The Eliot Girls

by Krista Bridge

  Several minutes later came a knock on her classroom door.

  “Are you always so clumsy?” he said.

  He came inside and closed the door, and at his touch, she went floppy and yielding, as though someone had removed all her joints. He pushed her into the corner behind the door and pressed himself against her, so that anyone looking for her would have opened the door right into them. He held his mouth near hers for a moment, then kissed her with reserve, as though his lips were determined to be more polite than his urgent body, its persuasive weight pinning her to the wall.

  At first, she was aware only of his lips and his hands, but then she heard a knocking, distantly, at the margins of her consciousness. For a moment, the sound seemed to be coming from inside her until she realized that it was footsteps in the hall. She jerked in shock, and they came apart.

  Trembling—whether with fear or reverberating desire she was not sure—she went back to her desk and sat down, a red pen and an open folder of papers before her. Henry opened the door and leaned against the frame, slightly out of breath. They watched each other in silence until the footsteps receded.

  “Were you all right getting home on your own last night?” he asked in a low voice.

  “Yes. Uneventful.”

  “I was concerned about the after-effects of an event like that.”

  She dismissed the comment with a wave of her hand.

  “Is there any chance of your belongings being recovered?”

  “I wouldn’t think so,” she answered. “I never called the police.”

  When Henry left, Ruth got up and went to the bathroom. A dying fluorescent bulb over the cubicles hissed and flickered for several minutes before it went out. Facing her reflection in the cold grey light, she started to giggle. Laughter was burbling up, from a place deep in her gut, a place that was raw like the skin under a fingernail. She put her hand over her mouth instinctively, like a child trying to contain laughter in church, but it was beyond her. She took several deep breaths, calmed herself, then regressed, and finally managed to gain control.

  She studied her face. She wouldn’t have said that she looked exactly good that day—she had rejected the self-abasement implicit in prettying herself, and she was wary of any actions Henry might interpret as special effort for him—but she was comforted by what she saw. Of course she was aging, but she could still look at herself and see the teenager she had been. One day, she knew that she would look in the mirror and find an unrecognizable old woman. But for now she still looked like the girl who had not yet conceived of a husband or a child, the girl who smiled sweetly in old pictures of high school dances, who was only just beginning to intuit the exhilarating scope of her own power.

  THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, HENRY approached her in the hallway at the beginning of the lunch hour.

  “Shall we take lunch outside?” he asked.

  She stared at him, clutching a brown paper bag containing leftover pasta and an apple. They were standing in the crowded hallway, people swirling around them. The possibility of conversing openly had never occurred to her.

  “When I was walking the other day, I noticed a little park not far away,” he said. “I could use some air. You?”

  Ruth glanced towards the staff room. She was just as glad to avoid it. Lately, it had been a social minefield. Since the argument about Seeta, she had found even the most minor communications excruciating. Every time she stepped into the room, someone was at her, wanting to share a word of support or concern about Audrey’s adjustment. It seemed that everyone considered Audrey perilously shy. Ruth despised being constantly confronted by this new view of her daughter—for her part, she couldn’t tell whether Audrey cared too much about being liked or too little, whether she suffered from intensity or apathy—and she couldn’t help being annoyed at Audrey for putting her, however unwittingly, in such an uncomfortable position.

  Ruth looked around nervously. “Okay,” she replied. She didn’t know whether to be reassured or disappointed by the lack of flirtatious subterfuge in his voice.

  She followed him out and around the corner in silence, uneasily affecting the cavalier attitude he seemed interested in establishing.

  “I can’t believe we made it out without anyone seeing us!” she said once they were out of sight of the school. She wanted to grab his hand and bask together in the delightfully subversive purpose of this trek. Henry, however, didn’t seem interested in viewing their exit as an escape, or this excursion as a rebellious romantic stroll. His sense of justification ought to have been encouraging—they were consenting adults, colleagues, walking in broad daylight on a public sidewalk—but it was more than a little dispiriting. Her heart had pounded as they descended the side stairwell of Eliot. She had felt young and insane. But now there seemed no need for her enlivening adrenaline. Again, she feared that he might be leading her to a private place so that he could apologize for the liberties he had taken with her and put a civil end to the madness.

