Now here she was, ten years on, still just beginning to grasp her own impotence. She looked from Richard, contentedly deconstructing his meal, to Ruth, picking at her fish, and was overcome by a wayward impulse.
“Speaking of Eliot,” she said, “the dance was pretty interesting.”
“Oh?” Richard said, his eyebrows raised.
Ruth’s face sparkled in either excitement or alarm.
“Did you meet a boy?” he asked.
Audrey blushed. “Actually, I left for a while. I went upstairs. It was so hot in the gym.” She took a sip of her water. “I went into the library. I found a book.”
“I’m sure Larissa McAllister would be proud of you for resisting the temptation of male flesh,” Richard said. “What was the book?”
Audrey looked squarely at her mother. “Who Do You Think You Are?”
Ruth’s hand, laying down her fork, betrayed a tremble.
“Ah,” said Richard. “How fitting. Did you know that The Lives of Girls and Women was the first book your mother ever gave me?”
Audrey shook her head, still levelling her gaze at Ruth.
“I never read it, though, I’m ashamed to say. But think about it. Lives of Girls and Women? I was closed-minded. It was a first edition, too. Your mother said she searched the city for it.”
Ruth watched Audrey as she spoke. “I did. It’s a shame you never bothered to read it.”
Richard dipped his head. “I’m sorry.”
Audrey dropped her fork with a clang onto her plate. “Well, I guess we all do things we’re sorry for.”
A fresh blast of icy air heralded a new set of diners, a man and woman, red-cheeked from the wind, clearly regulars. Chattering with the wait staff about a recent trip to Belgium, they stopped to kiss on the way to the table. Audrey turned from her parents, entranced by the woman’s waifish elegance. (It is the nature of fascination, isn’t it, to most admire those who are nothing like you?) But it was soon clear how much the woman was misrepresented by her entrance. At a distance, her curtain of glossy blonde hair hid all the ways in which she had striven to make herself hard: her thin lips were coated with matte black lipstick, her eyes messily lined with kohl; on the side of her neck was a black tattoo of a dragon with a long, forked tongue, on her ring finger a disturbingly lifelike black widow spider. She was already a little drunk, teetering flirtatiously, laughing too loudly, her head thrown back.
Like Audrey, Ruth watched the couple, dreaming of escape. The woman’s hopefulness was riveting, the aura of freedom around her. Ruth felt almost distraught with envy.
She had known a family meal was a terrible idea. But how to get around it on Richard’s birthday? She hadn’t been sure she could eat a thing. Fish had seemed the most innocuous thing to order, but when the Lake Huron yellow perch arrived, and was sitting before her in its watery juices, she had struggled to push away all thoughts of the texture of fish, the smell by the fish counter in Loblaws.
She had tried to go along with the conversation, but she worried that she hadn’t played her part well enough. She had been jumpy, testy: it simply wasn’t in her to cast a benevolent maternal ray over the proceedings. Was Audrey driving at something? Or did knowledge of her own sin cause her to interpret every statement as innuendo?
Yes, she and Henry had met briefly in the library on the night of the dance, for no more than ten minutes. What were the chances that her daughter had happened into the room during that narrow period? Her early abdication of guilt had begotten a belief in her immunity. Naturally, she had understood that she and Henry could get caught; that was the inebriating truth, the undercurrent of every encounter. But as with all givens, it had remained an abstraction.
Occasionally, she had wondered what would happen if Audrey did find out. It wasn’t impossible. Most of Henry’s and her encounters had been inside Eliot’s walls. Flashes of running smack into Audrey had come to her while they hunted for secluded spots. The idea had been weirdly exhilarating. Would Audrey lie for her? Even abet future meetings by providing alibis? Might her loyalty to her mother transcend the dull haze of morality? Or would such discovery be the thing to catapult Ruth out of her life? The thought of leaving Richard, of exploding their marriage, had only ever been fanciful, an illogical midnight reverie, floating free of any context of divorce proceedings, custody arrangements, house selling. She simply saw herself in a darkened kitchen somewhere, her head against Henry’s lank chest. She had gone no further. Part of the affair’s pleasure had been its eternal present. Yet something would happen, inevitably. There was only so long that such a tremulous balance could be held.
