“You must get bored weighing those goddamn seeds all day,” he remarks.
“I don’t mind it,” she says. “I like the work.”
He looks at her strangely, but she doesn’t elaborate. How can she explain that there’s so much more to it than just weighing seeds, which, admittedly, can become a bit mind-numbing? It’s the place itself that’s special: the wonderful smells, the conversation and laughter downstairs, being with her father in this enchanted world he’s created.
Gabriel scoops up a handful of seeds. “I wouldn’t have the patience.”
“It’s really not so bad,” she says, holding out her hand. “Smell these.”
He smells the seeds in her hand and shrugs. She can’t help giggling.
She’s glad she wore her pleated plaid skirt and the blouse with the lace edging today. Her hair is styled nicely, too. It’s wavy and parted on the side, held in place with a barrette. Her head is still throbbing from when Maman did her waves in the morning, not with bobby pins, the way most mothers do it, but with the side of her hand, jabbing relentlessly against Maggie’s skull until the waves took. At least now she can say it was worth it.
“Anyway, I couldn’t do it,” Gabriel says. “Up here in this hot attic all day.”
She stares deeply into his gray eyes and gets lost there for a moment. His cheeks are flushed from the cold outside. He’s lovely.
“It’s good preparation,” she says.
“For what?”
“I’m going to manage the store one day.”
“Why would you want to do that?”
“I want to take over from my father,” she explains, as though it should be obvious to him. “He can’t do it forever.”
Gabriel is about to say something when her father’s footsteps on the stairs silence both of them. “Mr. Phénix,” he says in French. “Customers aren’t allowed up there.”
Gabriel brushes past him on the stairwell on his way down. Before disappearing from Maggie’s view, he turns back once and grins at her. Her heart soars.
Her father remains in the attic for a few minutes without speaking, his presence warning enough. He’s cautioned Maggie many times about French boys, always reminding her that they’re mostly poor, don’t finish school, and their teeth rot before they turn forty. One year, when her uncle Yvon got so drunk he threw the Christmas tree out the front door, her father pulled her aside and whispered a stern warning about French Canadians and alcohol. “That’s why you stick with your own kind,” he said.
“But you didn’t,” Maggie pointed out while Peter and Deda dragged the tree back inside, leaving a trail of silver tinsel and broken glass balls.
“That was my mistake. You can’t change them, Maggie. Remember that.”
His words have always stayed with her. You can’t change them.
Her father leans back against her worktable with his arms folded across his chest. Maggie seals an envelope of prickly poppy seeds with her tongue and drops it into the pile.
“A new shipment came in yesterday,” her father says. “There’s Lily-of-Peru seeds, tiger lilies . . . Did you see them?”
“I didn’t get to them yet.”
He looks at his watch. “I’ve got some bookkeeping to do. Why don’t you go home without me today.”
She contemplates the long walk home by herself. “I’ll wait,” she says. She enjoys their walks home together. Besides, hanging around the store is better than being at home with her mother. “I can start on those new seeds?”
He looks at his watch again. “Those Lilies-of-Peru are worth an absolute fortune,” he says sternly. “Be very careful when you’re weighing them. I’ll need about an hour, undisturbed.”
She salutes him mockingly.
“Be accurate,” he reiterates. “No rushing, Margueret.” No doubt he suspects her of guesstimating how many seeds to allot for each envelope, which she does occasionally when she falls behind. “If you want more responsibility here, you can’t cut corners.”
She nods obediently, her face warm with pride. She can’t suppress her smile. The stairs creak as he heads back down.
“Maggie!” he calls out. “Accurately, eh?”
“Yes, sir!”
She dumps a pile of tiger lily seeds onto the table and starts weighing them, paying close attention to the scale. Measuring, measuring, undaunted by all the seeds before her. The tiger lilies are thin brown ovals surrounded by papery triangles. They feel scaly between her fingers. She crushes one to see what it feels like. The paper wing disintegrates into dust, leaving just a seed the size of her pinkie nail. She flicks it out the back window, destroying the evidence of her wastefulness. If she stares at a single seed long enough, she can forget what it is. She can even forget it’s a seed at all, the way when you say a word over and over again, it loses its meaning. Her mind does funny things like that up in the attic.
