Most Anything You Please

by Trudy Morgan-Cole

  Being a bridesmaid, Audrey got to join the adults for dinner at Stirling’s restaurant afterwards, while Alf stayed home to watch Marilyn and the little ones. Audrey at twelve, sitting up straight between her father and her grandmother, eating roast chicken and an ice-cream sundae. She remembers music playing, and when Frank Sinatra sang “I’ll Never Smile Again,” Susan looked at Marvin and smiled. “They’re playing our song.”

  Once the wedding was over, Susan moved out of their house and stopped working in the shop. Over the Christmas holidays that year, Ellen taught Audrey how to work the cash register, and in the new year she was given a regular turn behind the counter, from the time school let out until suppertime. She didn’t earn wages, but she got an increase in her pocket-money because she was helping out. And Audrey liked the work. She liked the way grown-ups had to look her in the eye and talk to her differently because she handled their money and passed them things from the shelves.

  Her friends walked home from school with her and stayed at the counter chatting, buying apricot squares and bottles of Pepsi. Audrey told them they had to move down to the end of the counter and shut up when an adult came in, because her mother didn’t want the shop to look like a hangout for hard tickets. Valerie Hynes and Lorraine Allen laughed about being labelled hard tickets, though Lorraine was a little bit of a hard case—she wore lipstick if she knew she wouldn’t get caught, and told the girls that she had kissed Freddy Ivany out behind Nolan’s Garage.

  “And now Freddy’s going around with that one Cathy Kelly from Presentation. I hope she knows what she’s getting into,” Lorraine said, leaning on the counter and cracking her gum. Audrey was glad her mother was upstairs in the kitchen: Ellen hated to see girls chewing gum. She said it looked cheap and that any girl who chewed gum when she was twelve would smoke when she was sixteen. Lorraine said she’d already tried smoking, but Valerie agreed with Audrey that both that and the kissing story were lies. Just Lorraine trying to make herself out tougher than she was.

  “Freddy’s mother’d skin him alive if she knew he was running around with a Kelly. All them Catholic girls are fast anyway, I don’t doubt Cathy’s cute enough to look out for herself,” said Valerie now. “Sure she was going around with Mike Kavanagh last year, and he was in Grade Nine at St. Bon’s then, and her only in Grade Seven.”

  “She developed early,” Audrey said, and they all snickered.

  “If you call it developing when you puts socks in your bra,” said Lorraine. “And I know for a fact she does it because Joanie went over there one time to play with her little sister Tessa, and they went into the bedroom and caught Cathy stuffing her bra.”

  There was a hint of envy as well as disapproval in Lorraine’s voice. Audrey wondered what it would be like, to be brazen enough to stuff socks into your brassiere and go around with older boys. When she looked at the boys in her class in school and the boys on the street, they looked like they had always looked: round-faced, snot-nosed, loud and angry, and a bit stupid. She couldn’t imagine wanting to kiss one of them. When she thought about fellows at all it was the faces of film stars and singers she cut out of magazines and taped on the wall over her bed. If someone who looked like Cary Grant and sang like Frank Sinatra came strolling down Rankin Street and dropped into the store looking for a pack of cigarettes, well, that would be a different story.

  “There’s no fellows around here worth going to that kind of trouble for,” said Audrey.

  “There’s not now, but there will be soon,” Valerie said. “There’s a whole boatload of American soldiers comin’ in sometime this week.” There were already Canadian servicemen in town, but Americans were something different altogether, and the cold January air was filled with anticipation. People talked about their arrival like it was either the Second Coming or the devil himself rising from hell, depending on who you were talking to.

  Lorraine laughed. “What, you think American soldiers are going to look at the likes of us?”

  “Not now, of course not. I s’pose the war will be over long before Mother ever lets me go on a date with anyone, let alone an American. But it’ll be exciting to see them anyway. You think they’ll all look like fellows in the movies?”

  “We should go down and see the ship come in. I bet there’ll be a crowd down to the harbour,” Lorraine suggested.

  “What day will it be?” Audrey didn’t have a lot of free time, between school and the shop, but maybe if the American ship came in on a Saturday afternoon, she might be able to get away and see it.