Having scraped all the sauce off her chicken and eaten perhaps two bites, Audrey was now regarding Ruth’s hands again. Ruth glanced down at her scarlet nails and blushed. She had painted them in a flight of fancy she had quickly regretted. This overreaching—grasping for an image ill-suited to her—was a failure that exposed her worst self. She removed her hands to her lap and smiled uncomfortably.
Audrey stood.
“Where are you going?” asked Ruth tensely.
“Um, to the bathroom?” Audrey replied.
When she was out of sight, Richard put his hand on Ruth’s arm.
“I really am sorry I never read that book,” he said.
“It’s nothing.”
“It mattered to you.”
Ruth waved her hand. “I got it wrong. It happens.”
She glanced at the neighbouring table, where the drunken couple was conversing in forceful low voices. The woman’s tongue stud flashed as she licked her lips.
“Do you think I’m boring?” Ruth said.
“Hardly.”
“I’ve been with you for so long, I think I’ve lost the knack of being interesting.” She turned away, half-disgusted with him, either for failing to recognize how boring she was, or for making her so in the first place. “It’s too late for me.”
“Life doesn’t give us many chances to go diving naked into lakes. That doesn’t mean you’re boring.”
Ruth laughed in spite of herself. Their first trip away together had been to Richard’s family cottage, a rustic cabin on an island with only two other properties, at the end of miles of dirt road and a short boat ride. Though it was early June, the temperature evoked autumn, and they had spent the week wrapped in sweaters and blankets, reading in the red Adirondack chairs on the screened-in porch, trying to stretch their provisions so they wouldn’t have to make the inconvenient trek to the grocery store. They tried to take hikes but were swarmed by deer flies. On the final morning, Ruth ripped off her clothes, ran down the steep stone path to the water’s edge, and threw herself off the dock headfirst before Richard had even removed his shoes. She was treading water thirty strokes from shore as he cannonballed into the lake, yowling as he surfaced. She swam in to give him a quick kiss, her lips already turning an opalescent purple, then flipped on her back and glided over the rippling water away from him again.
Richard hated swimming in frigid temperatures, and he climbed back up onto the dock and ran to the cottage to get towels and a camera. By the time he returned, she was a white flare in the middle of the dark lake, an uncertain reflection, disappearing and appearing amidst the insignificant waves. On the car ride home, wearing Richard’s cable-knit fisherman’s sweater, she had drunk coffee until her stomach burned. They had pulled off the highway and lain in the back seat together. He rubbed her arms vigorously as if to get the blood back into them. He told her that she was a madwoman. He said that she was the love of his life, that there could be no other, and she knew that this was a noble overstatement, a romantic boast, but she burrowed her face in his warm neck and let him believe it.
The difficulty she kept coming up against now was something more confusing than the betrayal of the marriage: Richard was her oldest friend. She had never kept any of her girlfriends. Her mother was gone. Who e
lse had known her for nearly twenty years, through the discrete portions of her life—from her directionless twenties to the approach of middle age, through the wrangling of that capricious girl into a wife and mother—and not just in her lowest moments but in the most banal, the most trifling, in the inconsequential minutes where the heart of their life lay? To whom else could she have said, in the dismal early days of parenthood, that she had to put down their screaming daughter and walk away or risk harming her gravely?
Sometimes Ruth wondered if that was exactly the problem, if she and Richard were burdened by excessive intimacy. Maybe she knew him too well, or simply thought she knew him too well. Was she blind to his possibilities, his capacity to change, to be things she didn’t predict? And had being with him for such a long time made her equally fixed, frozen in his image of her, incapable of adaptation, of challenging her notions of what she could be, of what they could be? Often, when she came across him on the street, in the millisecond that he was just a man in the distance, she saw him with a stranger’s clemency and found herself admiring his handsomeness, his elegant height and sure gait. He looked like a man from another time. In these moments, she wanted to run to him.
