The place we stopped at was old and quaint. Not a seedy motel but two rows of old-fashioned cabins. The proprietor was a nice old geezer who gave us cake to help us celebrate and ginger ale to go with our rye.
When we settled down for the night, we finally faced the reality of what we were doing. I didn’t like to face it. So I drank.
Your father wanted to see me with no clothes on but I hid under the bedcovers. I didn’t want to tell him how bad I felt.
It wasn’t anything like the dreams I’d had. There was a squeaky bed and a mattress that sagged in the middle. The stuffiness of the place nearly made me gag. The paint was chipped. There was a shower but no bath. I saw spiders in the corners.
But I knew why we were there. We were rebelling against my mother, and besides that, we were putting an end to our virginity. I pretended to be happy.
I stop reading. I take another sip and look up at the framed photograph on the living-room wall, one taken of the two of us at the lake, some months after we were engaged.
>
A Little Mystery
It was all right for me to sleep overnight at the Masons’ Victoria Beach cottage once Barbara and I were engaged. With spring, the Masons decided we’d all take a break from the wedding preparations, as soon as the weather was decent. We went, even though the municipality hadn’t yet turned on the water system.
During the preceding week, Barbara and her mother had barely spoken to each other. Over the months, they’d argued about every single detail of the wedding, from who the attendants should be to what kind of reception they should have. Barbara wanted Gloria to be maid of honour, but Mrs. Mason insisted that Barbara’s sister Sandra had to be—and, since she was married, she’d be the matron of honour. Barbara argued that Sandra hadn’t been around for years, and, because she lived in Toronto, she’d be no help with the preparations and therefore she should be a bridesmaid and nothing more (I wondered why a married bridesmaid wasn’t a bridesmatron). Mrs. Mason questioned why Gloria should be included at all: “She’s a dear girl, but don’t you find she’s much too short? When you’re all standing up at the altar, she’ll look like the runt of the litter. It will look as if we don’t think these kinds of things matter.” “But, Mother,” Barbara cried, “they don’t matter!” Mrs. Mason refused to talk about it after that. As far as the reception was concerned, Barbara wanted a sit-down dinner and a dance afterward with a live orchestra. Mrs. Mason said it sounded as if Barbara wanted a Ukrainian wedding. “Next, you’ll want the caterers to make cabbage rolls and you’ll expect the guests to bring envelopes full of money,” Mrs. Mason snarled. “But Jenkins and I love to dance!” Barbara cried. “It’s always been my dream that he and I would start a bingo dance at my wedding.” “A what?” Mrs. Mason shrieked, as if Barbara had said she wanted a belly dance. “You know very well what a bingo dance is,” Barbara said. “Dear,” said Mrs. Mason, in her most condescending tone, “this is the social event of the summer. We don’t want our guests to perspire. This will be a tasteful, late-afternoon do where good friends can mingle and be able to hear themselves converse—none of your loud band music. I thought perhaps a harp in the background—” “A harp?” said Barbara, aghast. “Mother, you’re making this sound like a goddam funeral!” “What did you say?” Mrs. Mason fired back. “Who taught you to speak like that? Does your father know you speak like that?” “Mother,” said Barbara, immediately contrite, “I’m sorry, I’m really sorry …” Mrs. Mason said, “You are going to regret you ever spoke like that to your mother.” Well, those were two examples. I wasn’t sure what the disagreement was about this time—the bridesmaids’ dresses, maybe, something about the size of the bow on the back or whether there should be a bow at all. I thought it was a bad idea to go to the lake under these conditions, but Barbara assured me that her mother would be nice to me because she wasn’t mad at me, and besides, Barbara’s father was refusing to take sides and he could use some male companionship. The four of us had driven out on Friday evening in Mr. Mason’s Buick Roadmaster, and Mrs. Mason, sitting in the passenger seat up front, had directed most of her conversation to me, sitting in the