Time passes. Her hands move deftly while her eyes record the numbers on the scale, her vision seemingly unconnected to her brain. She finishes another sack of tiger lilies and then dumps out a sack of Lilies-of-Peru. She checks the clock; she needs to take a bathroom break. There’s only one in the store and it’s directly below her, tucked under the staircase.
As she reaches the main floor, she glances over at her father’s office. His door is closed, a sign the accounting is not going smoothly. He probably needs some cheering up. Maybe she’ll poke her head in and say hi. He likes it when she does that. He always smiles and says in his ultraserious voice, All right, Maggie, enough tomfoolery. Back upstairs you go.
She quietly inches open the door, expecting to see him hunched over a stack of papers on his desk, his bifocals balanced on the tip of his nose. Instead, she finds him standing behind his desk with his back to her and his pants down, his white buttocks exposed. Maggie realizes he’s not alone; someone she can’t quite see through the crack of the door is crouched down in front of him. She watches for a moment, horror-struck and captivated, until her father moans with pleasure and collapses against the desk. And then a woman’s voice cries out, “Your daughter!”
Maggie lets out a loud gasp. Her father turns around; his face is flushed and sweaty. Whoever he’s with tries to stay hidden behind the desk, but her head bobs up for a split second, and Maggie instantly recognizes her golden braids. Clémentine.
Her father quickly pulls up his pants and looks right at Maggie, struggling with his zipper and belt buckle. Maggie, shocked more by his hubris than by the indiscretion itself, turns and flees.
“Maggie!”
As he utters her name, she bolts back to the staircase. She hears him say to Clémentine, “I told you this was stupid!”
“You could have locked the door,” she hisses back in French. The door slams.
Maggie dashes up to the attic, snatches a handful of seeds, and starts counting mindlessly. The seeds are slippery in her damp, trembling hands; all she can see is the image of her father with his pants down.
Moments later, Maggie hears her father on the stairs and contemplates ducking under the table. He steps into the attic with his hair smoothed back in place and the natural pallor returned to his skin. He paces the floor behind Maggie. She continues counting her seeds one by one. Eight, nine, ten, eleven. He paces back and forth, rubbing his bald spot with his fingers, sighing, silent, troubled. Still, he does not speak. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen.
“What you saw—” he finally says.
“I didn’t really—”
“It was an accident.”
“An accident?”
“Mm.”
“I didn’t really see anything.”
“It doesn’t . . . It won’t—”
“I’m not going to say anything.”
He expels a breath. She isn’t sure if it’s a sigh of relief or remorse, if it’s a sigh at all. He continues to pace behind her quietly for another few minutes before turning around and descending the flight of stairs.
She lets the Lily-of-Peru seeds slide betwe
en her fingers like sand.
They walk home together in total silence. Maggie’s father makes no attempt at levity. There’s none of their usual banter, only the weight of their shared shame hanging between them in the cold. When they finally reach the house, Maggie rushes inside.
The kitchen smells of cloves and allspice. She spots three sugar pies lined up on the windowsill. Her mother is at the stove, stirring a giant pot of ragoût de boulettes. They must be having company.
“You’d better get ready,” Maman says. “Everyone will be here at seven.”
“Who’s everyone?” her father wants to know.
“I told you I invited the Dions and the Frechettes,” she says impatiently, turning to give him a disapproving look. She isn’t wearing her corset yet, which makes Maggie so furious she has to look away. She resents her mother’s sagging breasts and loose belly, wishes she had made more of an effort to preserve her beauty over the years. What happened at the store today can only be her mother’s fault.
“I’m in no mood to entertain,” her father mutters, avoiding making eye contact with Maggie. “It’s been a long day.”
“Put the beer in the icebox,” Maman says, ignoring him. “You walked right past it in the mudroom.”