  But it turned out the Edmund B. Alexander was arriving in St. John’s early the next Wednesday morning. “Maybe they’ll close school,” Valerie suggested to Audrey. “Then we could go.”

  “Or if they don’t close, we could pip off,” Lorraine said.

  “We’d get in trouble.” Audrey couldn’t even imagine how mad her mother would be if Audrey pipped off school to go down to the harbour and watch a ship come in.

  There was plenty of talk in the shop that week about the ship. “Are you going down to see it?” Audrey asked Alf. Alf was fourteen and done with school since his Grade Nine exams; he worked on construction with their father now.

  “And get docked for a morning’s work? Not a chance. I’ll see more than enough Americans once we gets working down on that base they’re building in Pleasantville.” Alf seemed to see the Americans only as a possible source of work, but it was different for boys, Audrey figured. Valerie and Lorraine were still talking about skipping off school to see the ship come in.

  We’ll start off walking to school like we always do,” Lorraine told her, “and we won’t go past the school, we’ll turn over by Hanlon’s shop and go down towards the harbour. There’s going to be hundreds of people down there. Nobody will spot us, and we can go back into school at lunchtime.”

  “What would we do about the youngsters?” The three girls always walked to school together every morning, trailed by a crowd of their younger brothers and sisters. Marilyn would never forgive Audrey if she took off without her.

  “Ah, I’ll come up with some story, they can go on ahead of us,” Lorraine said. “We’ll say we’re coming after and we’ll just never show up to school.”

  Audrey lay in bed the night before and wondered would they really go through with it. Her mother had told her time and again that she relied on Audrey, her oldest girl, to be responsible and sensible. “Not like some of them foolish young things,” Ellen would sniff, and Audrey knew she was talking about girls like Lorraine, or like Cathy Kelly.

  Audrey and Marilyn were dressed for school in their coats, hats, mitts, and gaiters on Wednesday morning. Frankie, who still had a year to go before he started school, played on the floor, and June babbled in her crib as their mother wiped down the counters and got the shop ready for the day. Lorraine and Valerie with their own crowd of younger siblings—two for Lorraine, four for Valerie—stopped by to pick them up.

  It was a long walk down to Holloway School on Long’s Hill. Audrey always felt a little sense of pride that the school had the same name as her family, though it was named after a far more important Holloway who her father said was no relation. They all sloshed through the sloppy snow as far as the corner where LeMarchant Road turned into Long’s Hill when Lorraine said, “I’m going into the store for a pack of gum. Audrey, Val, want to come in with me? You kids go along with Marilyn, now.”

  Obedient as a row of ducklings, the youngsters trailed along behind Marilyn in the direction of the school while Audrey, Valerie, and Lorraine pretended to turn back, lingering just out of sight. “Now we only got to wait till they’re a good piece ahead of us and we’ll head downtown.”

  “No.” Audrey surprised even herself when she blurted the word. “I can’t. Marilyn will know right away what’s on the go when she don’t see me in school, and she’ll tell Mom.”

  “So what? I’m sure Joanie’ll tell on me, too, but b
y the time anyone finds out, it’ll be over. We’ll have been and seen it, and no matter what Mom or Pop does to me I’m not missing out on that.” Lorraine, brazen as brass, and Valerie, always willing to follow. Audrey, half-walking, half-running, caught up with Marilyn and the younger ones.

  There were more students missing from the Grade Seven class than just Lorraine and Valerie when roll was called, though the other truants were all boys. After dinner the missing reappeared, full of whispered stories about the huge ship, American flags flying, and the crowd waiting for it on the wharf, even bigger than the crowds that came out to see the sealing ships come into port in the spring of the year. “There was a brass band on board the ship,” Valerie told Audrey, “and they played ‘Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here’ while they were coming in, and the sailors—oh my, Audrey, you shoulda seen them. Just like fellows in the movies. There was some crowd, but we were close enough to see them wavin’ from the deck.”

  “We’ll be seeing them around plenty,” Lorraine said. “There’s a dance on board the ship tonight and Brenda and her crowd are all going down to try to get into it.” Brenda was Lorraine’s sister, sixteen and old enough to be going to dances.