  His strides were long and purposeful, as though he were trying to get them somewhere on time, and she found herself scurrying in a rather undignified way to keep pace. They talked idly about the unseasonably cold November weather, and Ruth made some mindless remarks about colleagues already planning their Christmas shopping. Then a silence fell upon them.

  They continued for several blocks. What was his point in bringing her out? If he had no desire to connect, why not let her stay inside? He had chased her, she reminded herself. It was not her job to make a case for the survival of his attraction. They passed a noisy construction site and had to walk onto the dusty road to get around a backhoe. From a distance came the shouting commands of the workers, though little was visible beyond the temporary plywood fence, covered in images of the sophisticated urban life on offer to buyers of the condos being erected. In black and white, smiling men and women gathered with wine glasses on balconies. Lovers embraced. Across a male model’s chin was scrawled, in black marker, “My nose looks like a dick.”

  “Really?” Ruth barked awkwardly. “That nose doesn’t look like any dick I’ve ever seen.”

  She looked to Henry, laughing gruffly. He returned a mild smile.

  Silence fell upon them again, and Ruth contemplated what an idiot she was.

  When at last they came to the park, she was ready to return to the school. Already exhausted by her nerves, her ungloved fingers red with cold, she flopped down onto a park bench and sat on her hands. She really would not talk first now, no matter how much quiet he made her endure. She had always despised people who controlled others with silence. He sat next to her, pulled an unappetizing, slightly squished cheese sandwich out of his pocket, and began to eat. She fished out her apple and regarded its many bruises with distaste.

  The park was bordered with neat lines of fledgling trees, and as the wind gusted up, quite suddenly, from the west, they arched in the wind. A golden retriever chased a tennis ball while its owner, a white-haired man in a McCarthy Tétrault baseball cap, talked furiously into his cellphone. A young mother had spread a picnic on a patchwork quilt, her stroller parked lopsidedly beside it on the uneven ground. Her newly walking son, undeterred by frequent falls, toddled along with poorly controlled speed, as if his motion were propelled by gravity. From an enormous canvas bag she unloaded Tupperware containers full of small cubes of cheese and banana, a bag of Goldfish crackers, a bottle of water, and a pile of children’s books. The baby staggered over to the books, sat heavily in a kind of free fall, and immediately started tearing pages out of one.

  Ruth glanced towards Henry and was faintly repelled by the sight of his teeth sinking into the bland wad of his lukewarm sandwich. The very fact that he was eating seemed improbable. There were so few real things she knew about him. Nearly everything had come from the inter-staff chatter. As when he had first arrived, she tried to hold herself apart from these stories. Of no concern to her was Sheila’s report t
hat he never drank coffee, only tap water, out of his University of Toronto mug because he refused to let anything have that much control over him, having at one time been so fiercely addicted to coffee that if he didn’t have time to drink some before a morning meeting, he would spend the entire time in a fever of distraction, thinking of nothing else. Irrelevant was Michael Curtis’s intelligence that he loved baseball but had been teased terribly as a young boy for his lack of coordination, and although forever causing his own black eyes—getting in the direct path of a hurled ball, standing too close to a swinging batter—he trumped up schoolyard fights to gain some masculine credibility with his parents. The only thing he had ever told Ruth directly about himself was that his favourite tome to read from was a Norton anthology, because he loved being able to sink into each dense thousand-word page. But she felt no lack in her ignorance. She preferred to feel the quiver of mystery.

  The wind whipped ribbons of hair across her face. Henry reached over and brushed a hair from her lips. She sighed more audibly than she would have liked.