She knew how lucky she was to have Richard. She did. But gratitude was like her youth: it seemed always to be slipping away from her.
“How much longer do we have to stay?” Audrey was back, standing over them, a hand on the back of her chair.
“Give in, kid,” Richard reached out and grabbed her playfully. “Let’s go wild and get something sweet.”
Ruth and Audrey looked at each other. They both wanted to leave, but it was Richard’s birthday. The least they could do was say yes to dessert.
LATE THAT NIGHT, LONG after Richard had gone to sleep, Ruth put the house to bed. She let the dogs out and stood at the back window looking out at the wintry yard, the startlingly lucid green of the pine tree in moonlight. When she went to turn out the lamp by the family room couch, she noticed a hardcover, missing its book jacket, on the coffee table. The Lives of Girls and Women. Opening the book to glance at the first sentence, she discovered an inscription on the title page.
To Richard, on your birthday, February 1988
In memory of all childhoods,
some forgotten (but to be found one day)
and some deeply remembered.
Ruth
She had no memory of having written the words, but beyond this minor failure of memory was something more disorienting: she could not remember ever having been a woman who would have written something so lovely. She knew the writing to be hers, but it was like looking at the dedication of a dead person, elusive yet enduring, hauntingly bridging the distance between the present and a time scarcely remembered.
A shuffling sound behind her brought her back to herself. Audrey was standing at the threshold of the room in her pyjamas. The only lit lamp now was the small one by the back window, and Ruth was grateful for the diminished light. She and Audrey had become to each other little more than a presence, the known figure of an intimate, seen from the distance only in outline. For a second, she felt as though she had a grip on an important thought, but then it dissolved, leaving her head as dim as the room around her.
“Your thing broke,” Audrey said. She held up Ruth’s antique compote, its scalloped bowl broken at the joining place.
“You broke my compote?” Ruth was incredulous, angry.
“No, I didn’t break it. I guess the dogs bumped the table.”
Ruth’s voice dropped. “Is there something you want to say to me, Audrey?”
Audrey looked down at her feet, which she was rubbing together in her thick wool socks. “No.”
Ruth reached for the compote, and Audrey handed over the broken pieces. Even at close range, Audrey’s face was provokingly unreadable. “What a shame,” Ruth said.
“You never really liked it anyway.”
“That’s not true!”
“Then I guess you changed your mind.” Audrey turned away. “I’m going to bed.”
Ruth turned out the last lamp but stayed in the family room after Audrey left. She felt paralyzed, like a child afraid of the midnight change in a landscape made so benign by daylight. She still held the compote in her hand, and it was several minutes before she was pulled back to herself by the sensation of a hand on her back. She braced herself, calmly certain that she was about to see the ghost of her mother, but when she turned around, there was only the empty darkness.
Chapter Fifteen
THE WEATHER WAS UNSEASONABLY warm for February, and the cluster of boys who awaited the Eliot girls after school stood around in the circular driveway with their coats open, their ties loose around their necks. Audrey, pausing by the landing window, watched the rapturous reunions. Kate Gibson’s boyfriend stood in the centre of the group, wearing only his school blazer to keep him warm. Instead of talking to the boys around him, he stared at the ground, a posture that gave the impression not of brooding, as he may have intended, but of a thin neck that couldn’t support the weight of his disproportionately large head, his mop of thick, wavy hair. When Kate spotted him, she rushed over and embraced him, her melodramatic enthusiasm unabated by the daily predictability of his presence—it was the custom of the most sought-after girls to pretend to be surprised every time they discovered their congregated admirers—and as they walked away, he clasped her hand in both of his, walked a bit in front of her, smiling backwards, as if leading her to a mystery location.
Audrey circulated the school at an amble until the crowds dispersed. The afternoon was quiet, with no scheduled sports practices, no choir rehearsal. For two days, the note Arabella had given her in the locker room had been buried in her math binder, and she wanted to get the mission done with, the note out of her bag, out of her mind.
