It’s dark when she wakes up. She smells something cooking. She gets up and goes to the kitchen, where Joe has a stew ready and the table set for supper. The kitchen smells good, but when Frances sits down to eat, she finds she has no appetite. She sits at the table saying nothing, and Joe clearly doesn’t know what to do. Finally he says, “That was kind of a mean trick. Don’t let it bother you.”
Frances doesn’t understand.
Joe said, “We did that on their wedding night, years ago. Ginny and Saul’s. Payback, I guess.”
Frances thinks, He’s telling me this so I’ll believe everything is all right. She picks up her fork and has a bite of stew and a chunk of potato, and she thinks there is a possibility that things could be all right—that the cap is not Silas’s, that she’ll never see those people again, that Joe will turn back into the man who’d taken her to the movies, the one she’d wanted so badly to sleep with. But it’s a slim possibility.
After supper, she goes to the bedroom again, and eventually Joe comes in and sits on the edge of the bed in the dark. He reaches out his hand to touch her, but she pulls away from him and rolls herself into a little ball in the wool blanket, still in her clothes. She remembers how she’d decided she was in love with Joe Fletcher, and then doubted herself, and then convinced herself she did love him. What was wrong with her? Now, it seems, she’s decided once and for all that she doesn’t love him, and it’s not just because of the cap. She could convince herself that the cap belongs to Saul. It wouldn’t be that difficult—much less difficult than convincing herself she can stay here. She should ask Joe what Saul’s last name is, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t mention the cap again.
She stays in Joe Fletcher’s house for eleven days. She does not let him touch her. He’s patient for the first few days, and then he becomes surly. He doesn’t force himself on her, but he’s sarcastic when she won’t undress in front of him and changes into her pyjamas in the bathroom. He calls her a baby, says he thought he was marrying a woman but got Daddy’s baby instead. She decides she has to leave. There’s no other solution. When she tells Joe this, he doesn’t argue. He carries her cardboard boxes and her suitcase out to the truck and drives her home. She takes the presents from the wedding with her, predicting that her mother will want to return them, but she leaves the presents brought by Joe’s friends. She also leaves the Bible Martha gave them. He can deal with those. She carries the sand candle on her lap again. They don’t speak at all on the way, not a word.
When they arrive at the dairy farm, Joe stops on the approach and unloads her suitcase and boxes. Frances can’t look at him. She risks a glance when the last box is on the ground and Joe is lifting the tailgate to close it. She sees that he has something to say and she fears that he is about to beg her to reconsider.
He’s not. She meets his eye and he says, “What did you think? That you could try me out, go for a test drive and then say thanks, but no thanks? Well, go to hell, Frances. I’m glad to be rid of you. I should have listened to Martha.”
For the first time she sees his side of it, and she understands that he hates her. She tries to say sorry, thinks she might even be sorry now that she’s safe at home again, but then he leans toward her, his whiskered face just inches from hers, and says, “One more thing. Forget about that cap. Don’t go spreading lies if you know what’s good for you. You don’t want to mess with Saul’s bunch.”
She steps back, alarmed. It was a threat. You don’t want to mess with Saul’s bunch. She remembers the way Saul and Ginny had stared at her the night of the party. Joe Fletcher has just warned her that something terrible will happen to her if she ever mentions the cap.
All she can think is, Stupid, stupid Frances Moon. And then, not even that, because Moon is not her name anymore.
After Joe is gone, she sits down on one of her boxes and waits. The sand candle is still in her lap. She sits on the box and waits until the milk truck pulls into the yard and drives slowly past her.
Shortly after that, her mother comes running.