  “Are you not hungry?” he said, gesturing to her uneaten apple.

  She shrugged. “I guess not. I had a big breakfast.”

  “Are you cold?”

  “Not really.”

  “Because we could go back.”

  She shook her head and insisted that she was fine. He wrapped up his sandwich and stuffed it back into his pocket.

  “It’s not an environment I’m used to, in the school” he said. “The activity is unending. The noise can be…”

  “You may never get used to it. It’s a far cry from the libraries at U of T,” she replied. “Finding your own space there can be a challenge. Some people, like Michael…” Her voice trailed off. Trying to bait him into negative pronouncements about their colleagues would only make her look bad: predictably catty, too desperate for conspiratorial talk.

  “Let’s not talk about work,” he said.

  She nodded in agreement. What would they talk about, then? She waited for him to introduce a new topic, but he seemed quite comfortable saying nothing. Finally, he lifted her hand, cupped it in both of his own, and blew his warm breath on it. “You’re freezing,” he murmured. She started to shake her head again in protest, but he began to kiss her fingertips one at a time. A teenage boy was approaching farther down the sidewalk. He had the look of an evolving thug, like he had been working on his walk and had to concentrate to get the half limp just right. As he passed, he stared at them defiantly.

  Henry released her hand, and they watched the boy’s back as he walked away. Even after he had disappeared around the corner, his presence lingered in the air. Their earlier self-consciousness descended again.

  “I trust that he looked in no way familiar,” Henry said.

  Ruth was briefly confused and thought he was asking whether she knew the boy, whether they had been spotted, and she felt a flush of annoyance—he had suggested the walk, he had taken her hand; how cowardly it was to initiate risks and then fret over the possible consequences. Then she noticed the worry in his face and it dawned on her that he was referring to the mugging.

  “Oh, no,” she replied. “Funny, I’d all but forgotten about that.” She looked down at her new wedding ring, a plain white-gold band that Richard had bought her as a temporary replacement. Perhaps, he had said, they could consider an eternity band for their next anniversary. She disliked the new ring—it was thick and boring and looked as though it may have been purchased at the mall—but Richard had been so proud of his purchase, so solicitous, that she pretended it was exactly what she wanted as he slid it on.

  They watched the park in silence for some minutes more. The mother was now settling her baby back into the stroller, burying him beneath layers of fleece blankets. A border collie mix trotted across her crumpled quilt, grabbing the sheaf of napkins and tearing away with them.

  “My dog Marlow used to—” she began, then stopped, seeing Henry check his watch. “I guess we should head back.”

  He gave her a long, almost sleepy look and nodded his agreement.

  When they were nearing the school, Henry halted in the middle of the sidewalk. At the stop sign ahead of them was Chandra Howard, holding the handlebars of her bicycle and fussing with the contents of its wicker basket (which she referred to, affectionately, as her pannier).

  “We have to meet elsewhere,” he said, looking straight ahead.

  Eliot was just now in sight, the top of the ornamental bell tower emerging with imperial self-importance, cresting the heads of the trees like a crown. What had happened between them had seemed possible only there, within those walls, and she couldn’t imagine their encounters in another venue.

  “I want to hold your hand so badly it’s killing me,” he said.

  “How about my house?” she replied quickly. She didn’t let herself look at him too closely as he mumbled his assent and crossed the street to return to school on his own.

  AUDREY SAT IN THE library at a long table by the window. It was Friday afternoon, and Monday was to bring yet another test, this time history. Ruth was in a meeting but had left a note on Audrey’s locker offering a drive home. Audrey’s former school had been nearly deserted so late in the day, but the Eliot library was bustling. Although exams were weeks away, most of the grade tens were already fretting. Every morning when Julie Michaels arrived at school, she claimed to have been up until two o’clock the previous night, and every morning she loudly predicted that between basketball practice, debating, and school work, she was well on her way to an early coronary.

