This Is Not for You

by Jane Rule

  “What’s that?” she asked, watching me in the kitchen.

  “Toad-in-the-hole. Something English for your supper.”

  “Is it really toad?”

  “You’ll love it.”

  “But what’s in it?”

  Carefully she copied down my meatless or unrationed meat recipes.

  “Now,” she said, firm against her own embarrassment, “I can’t flush your… thing. If I’m going to stay, you’d better let me in on the trick unless it’s like a secret, family recipe.”

  Knowing how to cook the food and flush the toilets in a foreign country is the basis for sanity, for people like Monk and me, anyway. You were more concerned with learning to ask for a ticket to Sloane Square with an English accent, a talent which embarrassed Monk and me so much that we always walked away to avoid hearing it. Monk’s capacity for embarrassment, along with her surprising ability to deal with practical problems, secured our new friendship. Occasionally she offered quick insights into herself which were not so reassuring.

  “Being engaged is a marvelous convention. I don’t have to think about marrying anybody, not even Robin.”

  “Don’t you want to marry him?”

  “I’m too frightened of the idea to think about what I might want.”

  But Monk never settled to talk about herself as you did. Because I couldn’t expect from her your reticence about requiring a return of confidences, I was grateful to Monk. She was extraordinarily easy for me to be with.

  You went on worrying about her just as you had at college. Apparently she went on talking to you just as she had at college.

  “She gets so depressed,” you said, “and she won’t think anything out. What’s she going to do about Robin? She can’t just leave him waiting indefinitely.”

  “Perhaps he simply won’t wait indefinitely.”

  “For Monk he will. She has a terrible effect on men.”

  She’s not the only one, I might have answered, but I didn’t. After your experience with John, you were being very careful to avoid the sort of man who would make any demands on you. How conscious it was I don’t know, for Slade offered you so many opportunities to meet young men more reluctant than you. Marcus and Clide and a boy we all called Purple Bell gradually formed a kind of gang around you for mutual protection. You admired their work, and they admired you. Not long ago, when I was in London, I went to a show of Marcus’, and in one of the sketches I saw the prototype woman he was beginning to understand when he sketched you. I would like to have bought it, but I am enough surrounded by the world you made or were made into. “Laying ghosts” is an unfortunate expression. I trust that’s not what I’m doing now.

  As had been true at college, you and Monk both seemed to have worlds to work in. I did not. My studies were really not much less theoretical than they had been. I was learning a new vocabulary and imposing the same discipline on new raw material. I still despaired of finally putting knowledge to some real use. And, because I no longer shared the books I read with you, I could not even talk much about what I was doing. When I heard in casual conversation with a friend of Doris’ that a large reception center for orphans was terribly short-handed, I decided working a few hours a week was what I needed.

  “You’re always paying debts of one sort or other,” Doris said.

  “I’m sorry it’s an orphanage,” I said. “It just happened that way. I need something ordinary to do.”

  “Why not take up beagling?”

  “Monk has. Her accounts are enough, thanks. Twenty people and thirty dogs after one rabbit. Besides, I have the only set of long underwear, and she has to wear it.”

  “You work too hard, Kate.”

  “I don’t. I work too much at one sort of thing.” It was an hour’s ride on the underground and a ten-minute walk, most of it through orphanage property, past the office buildings and hospital along a row of cottages where some of the children were housed, eight or ten together with a couple in charge. There were dormitories, too, for those who would not be staying more than a few days. None of the children, except for those seriously ill or handicapped, stayed longer than a month or six weeks. Once they had been examined and tested and observed, they were sent elsewhere to foster homes or schools. A few were returned to homes of their own when parents recovered from illness or financial difficulty and could deal with them again, but most of them were abandoned children, either there for the first time having been found wandering the streets, camped in bombed buildings, or there again not having been placed happily the first time. I went twice a week for two hours in the late afternoon to supervise a recreation period for boys and girls between the ages of twelve and fifteen. Sometimes I had as few as a dozen, but more often there were thirty or more. At the end of each session I met with one of the officials to report what I had observed of certain children, to drink a strong cup of tea, to listen to complaints about the shortage of staff. In that small room off the recreation hall, crowded with a couch, several chairs, and boxes of equipment, I often felt a terrible, physical apathy, an infant’s helplessness of body in which I was more aware of the antiseptic smell, the metallic taste of tea, an aggressive spring in my thigh than of the conversations I was supposed to contribute to. Perhaps they were attacks of memory. They served as a kind of defense against a despair of spirit, for I learned quickly that what I observed was really useless information. There wasn’t time; there wasn’t energy of imagination to do more than sort the children out generally and keep them daily out of trouble until they were sent on somewhere else. The talk about them was an outlet for tired human beings who wanted to complain.

  “That one’s not epileptic at all! The psychologist says it’s hysteria,” the matron reported angrily “So don’t let him fool you.”

