After River

by Donna Milner

  I once heard Morgan and Carl laughing over this willingness of Dad’s female customers to expose their breasts. ‘Guess they figure with all these cows he’s an expert on tits,’ they howled.

  Everyone knew my father. And they knew I was his daughter. ‘Nat, Nat, milkman’s brat, butter and cream make her fat, fat, fat.’ The silly singsong, skipping rhyme followed me through the playgrounds of elementary school.

  There are worse things than being teased. There are worse things than wearing heavy black gumboots in the winter while your classmates wear shiny, fur-lined ankle boots. Worse things than homemade dresses instead of reversible pleated skirts and pastel sweater sets. There are worse things than being called ‘heifer’, and ‘fatty, fatty two by four’. But when you are a young girl it’s hard to imagine what that would be.

  The only thing that got me through those early primary school days was knowing that when the final bell rang I would spend the rest of my day with my father, my mother, Morgan, Carl, and Boyer. Especially Boyer.

  Still, I wasn’t above revenge. When I was in grade school I took my revenge in the only way I knew how. I took everything I learned from Boyer and used it to compete with them. And I beat them. I beat them at every spelling bee, pop-quiz, or book report. And I beat them on the playground.

  During the winter when I was ten, Boyer and I practiced shooting marbles on the floor of his room. In the spring I carried my purple velvet Seagram’s bag with a few pieces of choice ammunition to school. I returned home with the same bag bulging each afternoon. The girls soon stopped playing, but the boys were more determined. They kept moving the shooting lines further back, which only made it more difficult for them. Each night I emptied my winnings out into boxes and hoarded them under my bed. Of course, my abilities did nothing to improve my popularity.

  I had a brief respite from my status as the class ‘square’ in grade five. Thanks to my mother. When I was eleven years old, she came to the school to play the piano for parents’ day. She made her way across the stage as if she was called for a command performance. She wore her Sunday go-to-church outfit, a blue duster over her best dress and a little blue boxlike hat on her head. She sat down at the piano and beamed out at the audience. Everyone clapped when she was introduced. Before she started to play she nodded at me and silently mouthed, ‘Hello Sweetheart’. I sat up a little straighter. Everyone would know this beautiful lady was my mother

  ‘Wow,’ I heard over and over that day, ‘your mom’s really pretty.’ For a brief while I was no longer ‘Nat the Fat’, but Natalie Ward, the daughter of the beautiful piano player. I basked in the glow of the second-hand compliments all the next day.

  Even Elizabeth-Ann Ryan couldn’t help but comment on my mother’s beauty. ‘Your mom looks just like a blonde Jacqueline Kennedy,’ she said to me as I drank from the water fountain a few days later. I straightened up and wiped the water from my mouth, but before I could respond she added, ‘You must be adopted.’

  It took a moment for the implication of her words to sink in. I forced the smile to remain on my face. ‘Must be,’ I said and turned away. Who needed friends? I told myself it didn’t matter. But looking back, I realize that my alienation in elementary school was, in large part, my own doing. I did nothing to encourage friendships. I either competed with the other girls or I ignored them. The games that drew them together, the skipping, hopscotch, and Barbie doll fantasies, held no interest for me. I told myself they weren’t important. I had Boyer, our word games in his room up in the attic, and books. And when Boyer was eighteen and became the school bus driver, I got to sit right behind him while the other girls watched with envy as my handsome brother, his eyes smiling in the rear-view mirror, talked to me about my day.

  Because of Boyer, school for me was only about learning, about soaking up knowledge so I could go home and impress him. By the time I reached grade six I was a serious ‘teacher’s pet’, shunned by the rest of the class. I had no friends, did not know how to make friends, and I didn’t care. At least I’d pretended I didn’t care for so long that I believed it.

  So when Elizabeth-Ann – who was easily the prettiest and most popular girl in school – came to me a few weeks after we entered high school and said, ‘Want to come to a sleep-over at my house on Saturday night?’ I had no idea how to respond.