THIS, DELIVERED BY her mother as a command: “Forget it. Everything. The marriage, the wedding, Joe Fletcher. Just thank your lucky stars that you got out of there. From this day forward, it didn’t happen.” Frances spends the first week of her return home lying on her bed and thinking about those words, It didn’t happen. She tries to think of them as a pardon for the mistake of the marriage. Most days, she sleeps all afternoon, and when she wakes up and smells supper cooking, she goes to the kitchen and they eat together, the Moon family, but they don’t speak. It’s as though they’re all too fragile for conversation. Her parents are relieved—she knows it—but their relief is not joyful. The three of them are traumatized, like people who have stepped out of a bomb shelter and found themselves at a dinner table with the walls around them blown apart.
Her mother returns the wedding gifts as Frances thought she would, even the dishes. All but the candle, which Frances says she wants to keep. She thinks of it more as a friendship present than a wedding gift.
“We’ll get a divorce,” Alice says, but the word “divorce” is as bad as the word “marriage” to Frances, and she says, “It didn’t happen, remember? That’s what you said.” Her mother says they should at least get her name changed back to Moon—some government department called vital statistics does that—and Frances beseeches her to stop, please stop talking about it, stop reminding her of what a disaster her life is.
Her mother says, “At some point, Frances, you are going to want a divorce. You have to face that.”
“It didn’t happen,” she says again, and her mother lets it go for the time being.
Myrna Samples comes to see her. They should drive to Yellowhead, she says, go shopping, check out the clothes in the Sally Shoppe, the new fall shoes in the Bata store. Frances agrees to go, but she has no enthusiasm for the things Myrna holds up and suggests she try on. Wide-leg jeans. Shoes with big block heels. A red corduroy jacket with little flowers embroidered on the collar. “This would look super fabulous on you,” Myrna says about the jacket, and Frances says, “I don’t know. Red hair. You should try it on. It would look better on you.” Myrna does try it on, and she buys it. Frances doesn’t buy anything. She’s such bad company. They go into a new record store that Myrna has heard also sells hash pipes, but Frances leaves right away when she sees the pipes under the counter, afraid the police will come and arrest them along with the hippie owner. It starts to snow and they decide they’d better head home before the road blows in. By the end of the day, as they approach Elliot, Frances knows they can’t be friends. She can’t be anyone’s friend.
When they pull into the yard at the dairy farm, Myrna says, “Isn’t that Joe’s new truck?”
Frances looks. It is Joe’s copper-and-white truck, parked in front of her father’s shop. She panics. She tells Myrna to turn the car around and take her the hell out of there, which Myrna is about to do when Frances’s mother comes out waving her arms for them to stop and says, “Don’t worry, he’s gone.”
Frances gets out of the car and Myrna drives away, and Frances asks, “What’s his truck doing here?”
Her mother says, “Apparently, it’s your father’s truck now. I’m so mad I could spit.” It turns out that Basie had bought the truck for Joe without telling Alice. As a wedding present, he said, because he didn’t want his only daughter running around the country in a rusty old truck. Joe had returned the truck while Frances was in Yellowhead.
Within the week, the truck is sold and gone from the yard.
And then Frances asks her mother if it’s too late for her to tell the university that she’d like to attend after all, and her mother immediately looks into it, not even trying to conceal her excitement, and finds that it isn’t too late. The school is on a semester system and Frances can start after Christmas.
She will put in her time, then, Frances thinks. Endure the next few months, push aside the fear she feels whenever a vehicle passes on the road. She sees he
r move to the city as her best option—exile, escape to the place where a lesser mistake was made years before, the simple mistake of not locking car doors against petty criminals.
She burns the sand candle in her room until the wax caves in on itself, and then she throws it out.
She tries the guitar again, figures out three chords, and is astounded by how much her fingers hurt. This is the bed I made for myself, she thinks, the price of what happened not happening.
She tries, for her mother’s sake, to show some interest in her own life.
The falsehood of her compliance: that she has finally come to her senses.
