Going Forward
Wanda said, “You should see this girl I know. Well, woman really, I should say woman. What a babe.” It was a sultry afternoon three weeks from the start of school, and we were dead-bored down in the orchard, sprawled in the back seat of an abandoned car whose doors had long-since been carted away; wild grapevines and burdock canes and deadly nightshade had thrust their way across the windows, under the floorboards, around what was left of the rearview mirror.
A smell of souring fruit and hot leather was everywhere.
“Oh?” I didn’t for a minute believe Wanda knew any babe; though I did need a diversion, so I decided to test her powers. “What about her?”
“Well her name’s Pat and she’s from Halifax or somewheres up there, and she’s about eighteen or something and she’s got clothes like a movie star and makeup—” Wanda’s eyes rolled back appreciatively —“you should see the makeup.”
Despite my habitual skepticism where Wanda was concerned, I could feel interest stirring.
“Where does she live then?”
“Closer than you might think.”
I flicked away a blackfly. “You’re such a bullshitter.”
Wanda’s eyes narrowed with pleasure and self-importance; for she was once entirely equal to my scrutiny. “For your info, she lives with the Bennetts. They brought her down here from Halifax—well Armdale, actually—to look after the kids during the day.”
I knew the Bennetts both worked; more than once my mother had spoken disapprovingly of Mrs. Bennett, who as a rule was not to be found at home with her children.
I gave the front seat a good swift kick. “Armdale, you say.”
Wanda studied my face for signs of capitulation, and I did have to grant her authority, plausibility. The Bennetts lived just down the lane from Wanda’s place, in a house that used to be owned by a farming family who had moved out West. If such a thing as a babe at the Bennetts’ had occurred, Wanda, if only by virtue of geography, would quite possibly be the first to know.
“‘Course she’s not the first one they’ve had in there. There’s been two or three in before her, but they never stick around for long. They always seem to end up gettin’ in her bad books and takin’ off after they’ve been in there a few weeks. Must be hard on them kids, poor little buggers.”
This was all news to me; it began to dawn on me that there might, after all, be more to Wanda’s claim about the hired girl than met the eye.
“So,” I said with as much indifference as I could manage, “what’s she like then, this Pat”?
What I thought, the first time I walked into that kitchen, was that if I had been a girl brought in to look after those children, I might have run off, out of sheer discouragement. The second thing I thought was that discouragement did not seem to be a thing that Pat had much familiarity with. Anybody else might have deplored the filthy floors; the empty cupboards; the almost complete absence of any furniture; the stacks of gritty, unwashed dishes.
The smell.
Pat seemed not only undaunted by this state of affairs; she was, I gradually understood, somehow unaware of, even above, it. It was not that she ignored the squalor; instead, she seemed focused on some other reality, some higher, worthier, believed-in thing.
What was that?
That was for her to know—with a thick-lashed wink, she soon said so—and for us to find out.
What did she do, then, from the time Mr. and Mrs. Bennett left for work in the morning until they returned, at supper time?
Oh, she said, she kept track of these little buggers (the two boys)—rolling her Egyptian eyes to make it clear that that was no mean feat—and fed them, and did the housework; you wouldn’t believe the housework! There was the laundry, the cooking (what cooking, I wondered?), the hosing down and mopping up and airing out of the house, and the animals to feed and the garden to weed, and God knew what-all. Any left-over moments must be devoted to the time-consuming task—a pretty pout, more eye-rolling—of her personal upkeep. She must go around looking like this all the time, then.
This visit, the first one, took place a few days after the conversation in the old car, and the weather, which had been stifling then, had not improved. August had reached the point
where everything in the world is covered in white road-dust and not a leaf is stirring, and though the sun burns on day after day, there seems to be no real light in the sky: we were at the part of the summer when just standing up makes you whimper, when simply catching sight of someone else can light your temper.
Though Pat seemed about as much aware of the temperature as she was of the state of her employer’s house. Instead of wearing a tank and shorts like anybody else, she was tricked out in one of the full-length bell-bottom jumpsuits popular at that time, and she wore a long-sleeved (cuffs to the elbow), many-buttoned silk blouse, pantyhose, and snappy patent-leather sling-backs, just as if she was all set to go out on a big date.
Not only that. Her short dark hair was impeccably teased back from the bangs in a soft mound punctuated by a pink satin bow, her kiss-curls perfect—how did she manage that, in such heat?—she was made up like a mannequin and seemed to sweat about as much as one, and she had long glossy witchy red fingernails, just as promised.
All, in fact, as promised.
Seeing her that first time, I recalled a line of poetry I’d once read, about a demon woman, a virgin purest lipp’d, yet in the lore of love: deep learned to the red heart’s core…
Compare this to Wanda and me with our frayed peddle-pushers from the year before, our dirty bare feet and smelly adolescent armpits, our tame aspirations concerning the boys in grade ten. We followed her around as long as she let us, which was most of that still and stifling afternoon. We were excited, competitive, wary.
But when five o’clock ticked into view, none of that mattered; Pat had us out the door in a hurry. And that only added to her mystery. Those kiss curls. Those lips. Those insatiable eyes.
“I don’t know what anyone would ever see in that hot thing,” I carped, as Wanda and I went our separate ways.
Naturally, we were back there the very next day. And the day after; in fact, every chance we got, we were padding down the dusty lane and around the corner to the Bennetts’ crumbling establishment. It became our habit to wander in there about mid-morning—the ‘little buggers’ went down then, for their first nap—to sit on the back step with Pat, taking drags off her cigarettes, admiring her makeup and outfits, which despite the deadening heat continued to be fresh, trendy and immaculate, and listening to her stories of the boys, the dances, the dates to be had in Armdale.
“In Armdale,” she said, her thick lashes brushing tantalizingly together at the thought, “there’s this guy? His name’s Cheetah—well his real name’s Donnie Something-or-other, but everybody just calls him Cheetah because he’s so wiry—And every girl, I mean every girl is crazy to dance with him, and last weekend (I was home for the weekend) he asked me to dance and afterward he kissed me French.” Her eyes closed completely at this thought, then slowly reopened. “Do you know how an Armdale boy shows if he likes you?”
How? We were eager, anxious, and desperate to know.
“His thing gets hard and he pushes it against you from behind”—the thick lashes closing again—“and he kind of rubs it back and forth, like this.” She made a
