by Mary Razzell
Jean and I left soon after, but before we got into her house, I threw up once more in her mother’s geraniums. I think I passed out on the spare cot in Jean’s room.
I woke with the sun shattering my eyeballs and my head feeling as though it were made of broken egg shells. Wandering through the house, looking for the bathroom, I discovered that no one was home but me. Everyone else was up and out.
Then I noticed the time. Ten o’clock! I should have been at work at Doc Howard’s at nine. I scribbled a note of thanks to Jean and left it on her pillow.
As I hurried along the road, I thought about what to do. All month I had concentrated on studying for exams and finishing grade twelve, trying to push everything else from my mind. Now that it was over, I had to take the next step, whatever that was.
I would go into Vancouver and find a job. And then... I would decide what to do about being two months pregnant.
I heard a truck come round the bend of the road. It slowed down. I turned to look, the dust settling. Suddenly it changed gears, revved its engine and sped away, throwing gravel.
But I had time to see Nels’ face. In that moment I caught a glimpse of his expression—jaw set, eyes straight ahead.
He looked as though he hated me.
17
HELP WANTED FEMALE.
I spread out the classified section of the Vancouver Sun on the café counter and pushed my coffee cup away.
Typist, some bookkeeping...Lady of mature years needed in motherless home...Hostess for dining room...Want a lively, highly paid job that lets you meet interesting people from all walks of life?
That one sounded too good to be true. But another one looked promising. Jolly Jumbo Drive-In. Waitresses and kitchen help wanted, top wages and working conditions, afternoon shift, uniforms and meals provided.
I circled it with my pencil. The address was in the south end of the city but on the streetcar line. It would be easy for me to find.
I had come into the city on the early morning boat, my belongings packed in a small cardboard box and with twenty-seven dollars in my purse. I had the feeling I was stealing away in the dawn. Only Mr. Percy was up that early, to take the head line of the Lady Alexander when she docked just before six. The sun had been up long enough to take the chill off the air, but the morning still had a brand-new feeling.
The night before I had packed and set the alarm for five o’clock. No one else was up when I buttered a piece of bread and drank a glass of milk for breakfast.
My mother, who was still sleeping, had left me four cheese sandwiches and an orange to take with me, and inside the lunch bag was a two-dollar bill and a note: Good wishes go with you from your mother. Don’t forget to write.
At the top of the trail, just before I lost sight of the house, I turned. At that moment I didn’t want to leave home. A movement at the window, which could have been my mother in her long white nightgown, disappeared as I watched.
After the Lady Alexander nosed into her berth in Vancouver, I stopped for coffee in the Union steamship’s waiting room before walking up the ramp from the dock to the foot of Carrall Street. Below I saw railway tracks and the shuttling CPR trains and could smell their hot cinders mixed with the other smells of the waterfront: roasting coffee beans, coconut oil, rope, tar, diesel oil, and salt from the sea.
I felt hopeful. Anything could happen.
I went up Carrall Street to Hastings, passing old men slumped in doorways, loggers in caulk boots waiting outside hiring halls, and women—their hair tied up in kerchiefs—hurrying to the fish canneries that lay along the waterfront. The day was going to be hot. Already the sun brought out the stench of rotting refuse from trash cans and a smell of urine from corners. Its rays pierced the dusty windows of pawn shops, making halos around second-hand watches, cameras, binoculars and trumpets.
Chinese storekeepers hosed down the sidewalks in front of their shops and set displays of produce in flat boxes outside their doors. Lettuce, radishes, cucumbers and carrots made patterns of green, red and orange that brightened the shabby street.
A Number 9 streetcar clanged to a stop, and I climbed on, leaving my cardboard box up near the conductor while I found a seat where I could keep my eye on it. That and the small amount of money in my purse were all I owned.