back seat behind Mr. Mason. Barbara sat behind her mother. This seating arrangement worked well because Mrs. Mason could ignore Barbara and didn’t have to look at her, while Mr. Mason could see Barbara in his rear-view mirror and the two of them carried on wordless communication that involved surreptitious winking and smiling and grimacing. The topic of the wedding was avoided. Most of the two-hour trip was taken up with Mrs. Mason’s commenting on fashions and fashion advertising—she hoped that the sheath dress would never go out of style—and asking me all about how ads were produced and what procedures were followed in our department, as if she were deeply interested. I knew I was being patronized. I knew she was trying to get Barbara’s goat, as the saying went. In reaction, Barbara flashed exaggerated looks at her father—the worst involved her facial muscles pulling down the corners of her mouth and her eyes bulging. When we arrived at the cottage, Mrs. Mason and Barbara put out some pre-made sandwiches and hors d’oeuvres without speaking to each other and Mr. Mason poured drinks. After the meal, Barbara and I went for a long walk to the pier and back. It was twilight when we left, dark when we returned. Barbara’s mother and father were already in their bedroom with the door shut. I gave my fiancée a kiss at her bedroom door and we retired to our respective beds. Mine was in the little room off the kitchen, the furthest away from the Masons’.
I was close to dozing off when I heard my latch move. Startled, I turned to see the door slowly opening. In came Barbara, on tiptoe, in a wine-coloured robe that had once been her father’s, one with a sash and satin lapels. Her movements were so stealthy that I wondered if she’d done this kind of thing before. I leaned up on one elbow to watch her; she put a finger to my lips—I wasn’t to utter a sound.
I wished I could’ve expected her. If I had, I wouldn’t have worn pyjamas to bed. Pyjamas weren’t masculine. Any guy spending a weekend at the lake wore his undershorts to bed, with maybe a plain white T-shirt. Yet this was the Masons’ cottage, and I was sure Mrs. Mason would expect me to wear pyjamas. At that moment, however, it wasn’t Mrs. Mason I wanted to please.
Barbara closed the door, making sure the latch didn’t make an audible click. She gestured for me to move over. The bed was no more than a cot, but I did make room by lying on my side, and I turned back the covers in a Come on in manner. I leaned my back against the bare-wood wall, where earlier I’d noticed a cobweb, but that didn’t bother me now. She untied her sash, took off the robe and let it fall to the floor. She was wearing baby-doll pyjamas. I could smell her lovely mixture of hair fragrance, lipstick and body heat. The cot squeaked as she lay down beside me.
This was a first. In nearly three years of dating, we’d never been in bed together. We’d regarded being in bed together as synonymous with sleeping together which was a euphemism for making love, which in turn was a euphemism for going all the way (which of course was also a euphemism), and in accordance with our pact to keep a little mystery in our courtship, we’d vowed to avoid any situation where we’d be tempted to climb into bed.
Now, here we were, in this narrow cot in her parents’ cottage, with her parents sleeping (or maybe not sleeping) only a few yards away. Under the covers, she sent one hand on an expedition inside my pyjamas.
“Oh, my!” she whispered, and she gave a throaty little chuckle.
I too went exploring.
“Why don’t we do it?” she whispered.
“What!”
“You heard me.”
“We made a vow.”
“I don’t care. I’m so mad at Mother.”
“We shouldn’t. Not here.”
“Come on. It’s more fun this way.”
“Don’t I need—you know—some protection?”
“I can’t get pregnant at this time of the month. Besides, if I do, it’ll serve her right.”
“I don’t think being mad at your mother
is—”
We heard a noise. Footsteps. It sounded like her father. We froze (if it was possible to freeze when you had your hand in someone’s warmest place). Mr. Mason passed through the kitchen, right by the door of the room we were in. We heard him unlock the back door and step outside.
“He’s going to the outhouse,” Barbara whispered.
“Would you stop doing that? I might—”
“Don’t you dare!”
“Then stop! … What are you doing now?”