  Sometimes I protested, tried to explain the psychological terms I had been trained to trust, but it only made them suspicious of me; and part of my job was to relieve them for a little of the burden of these children. There was little else I could do. With new faces each time, as strange to each other as they were to me, there was not much hope of organizing any elaborate group activity. The games they knew, prostitution and thieving, were not appropriate. The games I tried to teach them were complicated by their refusal to accept the convention of teams. In a relay race, the boys stole the shoes of their own team-mates. At darts, they liked each other for targets. Any game with a ball quickly turned into one-man-keep-away and mob violence. Only two means of discipline worked: brutal threats occasionally carried out and physical tenderness. The first I was reluctant to use; the second there were too many for. I was reduced to sometimes frighteningly unsuccessful attempts at simply keeping them from hurting themselves badly for two hours twice a week. There were children who were not violent. They sat passively or tried to press themselves into corners to keep themselves from harm. One little boy, who must have been twelve but looked no more than seven, sat pulling out and eating his hair. One side of his head was absolutely bald.

  “You need helpers,” Monk decided. “Esther and I’d better come with you.”

  “Sure,” you agreed, but you looked doubtful. “I don’t know much about children.”

  The first time you both came you were less than useless. The boys fought for curls of Monk’s hair until she had to be rescued, and a girl who begged to wear your ring then stole it from you. Neither of you would be discouraged, however, and gradually the three of us learned to control the children. We began then to have positive ideas. Monk played the piano, and you knew a hundred dances, which some of the children were willing to learn while others stamped and whirled and leaped and fell in their own inventions. We even managed to organize a fast, undisciplined sort of volleyball, two of us always playing with the children, the third giving time and attention to the ones too frightened to play.

  Neither of you would deal with the officials as I did, and sometimes we had fiercer arguments among ourselves than we had with them.

  “There’s no point in antago
nizing people,” I’d try to explain on the long ride home in the tube.

  “They need to be told it’s wrong,” Monk would say, “even if it doesn’t do any practical good.”

  “I think we can explain,” you’d insist. “After all, these people work there because they care about children. It’s just that they don’t know any better.”

  “I don’t think three rich American girls with a freshman course in psychology are going to be looked upon as experts.”

  “I’m not rich,” Monk protested. “And they can’t fire us because they don’t pay us. They have to listen to us whether they like it or not.”

  “And then take it out on the kids we’ve shown sympathy for—been conned by, as far as they’re concerned. And we are conned some of the time, you know.”

  “Sometimes I think you’re a cynical person, Kate,” Monk said.

  “No, I’m not. I just don’t want to fight until I can get somewhere by it. That takes power.”

  “Knowledge is power,” you said.

  “Not unless you mean the sort that teaches you to use money and political position.”

  “That is cynical,” Monk decided with some satisfaction.

  While I stored up frustration as if it were fuel or canned goods, Monk began to write protest plays as lucidly silly as her “psychological dramas” had been. It wasn’t in your nature to protest, and, though you may have begun with explanation, the work that came out of those afternoons was as individual as your attention always was. You spent an afternoon talking with a boy who was learning to be a bell ringer, and for weeks after that you worked on the extended body, weight that would seem to hang and float at once. Sometimes it was butchershop carcass; sometimes there were shoulder blades as sharp and delicate as butterfly wings. Figures groped or reached, leapt or swung. It was the first time in your life you had found a problem that was both technical and aesthetic. Years later, when you finally did your Christ, His beginnings were in that boy bell ringer, who had been able to tell you how notes were run through the muscle and bone of his reaching, hanging weight. There was no protest, no explanation; the note, the statement, that was all.

  I liked our conversations on the way to the orphanage better than those on the way back. Monk usually entertained us with stories of catastrophic rehearsals or her latest discoveries about the habits of the natives. After she gave up beagling, she took up rowing. I think one of the beasts had been stroke of the Cambridge crew when he was an undergraduate, and she wanted to know what it was like. She described practice hours in what she called “the tank” before anyone was allowed out on the river, but before that day came, Monk had to withdraw.

  “I was getting absolutely lopsided!” she announced, “really,” to us and several other passengers who had given up trying not to overhear. “I don’t suppose men have that problem.”

  Not to be outdone by Monk, you explored your talent for mimicry, which included not only half a dozen accents but an ability to suggest bodies totally unlike your own. You could in a stance or gesture recall dozens of our college friends and introduce us to people at Slade whom we’d never met.

  I was aware that sometimes our traveling companions did not find us as entertaining as we found ourselves. We had to travel at the beginning of the rush hour. We met at a fish and chips shop always, then rushed down escalators with a newspaperful each, stood for the first twenty minutes, eating and talking and laughing, falling about a bit because our hands were always too busy with other things to be hanging on as well. The last forty minutes, there was always more room, but we made too much gay use of it for the tired, end of the day newspaper readers. I tried to quiet us sometimes, but I never wanted to. I depended on those borrowed high spirits for my own.

  Andrew came unexpectedly on his first visit late one Saturday afternoon in November. Because a fog had settled, I persuaded him to stay at the flat for the evening. I had a bottle or two of red wine. There must be a can of something that would do for dinner, but at six o’clock there was another knock on the door. Monk, her hair tangled into curls by the dampness, stood holding up a small, bleeding, paper bag.