The manager of the Jolly Jumbo Drive-In was young, brisk and efficient. He interviewed me right there on the parking lot with its smell of hot tar and car exhaust. All the while he kept his eyes on the car hops, snapping his fingers at them if they were slow to notice when a customer wanted service. The boys ran to the serving window and to the cars, balancing their trays of milkshakes, hamburgers and French fries like acrobats.
“My name’s Ralph,” he told me quickly. “I need a girl in the kitchen—frying fish and chips, chicken. You can start today. Be here at four-thirty. Sign up in the office first. They’ll give you a uniform. Friday and Saturday night we’re open till two, otherwise you’re off at one-thirty. Any questions?” I opened my mouth to speak. “Good,” he said and left to check a tray that a car hop was taking to a car, sending the boy back for mustard.
“Pay’s thirty-one dollars a week,” he continued over his shoulder as he supervised a truck unloading at the service door. “Oh, by the way, be sure to wear something on your hair. Net, kerchief. Board of Health regulations.”
“You mean I’m hired?” I managed to slip in.
“Of course. You need a place to stay?” he asked, taking in the cardboard box at my feet. “There’s a Mrs. Williams rents rooms in the next block. You can’t miss it, a brown house on the corner. It’s the only house on the street. Tell her I sent you. Charges seven dollars a week. Likes to have people from the Jolly Jumbo.” He hurried away to talk to a customer.
Mrs. Williams’ house was exactly where Ralph had said. A dark-brown painted bungalow with morning glories climbing up the old-fashioned porch, it was set at the back of a narrow lot, and the whole of the area in front of the house was given over to a vegetable garden. The soil looked screened, black and moist.
Moving in and out of the raspberry canes was an older woman in a bright pink cotton dress who, when she saw me, worked her way slowly over in my direction. She stopped to inspect the size of the pea pods. She pulled a small weed, then she gathered a handful of rhubarb stalks, which she placed in her open apron.
Mrs. Williams was stocky and energetic looking, with hair that was streaked with gray. She talked all the way up the path to the front steps of the house, pointing out her prize plants. Leaving the rhubarb on the swinging wooden porch seat, she opened the screen door and led me into a cool dark hallway.
After the bright sunlight, it took a minute for my eyes to adjust. Mrs. Williams slid open stained walnut doors to show me the room for rent.
At one time it must have been the living room, because there was a small fireplace with a marble mantelpiece.
“Been renting rooms since my husband died,” she explained. “He passed away seven years ago last month. Had a heart attack, he did.” Her eyes magnified with tears. Absently, she dusted the top of a dresser with the corner of her apron.
“Here now, love.” She was cheerful again. “See this? A lovely new mattress. Paid handsomely for it, I did, even though it was on sale.” Then, pulling open the doors of the wardrobe, “There’s plenty of room here for your clothes. I know how you young girls like pretty things. I did myself when I was young. But I like girls, I do. Rather rent to them than to young men. Keep their rooms clean, even if they do use more hot water. I have a boy myself. Walter, his name is,” she went on and, as if summoned, Walter poked his head in between the sliding doors.
Walter looked to be close to thirty. His eyes seemed too small and looked over my head. His ears, too, were small and close to his head. A face without expression. My mother would have said he was subnormal.
“Oh, there you are, Wally,” Mrs. Williams said. “Did you put out the garbage as I asked?”
Wally grinned—foolishly, it see
med to me.
“Do it now, then, there’s a good lad,” she said sadly, and he bobbed his head, grinned once more—this time at me— and left.
She sighed, took a handkerchief from her sleeve and wiped her nose thoroughly, first one way, then the other.
“You’ll find Wally’s no problem. Now and again he loses his temper. Then he’s apt to shout. But pay no attention to that.”
I wondered where Wally slept. Across the hall from me? I didn’t know what to think. I’d heard about people like him from my mother, but there was no one at the Landing like Wally.
I followed Mrs. Williams down the hallway to the kitchen. Motioning me to sit down at the kitchen table opposite her, she told me about Wally.