She was making her way, head down, through a first floor corridor when she heard the sound of guitar music drifting out of the third grade room. Inside, Seeta and Ms. Massie-Turnbull sat on desktops facing each other, tuning their guitars. Ms. Massie-Turnbull, sensing someone’s presence, looked up, smiling when she saw Audrey in the doorway.
“Hey, kiddo,” she said. “Come on in and give us an audience. I’m trying to convince Seeta to have a run at this with me in chapel tomorrow.”
Unable to come up with a reason to escape, Audrey went in and took a seat near the door. Ms. Massie-Turnbull locked eyes with Seeta, who then glanced uncomfortably at Audrey before looking determinedly down at her guitar. As in assembly that morning, Audrey knew the song right away—more Neil Young, this time “Long May You Run.” Audrey was amazed by the power of Seeta’s thin fingers as she started to strum. They looked so fragile, yet they glided through the chords with utter assurance. Audrey remembered herself, back in the days when she had played the piano, always stumbling and cursing, her fingers too little practised ever to make their way effortlessly. In the classroom, away from the acoustics of the chapel and the disapproval of the audience, the singing was even more affecting. Seeta lost herself completely, as though she were not quite singing but allowing herself to be a conduit. The warm, confidential sound of it overpowered Audrey, engulfed her in its sonic shelter, and for a moment she forgot herself in a way she never had inside Eliot’s walls.
It wasn’t just that she no longer hated Seeta’s playing; she no longer wanted to hate it.
When they finished, it took a second for her to return to herself. Then she stood to leave. “That was really nice. Thank you.”
Ms. Massie-Turnbull pointed to Seeta. “It’s all her. This is one talented kid.”
Seeta smiled at Ms. Massie-Turnbull but kept her gaze studiously averted from Audrey. For the first time, Audrey wondered if Seeta suspected Audrey’s part in the notes. She had always assumed that the widespread understanding held that such an enterprise could only have been spearheaded by Arabella. But Seeta’s steely disregard seemed to stem f
rom something that went deeper than their petty friction. In it was a stoicism and loathing, a maturity, that made Audrey’s stomach somersault.
“Yes, she is talented,” Audrey said. “I wish I were that talented.”
On her way up to the second floor, she had to sit on the stairs. There was no reason to call off the plan, she thought, no barrier compelling enough to make her oppose Arabella. You couldn’t change a place like Eliot. There was no point in trying.
Upstairs, the hallway was empty, and Audrey knew she could be done with the whole mess, perhaps permanently, in seconds. On the outside of her locker, Seeta had placed a single sticker, a musical note. The sight of it made Audrey unspeakably sad. How innocent it seemed, this emblem of Seeta’s passion, marking her small territory at school.
Maybe it was the music, or maybe it was just this—her own fatigue, the dissipation of the intoxicating panic of the early days—more than anything resembling guilt, that made her pause by Seeta’s locker. Maybe it was this total physical quiet—her hands weren’t shaking and her heart wasn’t racing—that made her pay attention to what she was doing in a way she never quite had before. The act had acquired a kind of banality: there was no rebellion here. She had never been more obedient. It was not her own audaciousness she was discovering, but Arabella’s master plan, her inscrutable rules. And for what? The pleasure one took in Arabella bore no relation to actual pleasure. Audrey couldn’t have explained, even to herself, the compulsion involved. Was this what all her anticipation had come down to? Was this the riotous display of freedom? Her reason for coming to Eliot?
She leaned exhaustedly on the locker next to Seeta’s, the note dangling in her hand. She didn’t know what she would say to Arabella, and for the moment, she didn’t care. She crouched down and pulled a pad of pink Post-it notes from inside her knapsack. “I can’t do it,” she wrote, then pressed the note onto the words Arabella had written and, before letting a second thought undermine her decision, slid the construction paper into Arabella’s locker. All at once she became aware of a sound moving towards her, a shuffling step, feet dragging a bit on the carpet in late day fatigue. She turned her back to the lockers just as Henry Winter rounded the corner. He smiled faintly, without warmth, and glanced down at her knapsack, which was gaping open.
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