  “Liver!” she said in a regal voice.

  “How did you get it?” I asked.

  “I simply said to the butcher, ‘But what do you do when you’ve spent your week’s ration and are still thin and hungry?’ ” She did not see Andrew until I’d welcomed her in. “Oh dear, a love nest. I didn’t know. Really I didn’t.”

  “There’s enough here for three,” I said.

  “But I’ve invited Esther,” she said sadly. “I should have phoned first.”

  “I should have,” Andrew said.

  “There’s enough for four,” I said, dumping the liver out onto a plate. “Plenty.”

  “But Esther won’t want to come with you here,” Monk said to Andrew, then smiled helplessly. “Why don’t you and Esther go out to dinner, and I’ll stay home and cook for Andy?”

  “Making it worse only makes it worse,” I said. “Can’t you ever learn?”

  “No,” Monk admitted. “What will I do?”

  “Take off your coat. Wash the blood off your hands. And have a glass of wine.”

  “And I?” Andrew asked.

  “More or less the same thing,” I said. “It’s time peace was made. Liver is as good an excuse as any.”

  And it turned out to be. You never had any human awkwardness. You greeted Andrew not as if you had expected him to be there but as if it were the natural place for him to be. And you settled at once to talk with him because there really were questions you had to ask about Cambridge and his Ph.D. program. Monk and I listened for a while, my attention shifting from what Andrew had to say to the attentive loveliness not only of your face but of your whole body. You sat on the floor near the gas fire, one knee up to support both hands and chin, your long hair pulled back, then caught before it fell, heavy and dark against a pale blue sweater. There was nothing delicate about you, the bold bones of your hands under your strong chin, full, almost Negroid mouth, flat cheek bones, black eyes and brows. It was a face meant for repose, the fact of it animation enough. Beside you, Monk’s prettiness was not even a distraction, and that night she did not try to compete. She went with me into the kitchen to help prepare dinner, leaving you and Andrew to a peace that did not seem to have to be made.

  You left soon after dinner, on your way to a gang party the rest of us could not be persuaded to go to. At around ten o’clock, when Monk also decided that she had taken up enough of our evening, Andrew and I walked her home. I could feel how careful they were being of each other because Monk’s badly timed jokes had stopped, because Andrew paid too much attention to his conversation with me. After we left her, I let the conversation stop, and we walked for several blocks in silence.

  “We had a conversation about Canadian social customs once before,” I said.

  “Yes, and I should have taken my own advice then.”

  “Well, but don’t now, just to try to pay a bad debt. You’d be good for Monk.”

  “How?”

  “Don’t be irritated with me, Andy.”

  “I’m not. It’s just that sometimes I don’t get the hang of being friendly.”

  “I have to work tomorrow evening.”

  “Okay,” he said, with enough resignation in his voice so that we could both feel the game was being played properly.

  I had not really thought about Monk until she telephoned the next day just before I was going out to meet Andrew for lunch.

  “That bastard’s asked me out tonight!” she announced. “What did he tell you, that he was going back to Cambridge?”

  “Of course not. I told him I had to work tonight. You didn’t refuse, did you?”

  “Well… yes, damn it.”

  “Never mind. I’m about to have lunch with him. What time will you be ready tonight?”

  “Kate, hasn’t anyone ever told you that lending men is a dangerous game?”

  “I’m not lending him
to you, Monk. I’m giving him to you, to return the favor for the liver.”

  “What’s the matter with him?” she asked suspiciously.

  “He has an addiction to redheads.”

  “Harems more likely,” she said, “a brunette, a redhead, and a… blonde?”

  “Not quite. What time?”

  “Seven.”

  I did not work that night. I barely escaped being paid, however. Amateur standing in some sports is hard to maintain if you’re twenty-one and in good training.

  After that Andrew came to London almost every weekend. I often had lunch with him. His work and mine had moved closer together, and I talked with him as I had once talked with you. I was testing patterns in the economics of underdeveloped countries, as they were then called. It is still a more accurate, if less tactful euphemism than “emerging nations.” Andrew had a great deal of information about primitive cultures which threatened to be relevant. We argued a lot, really because Andrew’s interest was theoretical, mine more and more urgently practical.

  “You are going to be a spy and a humanitarian,” he said with some disapproval.

  Occasionally I also went to the theater with Andrew and Monk, but it wasn’t long before they began to isolate themselves, however reluctantly Andrew didn’t talk with me about Monk until just before Christmas when he dropped by for a drink.

  “Kate, I’m going to have to marry her.”

  “Who?”

  “Ramona.” He had stopped calling her Monk almost at once, but I wasn’t used to her real name. He might have been talking about someone else.

  “Have to?”

  He smiled. “She’s not pregnant, no. And she may have to be pregnant before she will marry me.”

  “Has she broken off with Robin?”

  “No.”

  “Well, don’t hurry it. She is in love with you, as much as she knows how to be.”

  “Love’s something none of my ‘harem,’ as she insists on calling you and Esther and herself, learned much about, it seems to me.”