She’d let go of me and raised herself up to peek under the window blind.
“I didn’t hear the outhouse door,” she whispered. “I—oh, no!”
“What now?”
“He’s peeing against a tree! In the moonlight!” She shook with muffled laughter.
“You’re watching your father—”
“I can’t actually see him. He has his back to us.”
“Get down before he turns around and sees you!”
We heard his footsteps on the back steps. We heard him open the door—too noisily, I thought. We heard him walking—and he stopped. For all we knew, he might’ve thought he heard something and was listening at our door. We held our breath. He continued on until a distant click told us he was back in the bedroom he shared with Mrs. Mason.
“I’d better go back,” Barbara whispered. “If Mother gets up, she’ll pick up my scent. She has the nose of a bloodhound.” She got up and put the robe back on.
“Shouldn’t you stay a bit longer? Your dad won’t be back to sleep yet.”
“If I stay, I’m going to rape you. G’night.”
One night, three and a half weeks before the wedding, I received a frantic call from Barbara. She’d had another shouting match with her mother and she’d run from the house and was calling me from the pay phone in Murphy’s Drug Store.
“She’s accusing us of doing it,” Barbara said. “That night at the lake. She said she heard me go to your room.”
“But we didn’t—”
“I can’t take any more of this. I want to elope.”
“Just a minute.” I closed the door to the living room so that my parents couldn’t overhear. “Okay, calm down, okay?”
“I mean it. Listen to me: I want to elope.”
“Okay! How do we go about it—meet one day after work and get someone to marry us?”
“I’m talking about right now. You come and pick me up and we just go. Out of town somewhere. Anywhere!”
“You have to work tomorrow, don’t you?”
“I’m not going to worry about that right now. Just come and get me.”
“You could probably phone somebody to cover for you, couldn’t you? I can call Chet and make arrangements to—”
“You don’t make arrangements. The whole idea is to walk away from everything, isn’t it? It’s arrangements that’re driving me crazy!”
“You want me to just walk out on my job?”
“I want to get away, that’s all! I want you to be spontaneous!”
I had to admit that the idea of being reckless on a Tuesday night was thrilling. “Where do you want to go?”
“I don’t know, we’ll just drive. When it gets dark, we’ll start looking.”
“It might be hard to find someone to marry us at this time of night—”
“Oh, Jenkins, that can wait till tomorrow. Tonight, we’ll just look for a motel.”
A motel! The very thought of it aroused me.
I said, “You mean, pretend we’re Mr. and Mrs. Smith or something?”
“We don’t have to pretend anything. We’re practically married now. I have a ring.”
“An engagement ring.”
“So what? Motels don’t care, do they? Kids are always checking into Bobby Jo’s on Pembina Highway. Would you hurry up and come and get me?”
She told me she’d be at the corner of Sherwood and St. Mary’s and I said I’d be there right away.
Barbara had been distraught a lot lately, so much so that I’d refrained from touching her or even expecting to neck on our dates. I had blissfully believed that, once the wedding was out of the way, all the tension would disappear and we’d instantly become The World’s Greatest Lovers. Now I found myself torn between humouring Barbara, which would move our long-postponed union up by a few weeks, or trying to talk her out of this sudden and irrational change of plans. I checked on my parents; my mother was watching television in the living room and my father was making a birdhouse at his basement workbench. Whatever I took with me tonight would have to be smuggled past them. I went to my room to figure out what to take. From my desk drawer I dug out the wedding ring and the box of condoms (necessary for birth control in those days) and a bottle of rye whisky. From my wardrobe cupboard I took the small suitcase I’d used for visits to the Mason cottage. I hesitated—Barbara wouldn’t like my bringing a suitcase because it lacked spontaneity—but I needed something. I put the bottle and the box into the suitcase and, to prevent them from rattling around, I threw in a couple of pairs of underwear shorts and socks and a couple of shirts. I considered pyjamas and rejected them. I was wearing a red short-sleeved sport shirt and grey slacks; I put the ring box and a fresh hankie into one trouser pocket and my wallet into the other. I picked up my car key and went to my back window. My dad had removed the screen, intending to fix a warp in it, and he hadn’t put it back. I opened the window and dropped the suitcase into the garden below. It was still light out, but any view from the neighbouring yards was obscured by the lilac bushes, my father’s pride and joy.