  Something had shifted over that summer. My long hair was still pulled back and plaited. I still wore the same clothes as last year, yet the teasing had stopped. It was as if the world left behind last June belonged in another dimension and the slate was wiped as clean as the brand new blackboards of our junior high classrooms. The girls who entered grade seven that September looked and behaved far different from the girls who had left elementary school a few months before. Barbie dolls and skipping ropes were forgotten. Poofy hair and nylon stockings had replaced bobby socks and braids.

  They had discovered boys. More exactly, they had discovered my brothers. Morgan and Carl were both in grade eight now and as inseparable as ever. Mom swore that Morgan failed grade six on purpose so that he wouldn’t have to move on to high school two years before Carl. It wasn’t hard to figure out that they were the reason for my sudden popularity.

  ‘Everyone’s coming at eight,’ Elizabeth-Ann said, smiling at me with a look that said how grateful I should be for this invitation.

  ‘Why?’ I asked not sure what kind of joke this was going to turn into.

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Why would I want to sleep at your house?’

  ‘It’s a pyjama party,’ she said sweetly, as if she had included me all along and couldn’t understand my reluctance. She named some other girls who would be there. ‘Come on, it’ll be fun.’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ I told her before I made my way over to the school bus.

  Except for Widow Beckett’s niece from Vancouver, Judy Beckett, who visited her each summer, I had no one I could really call a girlfriend. And even Judy only came out to the farm during the day. I had never been away from home overnight, never slept anywhere but in my own bed. It was hard to imagine sleeping in the same room as a group of girls.

  ‘Why, Natalie, that’s nice,’ Mom said when I told her about the invitation as we set the table for dinner that night. ‘Pyjama parties can be fun.’

  ‘What do they do?’ I asked trying to sound uninterested. ‘Play silly games?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Mom smiled. ‘Though they probably spend more time talking about boys if sleep-overs are anything like the ones I went to when I was a teenager.’

  ‘You went to pyjama parties?’

  ‘Sure, I was young once too, you know.’

  ‘You still are,’ Dad called in from the porch where he was hanging up his barn coat.

  So I went. If it was good enough for my mother, it was good enough for me. I was nervous, but secretly I was curious.

  Boyer drove me in on Saturday evening. He parked in front of the Ryans’ house on Colbur Street. ‘Smile,’ he said as I opened the truck door. ‘You look like you’re going to a wake instead of a party.’

  I shrugged. ‘It’ll probably be just as boring.’ I grabbed my pillow and a cloth bag that held my flannel nightgown and toothbrush.

  ‘Then I hope you have a book in your sack.’

  I groaned. Boyer had long ago taught me always to carry a book with me wherever I went. In the nervous preparations for my first night away from home I had forgotten to pack one. Boyer reached inside his jacket and pulled out a small dog-eared paperback. ‘Here, take this one,’ he said. ‘I think you’re ready for it now.’ He winked as he handed me The Catcher in the Rye.

  I tucked the book into my bag and leaned over and kissed Boyer goodbye.

  Mrs Ryan answered my knock. Every time I saw her, Elizabeth-Ann’s mother looked as if she were on her way to a party. Her angora sweater, tweed skirt, and high heels were in such contrast to my mother’s bibbed apron tied over a printed cotton dress.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Natalie, isn’t it
?’ she asked as she waved me into a foyer as large as our kitchen.

  I nodded.

  ‘The girls are upstairs,’ she smiled and gestured to the stairway. She smelled like a cloud of perfume and hair spray.

  ‘Thank you Mrs Ryan,’ I said and headed towards the stairs.

  As I crossed the foyer I heard the clinking of ice against glass. ‘Well, if it isn’t the pretty little milkmaid,’ Elizabeth-Ann’s father called out from the living room.

  Gerald Ryan, the owner of Handy Hardware, was the mayor of Atwood. Somehow being called the milkmaid by him did not sound the same as when my father said it.