  Outside, the soccer team was practising in the last light of the day. Even from a distance, Audrey could make out Ms. Crispe’s irritation, the unmistakable pose of whistle-blowing. On the other side of the field, Ms. Sampson, the elementary geography teacher, sat under a tree observing the practice, bundled prematurely into a puffy down coat with a fake fur–lined hood. Because they lived in the same apartment building, though apparently in separate units, Ms. Crispe and Ms. Sampson were rumoured to be having an affair. Dougie claimed to have once come upon Ms. Crispe addressing Ms. Sampson in an ardent whisper as “Peaches.” Audrey watched them, trying to detect some invisible chemistry, a girlish devotion in Ms. Sampson’s sensible demeanour, a corresponding boastful competence in Ms. Crispe’s coaching, but she was too far away to impose any specifics.

  At a table not far away from Audrey’s sat Arabella and Whitney in whispery conference, their heads close together. They looked up and caught Audrey staring at them. Blushing, she picked up her pen and started taking notes. A few minutes later, she heard rustling behind her. She looked back, expecting Ruth, but found Arabella emerging from the stacks.

  “So,” she said, plopping into the chair next to Audrey. “I just figured something out. Audrey Brindle. Ruth Brindle.”

  Audrey looked over to where Whitney had been sitting and saw that she had disappeared.

  “Fuck!” Arabella said delightedly. “I can’t believe I missed that!”

  Audrey shrugged sheepishly in consent.

  “Dude, there’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Arabella said. “Your mom is awesome.”

  Audrey wasn’t exactly ashamed of Ruth, but she still wasn’t sure how to handle having a mother who was also a teacher. She smiled, fighting down the panic that was always rising in her when Arabella was around.

  “So, this morning,” Arabella said. “What the fuck, huh?”

  That morning, Seeta had given another performance. She was, by now, performing at least twice a week. Her repertoire was seemingly endless, tending towards the upbeat (“Feelin’ Groovy” had become her signature piece, and she had played it several times as an unsolicited encore, always with a sly grin of assumption that this was what everyone had been waiting for). She favoured the classics, declaring that no one could be anything but happy while listening to the Beach Boys, and offering a small speech a
bout her personal environmental initiatives before “Big Yellow Taxi.” Every now and then, she grew eager to show off her range, and she opened the morning with a selection from AC/DC or Jimi Hendrix, “You Shook Me All Night Long” and “Castles Made of Sand” transformed into mellow, heartbroken ballads by her sweet voice pushing its gritty edges.

  For the first several weeks, the grade tens had reacted to her performances with pointed boredom: long yawns staggered as if perfectly timed along the pews, explosive coughs throughout, and a lazy smattering of applause at the end. But at some point along the way, Arabella and Whitney had instigated a change in strategy. Now people leaned forward in the pews in a parody of rapt attention. They squealed in delight when she played the opening chords of “Let It Be” and let out whelping cheers when she finished. Arabella had once stood, applauding forcefully, saying “Bravo” in a projecting, manly voice. Whether or not Seeta perceived the fraudulence in this enthusiasm was impossible to tell. There was no reduction in her visibility. She went about as she always had, taking her bow, humming in the halls and strumming her guitar at lunchtime, raising her hand at every question.

  What had distinguished this morning from other mornings was that after singing “Peace Train,” Seeta had announced that her brother, Ravi, a student at St. George’s, was joining her for a special duet. When he took to the stage, a murmur had spread through the chapel. Holding a guitar of his own, he perched on a stool, and together they tuned their instruments. Their impeccable harmonization during “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” won them little respect, and their unsolicited encore of “Time After Time,” during which Ravi played a harmonica to oddly mournful effect, inspired even less. During the long morning that followed, every time Seeta was out of the room, Whitney and Dougie had twisted their hair into buns at the front of their heads and held hands, gazing into each other’s eyes as they sang “I’ve Had the Time of My Life.”