his hometown of Kingston, Ontario. She thought she’d never see him again, but then a year ago she heard the name Tobias Sullivan being called at her ophthalmologist’s office in Yellowhead, where she was waiting for a cataract checkup. She looked around the waiting room to see who would stand up, but he had apparently missed his appointment. Then she did a little private investigation with the help of the chatty receptionist and learned he’d been living in Elliot for many years and was now a widower. That’s why she’d rented the house on Liberty Street. She’d set her sights on the prize she lost the first time around—that is, Tobias Sullivan.
Frances and her parents are invited to the small wedding in Tobias’s house. One of the first things Frances wants to know when they arrive is whether Dooley is there. No, Esme says (she’s Esme now, rather than Mrs. Bigalow, having insisted so many times that Alice gave up), and she shakes her head as though Dooley is a subject not spoken about in this house.
The living room is decorated with bunches of pink and white tissue flowers, and the guests sit in a semicircle of chairs for the ceremony. Besides the Moons, there are a few neighbours, one other retired teacher from the school, and the two remaining members of Tobias
’s gourmet cooking club, which used to be a going concern in Elliot, they say, but now most of the members have passed on. After Esme becomes Mrs. Sullivan, she whispers to Frances, “Remember what I told you about men preferring girls like me for their cooking? Well, look what I found: a man who can cook better than I can!”
Frances is the only child at the wedding, although she’ll be eleven her next birthday, so she’s not really a child. Still, Tobias Sullivan keeps looking at her as though he expects her to do something wrong. When she goes down the hall to find the bathroom, she decides she will do something wrong if that’s what he expects, and she snoops around for signs of Dooley. Next to the bathroom there’s a small bedroom that she guesses must have been his, but when she looks inside there’s nothing there but a bed, a dresser, and a picture of a sunset on the wall. She looks in the dresser drawers, but they’re completely empty. No clothes, no photographs, no toys a boy might have played with in his room. It’s as though Tobias has erased Dooley from his life. She goes to the kitchen for a drink of water and once again sees the pots and pans hanging from the ceiling and decides the house must have mice. The orange cat could have caught them if he hadn’t been moved to the Moons’ farm because Tobias is allergic. Now he’s learning to be a barn cat, whether he likes it or not.
After everyone has coffee and wedding cake, the guests leave so the bride and groom can rest up for their honeymoon bus trip to the Black Hills. The retired teacher who was at the wedding is still young enough to drive, and the next morning he takes them to Yellowhead to meet their tour bus. When they return ten days later, Esme invites the Moons for supper to thank them for their part in her relocation to Elliot and subsequent reunion with Tobias. Tobias makes the meal of roast pork with herbs. Although he insists he’s in charge of the kitchen, Esme has to climb on a stool whenever he needs a pot or a utensil from the rack on the ceiling (which doesn’t seem like a good idea for an old lady who broke her hip, Frances’s mother whispers to Basie). After supper, Tobias sets up a screen and projector, and they all look at slides of Deadwood and the faces of American presidents carved into a mountain. They can hear Tobias wheezing over the whir of the slide projector, even though there is no longer a cat in the house.
On the way home, Frances’s mother says, “I don’t know what she was thinking. Well, she made her bed, didn’t she?” Then she asks, “Why are those pots hanging from the ceiling anyway?”
“Mice,” Frances says.
Uncle Vince’s house goes up for rent again, but there are no takers.
JUNE. THE END of grade five and the last week of school. There’s not much work, just a lot of outdoor activity. They pick teams and play softball, and Frances gets hit in the head by a fly ball because she doesn’t see it coming right for her. Still, her head stops the ball and a boy picks it up and throws it to second and the batter is out, so it’s not as big a humiliation as it could have been. She feels kind of dizzy for a while after being hit in the head, but she doesn’t tell anyone.
On the last day—the day the report cards get handed out—Myrna Samples shows up wearing a bra. Daphne Rose, who now sits across from Frances, pokes her and asks if she’s noticed. Frances thinks Daphne must be wrong, but when she looks she can see Myrna’s new pointy breasts under her sweater. Myrna’s bra makes Frances feel more sick than getting hit in the head with a softball. It’s grade five. Grade eight girls wear bras, not grade fives. When Myrna gets up and waltzes to the front of the room to sharpen her pencil (who needs to sharpen a pencil on the last day of school?), the girls all stare and the boys whisper and make jokes until the teacher tells them to be quiet. Frances never wants to wear a bra (brassieres, her mother calls them). She is suddenly terrified that her breasts will begin to grow, and what will she do then?
She worries all summer, even though there’s no sign of breasts sprouting on her chest. Her parents decide she’s spending too much time moping, and she needs to do something useful, such as help with the chores. She hates slopping around in her rubber boots, pushing scoops of stinking muck into a channel in the barn floor and then out the door for her father to haul away with the tractor. She complains constantly about the smell, and she’s so slow that her parents give up and send her back to the house.