Hours later, the house is alive with music and raucous laughter. At the center of it sits her father, smoking a cigar and slapping a pair of spoons on his knee to the tune of “Les Filles du Canada,” the humiliation of this afternoon seemingly forgotten. M. Dion is accompanying him with the fiddle, and the women are clapping and singing along. Maman opens a window to let in some fresh air.
“Hahaha!” they roar. “Les filles du Canada!”
Maggie’s father helps himself to a long swig of Crown Royal. His cheeks are ruddy and splotched, his eyes glassy. Maggie usually loves it when her parents’ rare good moods collide. It’s pure serendipity when her father loosens up and morphs into a more vulgar, uninhibited version of himself and, at the same time, Maman relaxes and forgets to be miserable. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it makes Maggie feel like their family is all right after all, that they’re no less happy than other families. But tonight, Maggie’s burden lingers, dampening her enjoyment. She can’t get out of her mind the image of Clémentine Phénix hiding behind her father’s desk and its greater implication on their lives.
Her father suddenly drops the spoons on the table, jumps to his feet, and pulls Maman to the middle of the room. He holds her tightly around the waist and expertly swings her around, as though they’ve done this before many times, and then he dips her, right there in the living room. To Maggie’s and everyone else’s astonishment, Maman kicks out her leg and tosses her head back blithely, laughing.
Everyone applauds, including Maggie, in spite of her confusion. Maybe it’s best not to try to understand a thing like marriage, she reasons. Not yet. She’s on a different path anyway.
Chapter 6
“Pass it over,” Audrey says, reaching for the cigarette they’re sharing. She blows four perfect smoke rings into the air.
It’s early spring and Dunham is thawing. Maggie and Audrey are sitting on the front stoop of the Small Bros. building, where they make the equipment for producing maple syrup. Maggie blossomed over the winter. The onslaught of adolescence is fully upon her. Her legs are longer—she towers over Nan and Audrey now—and although she’s still skinny, her breasts have swelled a full cup size. She wears her black hair longer, and instead of the waves curling around her ears in a sweet bob, they now fall to her shoulders, giving her what she thinks is a more sophisticated look. She’s started wearing red lipstick, which she puts on after school and removes before going home.
Audrey hands Maggie the cigarette and she takes a long drag.
“I’m meeting Gabriel Phénix here,” Audrey confesses.
“Gabriel? Why?” Maggie hasn’t seen Gabriel since the fall, except for one brief glimpse when he came home to plant his corn.
“He invited me to go to Selby Lake with him,” Audrey says, flushing.
“Like a date?”
“Yes, a date.”
Maggie blinks. “You have a date with Gabriel Phénix?”
“Don’t tell anyone, okay, Mags?” she says, flicking an ash into the slush at her feet. “He’s so cute, but he’s a frog.” Her long lashes flutter adorably. “It’s embarrassing.”
Everything about Audrey McCauley makes Maggie feel deficient, from her golden curls to her shiny saddle shoes to her perfect WASP family. The last time Maggie was at her house, Audrey’s mother was wearing a pink tweed dress with pearls, and her father, Dr. McCauley, was reading the newspaper in a winged armchair by the fire. Her little sister was playing the piano beside him. The whole tableau filled Maggie with inexplicable despair. How simple it must be to be one of them, Maggie thought to herself that day. In all the years she’s been friends with Audrey, she’s never once seen evidence of any sides or opponents, or even any noticeable undercurrents of animosity. They’re just a family with a singular, common purpose: to be the McCauleys and thereby make others feel inferior. For Maggie to have lost Gabriel to Audrey makes the defeat all the more insulting.
“He’s bringing a friend,” Audrey says. “For you.”
“I don’t want to go.”
Maggie’s voice is drowned out by the roar of motorcycles. Audrey jumps to her feet. Gabriel and his friend pull up to the curb. Gabriel looks Maggie up and down, as though he’s never seen her before. His expression reveals nothing. “Hey, Maggie,” he says.
She glares back at him.
“This is my friend, Jean-François.”
“Everyone calls me JF,” he says, eyeing Maggie like he’s just won first prize. He’s not bad looking. He’s got dark eyes and a bluish sheen to his frozen black pompadour. But when he smiles, she notices he’s missing a bottom tooth. Pepsis and their rotten teeth, her father would say.