7. Snow
HER PARENTS FIGHT when they think Frances isn’t listening. Her mother brings up the truck over and over. How could Basie have done that, bought the truck without telling her? She keeps harping at him. Maybe, she says, that was Joe Fletcher’s plan all along—to marry Frances, an only child, and end up with a profitable farm instead of that liability he owns in the bush. Basie played right into his hands, she says, by buying him that new truck. Basie listens, or doesn’t listen, until he says something like, “Judas Priest, give it a rest.” Frances thinks that she caused this; she brought this discord into the house. She worries that her father doesn’t care about her anymore. He’s hardly spoken a word to her since she left Joe Fletcher.
Then finally, finally, on the morning she is to embark on her new life, he says something that expresses at least the possibility that he cares what happens to her. At the breakfast table, he says to Alice, “You’re sure about this room you’ve rented—that it’s a proper family she’s moving in with?”
“I’m sure,” Alice says. “I’ve spoken to them on the phone. Several times, in fact.”
“Maybe I should be coming along,” he says.
Frances wants him to come, but Alice says it’s not necessary. She needs to stay overnight to get Frances sorted, and there’s too much to do on the farm for them both to be away.
When Basie says, “You be careful in that city,” it’s clear what he’s getting at.
“Phhft,” Alice says, dismissing his concern, but Frances doesn’t trust that phhft.
An hour later, after the car is packed and they’re about to walk out the door, Frances turns back to her father, who is still sitting at the table, a cup of coffee in front of him, and she says, “Hey, Dad, how did the blind man meet his wife?”
He doesn’t answer at first, and then he says, simply, “That old joke.” As though the days of jokes are over.
Once they’re on the road, Frances watches her mother pretending: that she isn’t worried Frances will change her mind and come running home to Elliot; that she’s not afraid to be on her way back to the city where she’d once been carjacked; that she doesn’t care about the snow that’s beginning to fall, even though it’s windy and the visibility is reduced. Alice says, “What’s a little drifting snow? We’re used to that, are we not? Say something, Frances. Are we not used to drifting snow?”
“Yes,” Frances says. “We are.”
Everything grows white with new snow. Tammy Wynette is on the radio, singing that sad old song about the woman following her man to Utah and Texas and Alaska. The landscape is a blur of passing fence posts, and Frances can’t stop looking at them. She tries to focus on one fence post, but they’re passing too quickly. The snow lets up once they’re on the other side of Yellowhead. Thankfully, the wind has also died down. If it were still blowing, they wouldn’t be able to see a thing.
Frances looks out at the white world, the ditches level with the roadway, hay bales and sheds and machinery obscured by mounds of white, and says, “I wonder if we’ll know when we pass the place where we stopped the car when Tobias died.”
“I wouldn’t have a clue,” her mother says. “But we’re not going to ruin the day by talking about that, are we?”
Frances goes back to staring at passing fence posts. Every so often they pass one with a magpie sitting on it. She thinks about the way she’d left her father, sitting with his coffee at the kitchen table. She feels convinced that he’s given up on her.
When they reach the city, Frances tries to pick out the strip mall where they’d been carjacked. As they pass a familiar-looking convenience store, Frances sees her mother looking at it, thinking the same thing she is, but Alice says, “Keep your eyes open for our turn. The third set of lights. Here’s the first.”
They follow the instructions they’ve been given and find the address they’re looking for, the downtown home of a Greek family with a one-room furnished suite for rent in their third-storey attic (her mother calls it a flat). After Frances’s belongings and Alice’s white overnight case are inside and up the stairs, Alice is desperate for a cup of tea. She pulls a little container of teabags out of her purse, makes tea in an aluminum pot, and drinks it without milk. Then she finds the landlord and asks him to draw a map of the route from the house to the university campus, and they drive there with Frances navigating. They find the business office, and then take a walk around the campus while Alice babbles about the world that Frances is entering—what she will learn, the smart people she will meet. Frances only half-listens.