“You’ll never make a farmer’s wife,” her father says.
Her mother tells her she’d better start planning a future that doesn’t require manual labour, since she seems to be allergic to work as well as to milk.
“I wasn’t meant to clean up cow manure,” Frances says, sulking.
“Then start thinking about what you were meant for,” her mother says.
Frances goes back to worrying about the gross unfairness of girls having to grow breasts. Myrna and her bra ruin a perfectly good summer.
Just before school starts again, Alice finds a renter for the Liberty Street house. A new United Church minister moves to town, a thirtyish single man with a Beatles haircut. Even though Alice is not a churchgoer herself, and she doesn’t think much of his hair, she hopes she can’t go wrong with a United Church minister. He gives her six months of post-dated rent cheques and says he doesn’t mind the sound of trains passing; in fact, he likes it. He also likes Bob Dylan. Do they know Bob Dylan? He sings a few lines of “The Times They Are a-Changin’.”
“Isn’t he the one who has that song on the radio about drugs?” Alice asks.
“I’m pretty sure the lyrics were misinterpreted,” the minister says.
He turns out to be a good tenant. He pays his rent on time, and he even knows how to fix things like dripping taps. He tells Frances that in a few years’ time, she can join the teen club he’ll be starting at the church. Teenagers need clubs and sports, he says, to keep them on the right track. When Esme’s orange cat disappears, they find out that he’s made his way back to town and moved in with the minister. They let him stay there, since both the cat and the tenant seem happy with the arrangement.
Frances manages to get through most of the next year, grade six, before her chest does betray her and she starts to grow breasts. It feels like the end of the world. Her mother says, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, it happens to all girls.”
Which is true. By the end of grade seven, half of the girls in her class are wearing bras, including her. Frances’s new constant worry is that a boy will grab her bra at the back and snap it. What is wrong with them? And the girls are just as bad, the way they put up with the boys snapping their bra straps and making crude gestures, and even seem to like it. She can’t understand at all how everything has changed, turning the classroom into some kind of zoo. She tells her mother what’s going on and Alice says it sounds as though the girls in her class are all turning boy crazy.
“You, Frances,” she says, “are going to get the hell out of here, the same way I did, only you’ll actually land some place other than a cow farm because you’ll have a good education.”
What? Get out of Elliot?
Where would she go? The unknown destination is as remote to Frances as outer space, even though she’s not meant for cow farming. She imagines herself drifting toward the moon without any kind of spacesuit or breathing tubes.
That summer, a man really does walk on the moon.
They watch on TV.
THE WEEK BEFORE school starts again—grade eight, the last year before high school—Frances’s mother runs into Esme in the drugstore in town and learns that she and Tobias are about to leave on another bus trip, this time through Europe. They’re to catch a Greyhound to the city and then fly to Toronto, where they’ll meet up with their tour at the airport.
“The stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of,” Alice tells Frances and Basie. “You should have seen the batch of medications she was picking up for Tobias. He’s no more able to make a trip to Europe than he’s able to climb Mount Everest.” Alice shakes her head and says thank goodness Esme Bigalow—or Sullivan, rather—is no longer their business.
Only that turns out to be not quite true. A week later, Fra
nces and her parents are watching TV when the phone rings. It’s Esme, calling from a payphone in Toronto. Tobias has picked up a cold and the tour company won’t let him continue on to Europe. They’re going to spend the night in a hotel before they fly west again, and Esme wonders if Alice would mind driving to the city the next day, a Saturday, to pick them up when they land at the airport. It’s a big request, she knows, from someone who isn’t even family, but she can’t think of anyone else to call. Tobias’s friends are either unavailable or too old to drive to the city, and Tobias is not able to make the trip home by bus.
Alice agrees, no questions asked, which is a bit of a surprise to Basie because she’s never driven any farther than Yellowhead, and she’s certainly never driven in the city.
“Frances can come along to help navigate,” she says. “We can get a city map at a gas station.” Then she says, as though this thought had been lodged in her head for some time, “I’d like to drive by the university, see what it looks like. It’s a good school, so I hear, and less expensive than some of those bigger universities. Maybe we could arrange a tour. Well, I suppose not, on a weekend.”
Frances has no interest in the university—good or cheap or otherwise—but she’d like to see what the city looks like, a bigger city than Yellowhead. She imagines pizza parlours, hippies, the Mod Squad.
They leave early and find their way from one highway to the next, west, south, and then west again, arriving at the city limits four hours later, without incident. The land is flat and the buildings of downtown rise above the industrial outskirts in which they find themselves. “It should be straightforward,” Alice tells Frances, who has the newly acquired city map open on her lap. “We just keep going west and watch for the airport signs.” Frances examines the map and reports that the street they’re on leads almost to the airport; there’s just one turn after they get through downtown.
“Downtown?” Alice says. “You mean we have to drive through downtown? That can’t be right.” At the first break in the traffic, she pulls into a strip mall so she can look at the map herself.
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