In Her Mothers' Shoes

by Felicity Price

  A few minutes later came the flip-flop of her mother’s heeled mules and a rap on the toilet door.

  ‘What’s the matter, Lizzie? Your father says you’re not well.’

  Wiping her mouth with toilet paper, she managed to reply through the bile, ‘I’ve just been sick.’

  ‘Oh dear, that’s no good. I’d better get the doctor to call by on his rounds.’

  The mules tap-tapped away again.

  The doctor. She felt like throwing up again at the thought of him. Dr McQuilkin had a hideous blotchy face with a big bulbous red nose that sprouted long hairs. He always talked bridge hands with her mother and ignored the children if they were around. Once, when she’d had the measles, a drip had come out of his nose and landed on her forehead. She’d washed her face in scalding water afterwards to get rid of the feel of him. Ever since, she’d made a habit of being out of the room when he ‘called by’.

  But this time, his visit carried an even greater threat. If she was indeed pregnant, he’d know – and he’d tell her mother.

  It didn’t bear thinking about. Her mother would know, and what about school? If she was pregnant, she’d have to miss school.

  It was her last year and she’d been working hard on all her subjects, but especially on her art portfolio. The art teacher, Miss de Lambert, had said her work was very good indeed; she’d exhibited her painting of two pears on a plate at the school parents’ day, along with her pencil drawing of Julia.

  ‘You have talent, Elizabeth,’ Miss de Lambert had said. ‘You seem a natural.’

  Lizzie had glowed; her cousin Freda had won the school art prize four years earlier and she aspired to win it before she finished school at the end of the year. Although she had no desire to be an artist; while scorning her parents’ social extravagance, she did not plan on being poor, as she’d been warned artists inevitably were. She wanted to fulfil her artistic promise, she wanted to create things of great beauty, but she also wanted to earn good money. Her chosen career was therefore architecture. As well as Art, she was good at Maths and passable at Science. The things of great beauty she would create would be buildings.

  But getting into Architecture at university was competitive; she would need to pass Scholarship to get in, so she had to get better and get back to school.

  Missing school was unthinkable. Though she wouldn’t miss catching the tram. She’d guessed right – Peter’s conductorship of the Karori tram had been brought to an end; she’d not seen him since the night in the Karori Pavilion, despite trying different tram times. But she hadn’t given up completely.

  Unable to summon the strength to get dressed, Lizzie made it down to the dining room for breakfast in her dressing gown. But faced with the smell of tea and toast, she had to make a run for the bathroom again.

  Her mother tapped on the door just as Lizzie heaved again. ‘You poor thing.’

  Another stream of bile came up.

  ‘This is so unlike you, Lizzie. You’re never sick.’

  Of course not – not with the threat of Dr McQuilkin calling by and dripping all over her. How could she avoid him? She could hide in her room and refuse to come down. She could run away. Except she couldn’t go too far from the toilet.

  What was it about toilets? That awful concrete cell where she had let Peter do what he wanted to do with her had the dirtiest, smelliest toilet she’d ever endured in her life. Now, doubled over another toilet, filled with her own foul-smelling vomit and bile, she suspected the two incidents just might be connected.

  She groaned.

  ‘You do sound under the weather Lizzie. I’ll telephone the doctor after nine and see if he can call by.’

  She desperately wanted to say ‘No, I don’t want to see the doctor’, but she knew it was inevitable.

  ‘All right, Mummy.’

  Another wave of nausea cramped her stomach but this time she managed to hold it in.

  ‘You’d better pop back to bed until he arrives and I’ll bring you some boiled water.’

  Lizzie wanted to argue. She didn’t want to go back to bed; she wanted to go to school as usual. Surely she would feel better soon. The cramps would have to stop eventually. She put all her effort into not throwing up again while her mother was still outside the door, but as soon as the footsteps retreated, another burst of evil tasting bile made its way up her throat.

  The morning dragged by. She got out her English exercise book and tried to make a start on the essay due next week – ‘Jane Austen is regarded as both a friend and foe to women: discuss’. She’d promised her mother she’d do better in English – her mother was forever complaining about her marks in English and Latin but never praised her for doing so well in Art and Maths. Julia had lent her notes to help with the essay, but whenever Lizzie put her head up from the pillow to write she felt dizzy.

  By lunchtime, she felt better and asked her mother if she might have some soup and a piece of bread, but her mother said to wait until the doctor came because he might think eating the wrong thing to do. ‘An upset stomach is best treated with boiled water and fresh air,’ she said.

  ‘But I’m hungry,’ she protested.

  Her mother won. There was no lunch.

  Dr McQuilkin didn’t arrive until mid afternoon; by then Lizzie was starving. She heard him come in but waited for her mother to call.

  He asked her how often she’d been sick, at what time of the day, whether she’d been able to eat in the evenings then asked her to lie down on the couch. He knelt beside her, with some difficulty, on creaking knees, ran his hands over her abdomen, tapped and pushed and pummelled here and there, then asked her to get up again.