  Unbidden, a forgotten image welled up. An image from when I started helping Dad deliver milk years ago. As I placed milk bottles on his porch early one morning I glanced down and saw Mr Ryan standing at the basement window. At first I felt embarrassed that I’d caught him scratching himself and I hurried away. The following weekend he stood in the basement again, his hand rubbing the front of his pants as he stared out the window. I plunked the full milk bottles down, almost dropping them in my haste. I spun away, but not before his narrow red-rimmed eyes met mine. His lips opened in a leering smile. I didn’t tell my father. I still can’t say why. Perhaps it was because I didn’t understand why it frightened me. But I did ask Dad to change sides of the street with me when we delivered to houses on Colbur Street. Without hesitating, or questioning, he said, ‘Okay, Sunshine,’ and that was as close as I came to telling anyone. After a while I began to question what I had really seen behind that window. But as Mr Ryan winked at me over his raised glass, I felt the same repulsion I had back then.

  ‘Hello, Mr Ryan,’ I mumbled. I kept my head down, but I felt those red, rodent eyes follow me as I hurried up the stairs.

  It looked like half of the grade seven girls’ class was in Elizabeth-Ann’s bedroom. They were sprawled about, lying or sitting on the twin beds, and on the jumble of sleeping bags covering the floor. Movie Star, True Story and Mad magazines were scattered everywhere. Even Bonnie King was there. As she flipped through the pages of a glossy magazine I wondered if she still had problems reading.

  I noticed eyebrows rise as I walked in. Who invited you? What’s she doing here? Elizabeth-Ann called from her bed. ‘Hi, Nat, come on in.’

  A few of the other girls smiled and said, ‘Hey, Natalie,’ then went back to their magazines.

  ‘Come and put your stuff over here.’ Elizabeth-Ann indicated a sleeping bag next to the bed she sat on.

  I stepped around the air mattresses on the floor, feeling self-conscious and clumsy.

  ‘Listen to this,’ Sherry Campbell shrieked. Sitting cross-legged on the other twin bed, she was wearing pink baby-doll pyjamas and had matching giant pink rollers in her hair. She held a copy of True Confessions magazine. An illustration of a movie-star-handsome man, and an equally perfect young woman, her long hair flowing behind her as he held her in his arms, adorned the cover. ‘I was a teenage love slave,’ Sherry read, her voice an exaggerated stage whisper. The other girls leaned closer and listened, sometimes giggling behind their hands. I sat on the sleeping bag, feeling awkward, fat and separate. But as Sherry read on I was surprised by the effect the unfolding story had on me.

  ‘I felt his hands on my tender breasts, harsh and demanding, as he forced his tongue in my mouth,’ she read. There was something deliciously wicked about hearing the forbidden words, something sinful about the warmth spreading through my abdomen, the unexpected tingling. When she finished, Sherry held the magazine to her chest and breathed, ‘Oh, that poor girl!’

  ‘Oh, that lucky girl!’ Someone else laughed.

  ‘Those stories aren’t real,’ another scoffed.

  ‘They are so,’ Sherry retorted. She held the magazine up. ‘See, it says true confessions.’

  ‘I want to be someone’s love slave,’ Bonnie sighed and threw herself back on the bed.

  ‘I want to be Morgan Ward’s love slave,’ someone cried. I whirled around to see who it was, when another voice said, ‘No, Carl’s!’

  ‘Yes, yes, Carl’s.’

  ‘Is Carl going with anyone?’ someone asked.

  ‘What about Morgan? Does he have a girlfriend?’

  Everyone’s eyes were on me. I was the centre of attention. I turned from one to the other. So it was true. My brothers were the reason I had been invited. I was not surprised. I was surprised, though, at how I felt about all the eager faces waiting for my words. I found I liked the feeling.

  I straightened up. ‘Morgan and Carl have lots of friends,’ I said. It was true. Lately it seemed our sunroom was always full of kids from town who came over to listen to records and dance.

  The questions kept coming.

  ‘Do you ride horses?’

  ‘Do Carl and Morgan have their own horses?’

  ‘Of course they do,’ I said. Stupid girls, how did they think we went after the cows when they wandered off?

  Some of the girls began changing into their pyjamas as the chatter continued. I pulled out my flannelette nightgown, trying not to look at the half-naked bodies, unable to stop myself. The room became a blur of baby-doll pyjamas, bikini panties, and bras. Bras! The only one in the room who needed a bra was me. I had not even considered one until that moment. As the other girls flung their clothes around, I turned my back and stripped down to my cotton briefs and vest, then quickly yanked my nightgown over my head.