“Had a kidney problem, I did.” She kept her voice low. “The doctors didn’t want me to get pregnant. But there you are. These things happen, don’t they?” Had she guessed about me? “And in those days, dear, there wasn’t much they could do about it except take me off salt and put me to bed.” Did my running to the bathroom often mean I had a kidney problem? “Not like nowadays with their new medicines and machines and I don’t know what else. So there it was. And when the doctors told us Walter wasn’t quite right...almost broke my husband’s heart, it did. I said to him then, ‘Mr. Williams,’ I said—I always called him that, him being so much older—’I’ll not put him in an institution until I have to. After all’s said and done, he’s our own flesh and blood.’
“And I’ve not regretted it, although, to tell you the truth, Mr. Williams never quite accepted it. But I don’t know how much longer I can manage. He works, you know—Wally does. He’s a dishwasher at the Jolly Jumbo, afternoon shift. Same as you.”
Later I paid the seven dollars’ rent in advance.
“I supply one clean sheet, pillow case, towel and face cloth per week,” said Mrs. Williams. “You’re welcome to use the laundry tubs and ironing board.” And she showed me around the house and basement.
It didn’t take me long to unpack and hang my clothes in the wardrobe. I closed its doors with a sense of satisfaction and looked around me. For seven dollars this room was more than I could have hoped for. There were even books in a built-in bookcase on one side of the fireplace. I looked through them.
One fell open to a pressed rose between its pages and a note that read, You know I haven’t changed. It’s you who has grown distant. P.
Mrs. Williams? To Mr. Williams?
I kicked off my loafers and lay down on the faded rose chenille bedspread. Pulling my dress tightly across my hips, I looked down and wondered if there wasn’t a slight swelling there.
Which brought me back down to earth in a hurry. Come on, Sheila, be practical. You’ve got a job at the neighborhood drive-in restaurant, thirty-one dollars a week. You start today. Room paid for one week. Total cash on hand, twenty dollars. And you’re pregnant. You’ve got to do something about it. And fast. Don’t think of it as a baby. It’s not a baby yet. A baby’s when it’s born. Wally was a baby once. Never mind that. A new job. A chance at a new life.
What I wanted, I realized then, more than anything else in the world, was to talk to someone.
Mrs. Williams? No. Because of Wally, she’d never understand how I felt.
There was no one, and I felt desperate.
My father. Weren’t we supposed to be alike? The last address I had for him was the King George Hotel. Somehow it seemed too much to hope for, that he would still be there. But he might have left a forwarding address.
18
NOW THAT I had decided to try to find my father, I became impatient. I wished I’d waited a few days before getting a job so that I would have had that time to look for him.
The Jolly Jumbo was busy, hot, cheerful and noisy. I didn’t have time to think about myself. I was too busy learning how to fry chips to keep up with the steady stream of orders that were shouted in through the small pass window between the grill area and the fry kitchen.
Three older women worked in the fry kitchen. They’d been there for years, they said, and their names were Bertha, Nellie and Doreen. They looked after me like three mother hens. After the supper rush was over and we were caught up on our orders, they told me to go for my own supper.
I took my plate of stew, which was the employees’ dinner, outside to the lane behind the drive-in and sat on an overturned milk can. It was cooler out there, with an evening breeze that smelled of newly cut lawns.
I lifted the hair off the back of my neck. I decided to get it cut. I’d only let it grow long for Nels.
It was a relief to be out of the heat and smell of cooking oil. I started to think about my father again. I knew he’d help me—some way—if only I could find him,
“Mind if I join you?” It was Don, a university student who worked on the grill. He was the one who called in the orders from the car hops to the fry kitchen.
Without waiting for an answer, he pulled another milk can over to where I sat and began to chat. All the time he was talking to me, I wondered if he would be so friendly if he knew what a jam I was in. Then my mind began to work away again at the problem of finding my father.
“Okay?” It was Don’s voice, and I’d obviously missed something.
“I’m sorry...”