Before the sight of all the familiar trappings—my desk, my lamp, my books, my framed university degree—dissuaded me, I left the room.
“Just going over to see Barbara, Mom,” I said.
“Don’t be late, now,” my mother said. “You both need lots of rest for The Big Day.”
I kept moving. I went out the back door, retrieved the suitcase from the garden, and scuttled out the back gate to the car. I put the suitcase into the trunk. It was nine o’clock, a few days after the longest day of the year, and the sun wouldn’t be setting for at least an hour. I drove the several blocks to Sherwood and St. Mary’s, where Barbara stood on the corner, looking impatient. She was dressed in beige cotton chinos, a white sleeveless blouse and brown and white saddle shoes. She wasn’t carrying anything, not even a purse.
“What kept you?” she said, jumping in and slamming the door.
“Sorry—a few things I had to do.”
“You packed a suitcase. I’ll bet you packed a suitcase.”
“No, I—all right, I did bring one.”
“I knew it! How could you?”
“I didn’t want to look too suspicious at the motel.”
“I’m standing on a corner going out of my mind and you’re packing a suitcase!”
“Not much—hardly anything. Which way do you want to go?”
“I don’t care. Just drive!”
I drove, heading north on St. Mary’s Road.
“We’re going to save everybody a whole lot of bother by eloping,” Barbara said. “I guess Daddy will lose his deposit on the banquet room, but there’s still time to send out cancellation notices.”
“I like that idea, sending out wedding cancellations.”
Barbara clapped her hands. “Think of the excitement it’ll cause! This was just another wedding everybody expected because we’ve been dating forever. Won’t we shock them when we call the whole thing off?”
“The nice thing is, we call off the wedding but we still get married.”
“You know who’s going to be happiest? Gloria. She’s been trying like mad to lose weight for the wedding. Now, she can stop. I should call her tonight and tell her she can go on a binge!”
“I brought a bottle of rye, in case we want to make a toast.”
“You just want to get me drunk so you can ravage me.”
“Isn’t that what this is all about?”
“Oh, you are awful! I love you!”
“I’m going to call Chet and tell him we eloped,” I said.
“I just love the sound of it, don’t you? ‘Guess what, Mom. Jenkins and I eloped.’”
“Don’t you think you should call your parents tonight? They’ll be worried sick.”
“Good. Let them stew! Oh, I feel so free! To take off with nothing but the clothes I’m sitting here in!”
“You didn’t even bring a purse.”
“It’s okay. I have everything I need in my pocket.” She held up a lipstick and a roll of Wild Cherry Life Savers. “I knew you’d bring money.”
“You might get cold. I have an extra shirt you can wear.”
“Who needs a shirt? I’ve got you.” She patted my thigh.
We drove up North Main and I began to catch some of Barbara’s euphoria as we put the city behind us. I liked the feeling of pointing my car toward the wide open spaces and having no particular destination in mind. I checked the fuel level—half full.
“Penny for your thoughts,” Barbara said.
“We’ll have to stop for gas in a couple of hours or so and I don’t know if there’ll be anything open.”
“Where are we headed?”
“I thought we’d go east.”
“Not too far, I hope.”
“I thought maybe Kenora. You know, across the border and into another province. Just like outlaws.”
“I like that. How long will it take?”
“Three hours? Not much more than that.”
“We won’t get there until after midnight.”
“The witching hour. If I don’t get you there before then, you turn into a pumpkin.”
Barbara giggled. “I can’t remember when I’ve had so much fun. Isn’t it great just to drive and not care about tomorrow?”
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