  ‘Oh, a granny gown,’ Elizabeth-Ann said. ‘You look cosy.’ She sounded sincere, but at thirteen, who can tell?

  The giggling and chatter continued into the night. Once Mrs Ryan called out, ‘That’s it girls. Lights out.’

  Later Mr Ryan’s slurred, singsong voice called up from the bottom of the stairs, ‘If I hear any more giggling up there, I’ll have to come and paddle some pretty little bottoms.’

  My stomach lurched. Elizabeth-Ann groaned. She leaned over and switched off the lamp. Much later, when I thought everyone was asleep, I heard her whisper in the dark, ‘Natalie, does Boyer have a girlfriend?’

  Boyer? Every muscle in my body stiffened. Why would she ask about Boyer? Until that moment I had never imagined him with a girlfriend. The thought of someone else besides our family as part of his life had never occurred to me.

  ‘No, my brother’s too busy with his job and the farm.’ My voice was tight, protective, possessive, and jealous. Even I could hear it. ‘He doesn’t have time for girls.’

  ‘Oh,’ she sighed.

  And he won’t have time for you, either, I thought. Besides he doesn’t need anyone else. He has us.

  The next morning I dressed before anyone was awake. I stood at the top of the stairs and listened before I crept down in the silence and slipped out of the house. I walked to the corner of the street and sat down on the kerb. I pulled out my book and in the half-light under the street lamp I tried to read while I waited for my father. When he finally pulled up to the kerb I breathed a sigh of relief and jumped into the milk truck. The welcome odour of cigarette smoke, barn, and Old Spice gathered me in.

  ‘Well, how was the party, sunshine?’ my father asked as he shifted gears.

  ‘It was okay,’ I mumbled.

  I didn’t tell him I had lain awake all night listening to the angry voices downstairs and the strange noises of the unfamiliar house. I kept silent about how I had cringed inside my sleeping bag, pretending to be asleep, when in the middle of the night the bedroom door opened. I peered out from the tiny opening in my bag as Mr Ryan slipped into the room. I thought Elizabeth-Ann was asleep until I heard her hiss, ‘Go away, Daddy,’ as he leaned over her bed.

  I didn’t tell my father about the fear I felt as Mr Ryan backed out of the room, the moonlight exposing the gaping front of his pyjama bottoms.

  As my father and I finished delivering milk that morning it dawned on me how silly I had been to feel ashamed of him because he couldn’t read. I had just found out that some fathers have far worse secrets.

  Chapter Fourteen
r />   DURING THOSE TEENAGE years, extra bodies often crowded in at our table at mealtimes. Town kids. Morgan and Carl’s friends. They were all willing to carry milk buckets, chase cows or throw hay bales in exchange for the privilege of spending time ‘out at the ranch’. They showed up regularly on weekends and summer holidays. It seemed everyone wanted to be at our place during those blameless years. Our table was so full sometimes that, when Jake was still with us, he refused to sit down for dinner. He would slink into the kitchen and scowl at anyone sitting at, or near, his spot at the end of the table.

  After I started high school our home was suddenly filled with the twittering noises of young female voices. My new-found friends. They never seemed to know when to go home. During summer months it got so bad that Dad threatened to change the Ward’s Dairy Farm sign over our gate to Ward’s Home For Wayward Girls. Carl joked, ‘Last stop on the way to Our Lady of Compassion.’ Dad told him to watch his mouth.

  Elizabeth-Ann was the most frequent visitor. The first time she phoned and whispered, ‘Natalie, my dad’s drunk. Can I come out?’ I was unable to turn her down. Before long she stopped asking and just showed up, sometimes even on school nights.

  Since the slumber party, I hadn’t returned to the Ryan house.

  Besides not wanting to run into Mr Ryan, I had no interest in town life. I believed that my family, my home, was far better than anything those neat houses stacked on the hillsides of Atwood had to offer. When she pursued my friendship, I allowed Elizabeth-Ann into my life because I believed that my world was perfect and hers was not.

  We became close, I suppose, in the way friends do who need something from each other. Even though I knew Boyer had been the attraction at first, my friendship with Elizabeth-Ann grew, and I began to look forward to her company.