  ‘Excuse me Mrs Hamilton, but I need to ask a personal question of your daughter.’

  ‘Oh.’ Her mother looked extremely uncomfortable.

  ‘Can you tell me when you last had your monthly period, Elizabeth?’

  She could have died of embarrassment. She never talked about her period, not even with her mother and she had a horrible premonition where this was heading.

  ‘Er . . . I don’t know.’

  ‘Well think then. Was it anytime this month?’

  Lizzie shook her head no.

  ‘Last month then?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  Dr McQuillin had a strange look, almost triumphant.

  Her mother’s face looked like she’d just read a bad write-up of one of their meetings in the paper.

  The doctor opened up his bag, pulled out a small white box, produced a glass bottle with a cap and held it out to her. Then, to her horror, he asked her to take it into the toilet and hold it under the stream of urine she was expected to produce. Flushed with embarrassment, she left the room, did as she was told and returned, carrying the filled bottle in her much-washed hand.

  ‘Thank you, Elizabeth. I will send that off for tests to confirm what I think has happened.’

  Lizzie had no idea what he was talking about. ‘Pardon?’

  ‘The laboratory will inject this into a frog and if she produces eggs within the next twenty-four hours, then it will show if you are pregnant.’

  She gasped. The poor frog!

  ‘Elizabeth, I wonder if you could please leave the room for a moment while I ask your mother some questions.’ She nodded and left, inwardly seething at the injustice of it. It was her stomach that was upset, not her mother’s. If anything else was wrong, if the awful fear that gnawed at her proved to be true, she should be the first to know. So why couldn’t they talk about it with her present? What were they saying behind her back? She waited outside in the hall, trying in vain to hear through the keyhole what was being said.

  Moments later she was called back in. Her mother had retreated behind an armchair, gripping it for support, her mouth tightly drawn, as if confronted in her living room by the Wednesday gardener in his work boots.

  The doctor spoke first. ‘We will have to wait until the test results come back, Elizabeth, but it is possible that you are pregnant.�
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  Pregnant. It was such an ugly word, ugly and unbelievable. What would Julia say? And the headmistress? It was too awful to contemplate.

  She pictured herself in class with a pregnant tummy, trying to fit behind the desk in the narrow space between the rows, her gym frock hitched up over the bump, the perfect excuse at last for getting out of P.E. She could hardly be expected to jump over the vaulting horse in that condition.

  ‘Do you understand me, Elizabeth?’ Dr McQuilkin was frowning.

  She couldn’t look at him any longer, the judgmental old poop.

  Her mother kept her mouth clamped shut; all the lines around it deepened in disapproval, or was it disappointment? Lizzie didn’t blame her.

  The doctor continued in a measured manner. ‘Have you had relations with a young man who could have done this to you?’

  Her face was burning. How could she confess? She had never told anyone at home about Peter. She knew he was from an entirely different social class; her mother would be horrified. A tram conductor? She could hear her mother’s revulsion. She couldn’t believe she had been so stupid, so naive, to let Peter talk her into it without recognising the consequences. She’d just blindly followed him into the Men’s and let him do what he wanted without a moment’s thought of what it could lead to, what it had led to.

  She remembered the headmistress telling her once that she had scant disregard for consequences. She’d wanted so badly to go to an exhibition in town last month; she’d just caught the tram to the gallery one lunchtime and, of course, had been late back. She had to admit it: she’d not once thought of the consequences, and she hadn’t with Peter either.

  Why had she let him do it? What had scrambled her mind so much she’d been oblivious to where it might lead? He had a mesmerising effect on her: he could have said follow me to moon and she would have gone. She thought about his cheeky grin, his blue eyes, his shiny silver buttons.

  And how it had ended, on a cold concrete floor in the Men’s toilets.

  ‘Come on, Elizabeth. You have to tell us. Was there someone?’ Her mother’s tone was flat, sad almost.

  She looked out the window and focused on the trees at the end of the lawn. Their branches bare and stark, their leaves long ago swept into neat piles and burned, emitting thick plumes of dirty brown smoke.

  Not so long ago, she was out there with her little sister Penny, rolling in the leaves, throwing them at each other, shrieking with laughter. It was one of those rare still autumn days, the leaves falling on their heads like shreds of brown crinkly parchment. Mummy joined in, scooping up armful after armful and giggling with them as she let it drop on her girls. Lizzie could still smell the damp decay, the earthy mustiness as she burrowed into a mound of fallen leaves under the big chestnut tree, its harvest of prickly hedgehog balls scratching her skin. When she was a child, she used to collect the spiky shells, taking them up to her room to crack them open in the hope that the shiny hard conker would reveal the chestnut fairy from her favourite book Fairies of the Flowers and Trees. She could picture him still, an impish brown elf in tights and jerkin, his head covered by a hat of tiny barbs, his wings speckled with white like a moth’s, his hands offering up the chestnut, ‘silky within’.

  ‘Elizabeth!’