“Okay if I walk you home?” he repeated. “After work?”
“Oh, sure...if you want to.”
The rest of the night went quickly. Nellie showed me how to fry fish, and after she was convinced that I could do it, she sat down with her feet resting on top of the shortening pail while she had a cup of tea. And Bertha told me all about her daughter who had had innumerable miscarriages and was now walking around with a pessary inside of her.
Sometimes I thought the whole world must be pregnant. It seemed that people talked about nothing else. Or was it because my pregnancy showed, and they thought I would be interested?
Just before we went off shift, Don made me a special deluxe hamburger—mushrooms, lettuce and tomato—and a vanilla milkshake. Then he waited for me while I changed in the women’s locker room.
When we got to the corner to cross the street over to Mrs. Williams’ house, he took my hand and didn’t let go, even when we got to her gate.
“You’re kind of quiet, Sheila. Are you tired?”
“A little.” But it was more than that. My head was busy with one thought. I had to find my father. Quickly.
“See you tomorrow afternoon at work,” Don said, and he pulled me gently toward him. He kissed me lightly, briefly—a butterfly kiss.
Later I stood in the shadows of the porch and watched him go down the street. He walked briskly, as if he knew exactly where he was going and why.
I wanted desperately to feel the same way.
* * *
I woke to the sound of Wally singing in a high, clear voice from the room across the hall. Sunlight bounced through the bay window and across the green carpet to where I lay in a delicious half-sleep. A faint smell of cooking oil rose from my hair.
Less than an hour later, I got off the streetcar in front of the King George Hotel. It looked the same as when I’d stayed there to see the dentist. That seemed so long ago.
Murray was still at the registration desk. I would swear he was wearing the same suit and tie. The suit was rusty brown, and the tie was broad and yellow, displaying a bare-breasted hula girl in a fluorescent green skirt.
“You probably don’t remember me, Murray, but I’m Frank Brary’s daughter.”
I waited expectantly for him to say something, but he just went on looking at me. I dropped my eyes to the tie. The girl’s stomach was too rounded. Was she pregnant, too?
I tried again. “My name’s Sheila. Is my father staying here?” Murray shoved the register across the desk to me and, pulling out a small penknife attached to his key chain, started to clean his nails.
Only a few pages of the register were filled, but I couldn’t find my father’s name among the signatures.
“Do you have any idea
where he is?”
Murray didn’t bother to look up, just went on cleaning his nails.
The telephone rang, and he answered it. Two men came to the desk, leaving their keys to be pigeonholed. Murray made up a bill for someone checking out. He gave change for the pay phone. And all the while, he ignored me.
I got more and more angry. I didn’t deserve this kind of treatment. Who did he think he was, anyway? Who did he think I was, to act this way toward me?
“Listen!” I said, leaning across the desk. “I don’t know what’s bothering you, but I want to know where my father is. And I’m not moving from here until you tell me.”
I glared at the hula girl. I would have liked nothing better than to grab that tie and hang on until Murray told me what I wanted to know.
Then Murray, in a mild voice and without changing his expression—as if there had never been any lack of cooperation on his part—told me.
“He’s staying at the hotel in Campbell River.” And added, still in a conversational tone, “He’s married again, you know.”
“He couldn’t be,” I answered without hesitating. “He’s still married to my mother.”
Murray looked at me as if I wasn’t too bright. I realized then that Murray would never bother to lie. Lying would be too much trouble.
At the bottom of my purse I found a dime and went across the lobby to use the pay phone. Twelve noon by the clock behind Murray’s desk. Would my father be at the hotel? Out eating? At work?
My perspiring hands made the receiver slippery. Reversing the charges, I listened to the telephone operator make the connection to Vancouver Island and then Campbell River.
“And what is your name, please?”
My name wouldn’t come out. I didn’t want to tell her. What if she listened in to conversations? I didn’t want anyone to know why I was phoning.
“What is your name?” she repeated impatiently.