  “It was all being broadcast on the radio, they had these big loudspeakers set up telling us all what was going on as the ship was coming in, listing off how many men were on her and all that,” Valerie said. “They’ll probably play it over again tonight, or some bits of it anyway.”

  Sure enough, when her father turned on the evening news at suppertime, VONF was playing the highlights of the Edmund B. Alexander’s arrival. Audrey listened with the others, trying to picture it, cursing her own lack of nerve. The worst blow was to find out that Alf had gone after all—he’d showed up an hour late to work after going with some of the fellows to see the ship, and Dad wasn’t even mad at him. Mom didn’t say a word about it.

  That’s a story I could tell, Audrey thinks, years later, when the young ones are after her to tell what she remembers about The War. The day I never saw the American ship come into the harbour. The day I missed it all. The day I made up my mind I’d never be so timid again, that I’d take my chances and never miss out on any good times that were on the go.

  And then she’ll look around at the counter, the cash register, the Coke cooler and the ice-cream freezer, and think to herself, And how’s that going for you, Audrey?

  ELLEN

  Two American servicemen came into the store just after suppertime, when Ellen was putting tomorrow’s delivery of bread from Mammy’s Bakery away on the shelf. Strapping young fellows, everything about them looking spit-and-polished, from their huge white teeth to the buttons on their uniforms. The Americans didn’t often come into the shop—they had their own shops down on the base. There wasn’t much reason for them to buy smokes or candy bars at a corner shop in Rabbittown, and Ellen had to admit that having men in uniform all over town still made her a little nervous.

  It wasn’t like the Great War, when Ellen was a child. Back then, Newfoundlanders went overseas, and every other family seemed to have a boy at the front or in the navy. In this war the boys still went away—Ellen’s cousin and one of her nephews were on board Royal Navy ships somewhere in the Atlantic, and she worried about them whenever she heard of a ship sinking. But there was also the blackout here in St. John’s, all the windows blocked up at night so not a seam of light would attract a German plane. Then all those poor people drowned when the Caribou was torpedoed by a German submarine—not just sailors, but ordinary passengers only trying to cross over to Canada. And on top of that, men in uniform all over the streets. This war seemed less like a war men left home for, and more like a war on their doorstep.

  “Howdy, ma’am,” said one of the soldiers, sounding so much like a cowboy from Red Ryder or some other Western that Ellen had to stifle a laugh. His companion opened the cooler to pull out two soft drinks and laid them on the counter.

  “Anything else for you fellows tonight?”

  “No, ma’am, just these here Coca-Colas. Well, and maybe a pack of Camels. I’m down to my last two.”

  “You boys must be meeting your lady friends around here, are you?” Ellen asked as she passed him the cigarettes and rang in their purchases.

  “Yes, ma’am, we’re heading up to the roller rink,” the soldier said. The rink was only half a block up from the store, and so popular with the American servicemen that Alf had told her the Canadians got beaten up if they tried to go there. The soldiers were no doubt stopping in here for a smoke and a Coke before going to meet their girls.

  Which girls, she wondered? Vera Allen had been in here talking about it earlier, how shocking it was, young girls going around with servicemen. “I told Brenda just the other day,” Vera had said, “if I ever sees you talking to one of them Yanks, I’ll lock you in your bedroom till the war is over. Say what you like about the Americans coming into the war, it don’t matter—we all knows what kind of girl goes around with soldiers.”

  It’d give Ellen a good laugh, to tell the truth, to see one of those soldiers walk past the window with young Brenda Allen on his arm, because Ellen knew Brenda, like most girls, got away with a lot more than her mother ever guessed. But she agreed with Vera, for the most part. The American soldiers and sailors might be useful for beating Hitler, but they were trouble for the mothers of young girls here in town.