  Her mother never called her that. She was really in trouble. She swivelled her eyes from her mother to the doctor and back again. They were both looking at her sternly, waiting for her to tell on Peter. Well, she wasn’t going to.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘This isn’t like you, to be so wilful.’ Her mother’s stern expression belied the sadness in her eyes. ‘You just don’t think. You never think of the consequences.’

  ‘Mrs Hamilton, perhaps I could have a word with her.’ Dr McQuilkin’s red nose flared, making it stand out even more than usual.

  ‘Very well then.’ Her mother left the room without glancing at her daughter.

  Lizzie kept staring out the window; she didn’t want to face the doctor and his questions. She hated him for his smugness, his superiority.

  ‘You can tell me, Elizabeth. I’m your doctor. If you’re in trouble, I can help you. You’ve got a boyfriend, haven’t you?’

  She wouldn’t look at him.

  ‘You don’t have to tell me his name if you don’t want to, just tell me what happened.’

  He was so persistent. She glanced at him, annoyed, wishing he would just go away.

  Dr McQuilkin was watching patiently.

  She realised she had to say something or he’d just go on and on. Gripping the chair for support she said, ‘I think I’ve done it with a boy.’

  ‘Ah, I thought you had a boyfriend. Can you tell me more?’

  The doctor’s glasses glinted in the afternoon sun; his nose shone even brighter red; a drip hung on the end of one of its long whiskers. His uneven, brown-tipped teeth were bared in a greedy smile.

  She hadn’t told him she had a boyfriend. How dare he make that assumption? Was Peter a boyfriend? Not really, not like Julia’s boyfriend at Scots. They went on dates to the movies, they met up at the milkbar on the corner of Julia’s street, they wrote each other silly notes. Peter didn’t do anything like that. And he wasn’t a boy either. He was a man. All of twenty, and working in a real job. No, she didn’t have a boyfriend. The doctor was quite wrong.

  The trees continued to hold their fascination. She wasn’t going to tell this man anything, not Peter’s name, nor anything that might identify him; nothing about the tram or about the pavilion, and especially nothing about the men’s toilets. Then her mother would never know.

  She shook her head. She’d said enough.

  ‘Did he use a condom?’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A condom? A rubber sheath. To stop you getting pregnant.’

  A rubber sheath? It sounded revolting. There hadn’t been anything about rubber sheaths in You and Your Body. Perhaps there should have been; if it could have stopped all this – the creepy doctor, her mother’s disappointment and missing school – it might have been worth it. Why hadn’t Peter thought of it? Did he want her to get pregnant?

  ‘No.’

  The doctor asked her if she’d be able to tell her mother, or would she like him to tell her.

  ‘I don’t want you to tell her anything.’ She was glad she hadn’t given him much to tell.

  He folded his arms and looked exasperated. ‘Very well then,’ he said at last. ‘I’ll leave that up to you.’

  She stood to ready herself for the confrontation she knew would follow.

  The doctor brushed past her on his way to the door to fetch her mother. His elbow touched her chest. ‘My, you have grown up to be a big girl.’

  He stopped and raised his hand - a huge hand ridged with dark veins and dotted with liver spots. She stood very still. But he didn’t touch her again.

  ‘I can see I’ll have to keep an eye on you,’ he said, wagging his finger at her like she’d been a naughty child.

  Her tongue stuck to the back of her mouth; she was speechless. She nodded.

  The rest of the doctor’s visit went by in a blur, with a red haze covering her eyes. The doctor did most of the talking. Her mother was so upset her lips disappeared in a thin drawn line, like a mailbox snapped shut.

  No sooner had Dr McQuilkin departed than Lizzie’s mother ushered her into the kitchen and sat her down at the big wooden table.

  ‘You foolish, foolish girl,’ her mother cried – her mother who never usually raised her voice. ‘I don’t believe you can have been so stupid.’

  Lizzie studied the marks on the table, the faint scorch from one of Mrs Mullen’s casseroles, the dish so hot from the oven it had glued the cork mat to the wood; the watermark from teapots and jugs with no coasters, which almost constituted a hanging offence; the scratches from carelessly held knives; the deep score her brother Jerry had made when questioning his mother’s ruling that he couldn’t go away on a weekend camping trip with his friends – the table bore all
the hieroglyphics of the Hamilton family’s existence.

  ‘Are you listening to me?’

  ‘Yes.’ Sullen, withdrawn; she continued to study the table.

  ‘Well answer me then, who was he?’

  The inquisition began. Did he go to Scots College? How old was he? Who were his parents? Where did they live?

  Lizzie gave away nothing. She refused to say anything until the results came back.

  Something must be up, she realised a week later, when her mother came running up the stairs to her room the moment she got home from school. She’d come in the back way, hoping to give her mother the slip, but the top stair always creaked, even when she tried to step across it. She’d flung herself down on her bedspread and was clutching her doll Jemima when her mother knocked briefly then came straight in, before she’d even answered.