“Let’s go,” Gabriel says.
Audrey climbs on the back of his bike and wraps her arms around his waist. She grins stupidly, and Maggie wants to grab a fistful of her golden waves and pull her right off that motorcycle.
“You coming?” Gabriel asks Maggie.
Audrey gives her a pleading look. At least if she goes with them she’ll be able to keep an eye on Gabriel. She gets on the back of JF’s bike and notices that not a wisp of his blue pompadour moves in the wind.
Maggie’s father has warned her about the apocalyptic possibilities of speeding down country roads on a motorcycle—careening into tractors, flipping over into ditches, slamming into utility poles. Last year, a St. Helen’s girl died on the back of her boyfriend’s motorcycle. Maggie closes her eyes. The wind is cold against her face, battering her cheeks until they feel bruised. She feels strangely exhilarated, wishing it were Gabriel she was holding on to.
Selby Lake is at the foot of Mount Pinnacle. Maggie has spent many summer days here grilling under the sun by the water, reading on the veranda of the canteen, chatting with the guests from Pinnacle Lodge. There’s a dance at the dance hall every Saturday night and this summer she’ll be old enough to jitterbug until the lights come on.
They park in front of the old abandoned Selby barn. The cottages stand empty and abandoned. The only people left after Labour Day are the farmers, who emerge only to cut ice or fish on the frozen lake. It’s gray and mournful, and Maggie realizes she’s never been here in the off-season. She follows the others inside the barn. The sky through the window is layered pink and orange, glowing like the inside of a pumpkin. “What’s in your pockets?” Gabriel asks JF.
JF pulls out two bottles of Labatt Fifty and a long piece of black licorice. He tosses a beer to Gabriel.
“I’m cold,” Audrey says. Gabriel unzips his leather jacket and hangs it over her shoulders.
Audrey reaches for Gabriel’s hand and tugs him toward the loft. It’s a famous make-out spot and Maggie realizes with a sinking heart that Audrey and Gabriel have been here before. Gabriel lets Audrey pull him away.
He looks back once at Maggie, but she quickly turns away as he follows Audrey up the ladder like a puppy.
The moment they’re alone, JF lunges at Maggie. There’s a look in his eyes that reminds her of a wolf, but she holds her breath and tells herself it’s her only chance to make Gabriel jealous. As his teeth clack against hers, she thinks about his missing tooth and has to suppress a gag. He manages to maneuver her to the ground and get her flat on her back. My first kiss.
JF unbuttons her coat. She doesn’t stop him because she doesn’t want him to report back to Gabriel that she’s a prude. Besides, the more they do, presumably the worse Gabriel will feel. He flattens her breast with the palm of his hand. She closes her eyes and resigns herself to his grubby hands on her rib cage. “Ouch,” she says.
He kneads her breasts, his fingertips icy on her flesh. She lets him grope her for a while before finally pushing him off.
“Heh?” he cries indignantly.
“Stop, please.”
“Maudite Anglaise,” he mutters. “You’re all prudes.”
His breath smells like black licorice and cigarettes. They sit there sullenly, not speaking, until Gabriel and Audrey finally come down from the loft. By now it’s dark, but she can see that Audrey’s cheeks are red. She’s disheveled and sheepish. Gabriel has an impassive look on his face. JF gets up and strides out of the barn, making a show of disgust. He doesn’t even help Maggie to her feet. Gabriel doesn’t seem at all jealous, which means she kissed that creep for nothing. She trails after Gabriel and Audrey, utterly miserable.
Gabriel suddenly turns to Maggie and says, “I’ll take you home.”
Maggie freezes. Audrey looks perplexed. “She lives next door to me,” Gabriel explains.
“So?” Audrey has her hands on her hips.
“It’s just easier,” he says. “Get on, Maggie.”
Maggie’s spirits soar.
“Maggie!” Audrey says angrily.
Maggie hesitates. “We’re going to the same place, Aud.”
The Home for Unwanted Girls Page 4