After a quick stop in the cafeteria to check the prices (reasonable, Frances’s mother proclaims), they drive to a grocery store and find a bank near the apartment. Once Alice has set Frances up with a chequing account, they drive back to the apartment with the groceries and cook macaroni and cheese on the hot plate, and afterward Alice insists on making hot chocolate (as though they are roommates, Frances thinks). Then they go to bed, the two of them squeezed onto the twin-size mattress. In the early morning, Alice cooks oatmeal and then packs up her nightgown and toothbrush, and says, “We’ll see you at Easter. You can tell us what you’ve learned. I know you’ll do us proud.”
She leaves when the sun is barely up, so used to an early start to her day. Frances goes back to bed and falls asleep thinking about Easter. She already knows she doesn’t want to go home at Easter. She may never go back to Elliot again.
Later, the Greek couple look in on her and give her a lesson on the old house’s fragile plumbing system, and also how to say hello in Greek at different times of the day. That night, she wakes up in the dark and doesn’t know where she is. She thinks she’s on the top bunk of her bed at home and is surprised when she sits on the edge and feels the floor under her bare feet. Then she sees the outline of her suitcase across the room and remembers.
The sound of children in the house wakes her the next morning. She bundles up against the cold and walks to the university for orientation day. It takes her almost an hour to get there. Once she arrives, there’s a tour of the campus, classes to choose, more forms to fill in. When she sees “legal name” as the first question on all the forms, she is sickened that her legal name is now Frances Fletcher. She writes Frances Moon anyway, since the application was in that name, and after she’s completed everything that is required of her, she finds a phone book hanging from a chain under a payphone and pores through the government listings until she finds the vital statistics office, and she takes a taxi there. She provides identification, writes a cheque (the first in her life), and fills out another form that will change her name again, back to Moon. The official name change will take time, they tell her. She doesn’t care. She already feels a weight lifted, the weight of Joe Fletcher’s name. She walks home from the government building, and when she passes a lawyer’s office—J.C. Homan, the name on the sign says—she goes inside and asks for an appointment. J.C. Homan is free that very minute. She tells him the bare bones of her story, and how she doesn’t want the man she married to get her parents’ farm. He says he couldn’t anyway—“He didn’t marry your parents, did he?”—but he tells her about de facto separations. He creates a file with her name on it and puts a statement inside. Come and see him again, he says, when she’s ready for a divorce. She writes him a cheque. She leaves his office and stops at a corner store and buys a bag of ripple chips. There’
s a rough-looking man—a drug addict?—hanging around the drink cooler, and she wonders if he will follow her and try to steal her purse, but he doesn’t. She gets all the way back to her apartment without anything bad happening. She locks the door after herself and sits on the side of the bed and eats the chips without even taking her coat off.
FOR THE FIRST several days of classes, Frances walks to the campus because she doesn’t know how to take a city bus, is afraid she won’t know how to tell the driver to stop the bus and let her off. After three days of enduring the January cold, she decides she’s being ridiculous—daft as a wagon horse, her mother would say—and she stands at a bus stop and tries to look hopeful when the next university bus comes along, and it works because the bus stops and the door opens for her. There’s a sign on the coin box that tells her how much change to deposit, and she doesn’t have to do anything when they get to the university. The bus pulls up in front of the library and the doors open and all the students with their armloads of books spill out the doors and push their way into the building against the bitter wind. Boys with long hair. Girls wearing workboots and colourful scarves. No one she recognizes, not one person. No one from home—not even Jimmy Gulka, who has gone off to a bigger university in Alberta.
She finds herself walking next to a dark-skinned boy she thinks might be in one of her classes, and for some reason that she cannot fathom, she speaks to him. She assumes he is a foreign student from some primitive village even smaller than the place she is from.
“That was my first time on a city bus,” she says.
“Really?” he says. “I thought everyone took buses in a city like this. Where there are no trains, I mean.” He has perfect English, with only the slightest accent, which sounds British, if anything.
She says, “I’m from a small town,” and then she looks away and hurries off down the long, crowded hallway to her lecture hall, which is the same one that the boy, Rudy Bustani, enters. He sits in an empty chair beside her.
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