  The other day Wes had run across Frankie and a couple of other youngsters, the littlest Ivany and the biggest Hussey, hiding under Mrs. Vokey’s gallery hollering out to a pair of girls who were walking with soldiers, “If ya can’t get a man, get a Yank!” Wes told Ellen that the soldiers didn’t pay any mind, though the girls looked annoyed. “But I told Frank and the other youngsters that them Yanks would tear a strip off them, they’re soldiers after all and spoiling for a fight. Best to put the fear of God into the youngsters—you don’t want ’em making trouble.”

  “You got a nice little store here, ma’am,” one of the soldiers drawled as he took his change, his voice like honey on warm toast. “My folks got a corner store back home, this place kinda reminds me of it.”

  “Is that so? And where is home?”

  “Muncie, Indiana,” the boy said, and he really did look like a boy now, a fresh-faced blond boy with a bristling crew cut under his uniform cap, a sprinkle of freckles so pale they were almost blond too, spanning the bridge of his nose. A boy behind the counter of his parents’ corner store.

  “Did you used to work in the store, growing up?”

  “Yes, ma’am I did, from the time I was about twelve, right up till I joined the army last year. What about you, you have any young’uns to help behind the counter? Or yours are not big enough yet, I guess, ma’am.”

  “I’m big enough,” Audrey said, and Ellen turned. She hadn’t even heard Audrey come down the stairs, but there she was, fourteen years old, her copper-coloured hair freshly brushed and shining, her new little breasts straining against the white cardigan she wore over her red tartan skirt. Oh yes, my girl, Ellen thought, make no mistake, you’re big enough. And the war could last for years yet.

  She reached out an arm, hooked Audrey’s shoulder and pulled her closer. “This is my little girl, Audrey. She’s a grand help around here, even though she’s only in Grade Nine.” Audrey looked sixteen, easily, and suddenly the soldier Ellen was talking to shifted back from looking like a wholesome young boy to a menacing man in uniform.

  “Come on, buddy, we gotta get going, the girls’ll be wondering what happened to us,” the other soldier, the dark-haired one said. With a smile and a nod that encompassed both Ellen and Audrey, the young men turned to leave.

  “Mom, can I go up to the rink tonight with Maxine and Valerie?” Audrey said, as soon as the boys were out the door.

  “No, I got a headache, I’m going to need you to watch the store tonight.”

  “Oh, Mom! I told the girls I’d go, and I got a
ll ready.”

  “Well, you shouldn’t have done that without asking me, should you?” And now Ellen really did feel a little bit of a headache starting, which was good because it meant she wasn’t lying. “If they come by, tell them some people got to work for a living. You just told them soldiers you’re big enough to work, now do your fair share.”

  “That’s not fair, you’re not being fair!” Audrey said, but Ellen was halfway up the stairs, and another ping of the door cut off Audrey’s complaint.

  AUDREY

  “Be quiet, will ya? If Mom catches us, she’ll have my guts for garters.”

  “She won’t catch you—Mrs. Hiscock is in the store with her, you know they’ll be jawing for half an hour.” Lorraine grabbed Audrey’s hand and pulled her toward the back fence.

  “I’m going to tear me skirt if I goes over that fence!” Audrey warned, but in fact it was Lorraine who snagged her hem and muttered a bad word under her breath as she followed Audrey up the laneway. The only door from the Holloway house onto Rankin Street was the shop door; the back door led into the tiny backyard but there was no gate out of the yard, so the only way to escape the house without passing under Ellen’s watchful eye was to slip out the back door and climb the fence. Not an easy prospect when you were wearing a party dress and dancing shoes, but it was worth it for the prospect of going to a dance at the Caribou Hut.

  Both girls were giggling as they reeled out between the houses onto Calver Avenue. Audrey knew her mother would have a thousand objections if she knew where the girls were going: Audrey should be home studying, not out gallivanting; Lorraine was a bad influence. Dances were nothing but trouble, and any big gathering might be dangerous—look at what happened to those poor souls at the K of C. Nearly two years had passed since all those people died in the fire, people who had crowded into the Knights of Columbus Hall to hear the Barn Dance show. Everybody in St. John’s knew a family who had lost someone, and the shadow of the tragedy still hung in the air like the heavy gray smoke did for days afterward. And though it had never been proven, folks still said it might have been German spies that started the blaze.