startling movement with her pelvis at the same time as her beautifully painted lips curved up in a savoring smile. “That’s how you know when an Armdale boy really likes you.” Her glance fell momentarily on me. “In Armdale,” she continued, “it’s an honor to be carrying a hippie’s baby. If an Armdale girl’s pregnant by a hippie? She dances like this, with her hand on her belly.”
Now she spread five perfectly manicured fingers across her own slightly rounded abdomen—“See? Oohm…”—and closed her eyes again, pouting like a ripe raspberry and swaying to music only she could hear.
Soon I was forgetting to keep track of how many days to go until school started; boredom was becoming a thing of the past. My first thought on waking each morning was, What will she have on, what color will her lips, her fingernails be, how will she have her hair today, what will she say?
Somewhere along the line these afternoons began to take on a different character, to acquire a sense of purpose, a focus. This was launched by a formal introduction to cigarette-smoking, an activity new to me though not to Wanda, and which, according to Pat, neither Wanda nor I did with any style. Or it might have been our woeful ignorance in the matter of toners and sloughers, our out-dated, hand-me-down, babyish summer clothes, our useless youngness. Whatever it was, our afternoons at the Bennetts’ gradually morphed into lessons of a sort, Wanda and I becoming Pat’s grateful and devoted protégées in the countless subtleties of grown-up femininity.
And not a moment too soon, apparently. What hopelessly rough material she assured us we were, what hot stuff we would be by the time the school doors opened in September. The grade ten boys, she promised us, would never know what hit them.
We were shown how to walk with a provocative undulation of the hips, which Pat, in her stylish outfits could pull off, but which, when Wanda and I tried it, looked demented.
“Look at the cow on ice!” I cackled, watching Wanda’s lumpen attempts, only to be hooted at by her when I doubled over, trying to inhale.
“Cut it out, you dumb-asses,” warned Pat with an expert drag on her own cigarette, “there’s nobody here but us, so smarten up and try,” a slow wink, “try, again. You want to know how to do this when school starts, don’t you?”
Soon we were initiated into the complexities of creams and foundations and the removers of same, instructed in the steady application of eye-liner and mascara, shown the varieties of lipstick and rouge—“you don’t want the powder kind, you want the stick, like this, it’s easier to blend, see”— the artful application of hairspray, false eyelashes, nail polish.
We learned how to back-comb, how to tease, how to round-brush our hair so that, whether we wanted it over or under, it would flip just the right way.
Then came dancing, which we did in the milk-and-rice-crispy-strewn kitchen with the top forty cranked up and the curtains closed, to make it seem more like a dancehall. Though there seemed to be no particular steps or routines to learn, there was a succession of unenthusiastically delivered and mechanical movements and gestures that could not be deviated from, and that were all the rage in Armdale.
Waltzing, though, was another thing. We couldn’t stop snorting and recoiling at the need to get pressed up against each other and shuffle in circles; Pat had to keep lecturing us as to the serious nature of what we were doing, the promise that it was for a future, better cause, and the fact that we were being immature, an accusation she knew we hated to hear.
“Grow up, you two, if you want to act like babies, go on home and hang around your mothers; I got plenty here already, to keep me busy, without wasting my time on you.”
Recoil or not, I never seemed to get enough of this dancing, performed in the weird afternoon intimacy of that derelict kitchen, the hot, pale sun pressing on the tired curtains, the transistor radio crackling on the counter. When I waltzed with Pat, I tried to memorize her mysterious smell made of unguents and grown-up body odor (she did sweat, it turned out, after all), to follow the intricacies of her ear’s perfect coil, to brush her kiss-curls, by accident, with my cheek, as if, by an adoring osmosis, I could somehow absorb her, become her.
Though there was one thing, one niggling question that managed, annoyingly, to penetrate all this fog: Why did Pat feel the need—surely all that housework and child minding couldn’t be doing her beautiful outfits any good—why did she feel she had to dress so perfectly every single day, just to be a housekeeper in a hellhole, in the middle of nowhere?
So, one day when she was my waltzing partner, I whispered my question into her dazzling ear. A minute movement of one of her shadowed eyelids was all that indicated what might have been a momentary lack of assurance; the next instant she looked me straight in the eye.
“Well,” she said matter-of-factly, “I do have a boyfriend, a sort of boyfriend down here, and we go out when he’s off work, after they”— the Bennetts—“get home. He comes to get me right at six o’clock though, and what with these little monsters to run after all day, there’s no way I’d have time to get ready if I waited ‘til I was done with work.” With one manicured finger she rubbed a shimmer of moisture from below her eye. “I have to start first thing in the morning, and just watch out I don’t get dirty.”
I thought that was a fishy story. I agreed it was a prudent measure.
I noticed—it was the first time I had ever looked at her at such close range—that her nose, whose daunting nobility I had always admired, was ever-so-slightly bent.
In that part of the country there will sometimes come a late-summer event that the locals call “a terrific storm.” This can involve anything from hail to hurricanes, and never fails to bring high winds, thunder and lightning, bruised apples, beaten-down grain. People anticipate the storm with stoicism and, depending on how long the weather has been unbearably muggy, not without a grim sort of eagerness, agreeing that it should at least soon be possible to breathe again, for a while anyway.
Though until the storm breaks, it’s like something has sucked every little bit of air out of the world; all you can do is wait and sweat.
The worst of the hot weather, the flat dead eye of it, had been going on for about a week when Wanda and I made what turned out to be our last visit to the Bennetts. That day, neither of us, padding through the soft white dust of the lane, felt much of the usual enthusiasm about the afternoon’s instruction; the heat had gotten to us; we were silent and introverted, ready to be offended.
“You bumped me.”
“Yeah, no.”
“You did so, you bumped into my hip, you know you did. Ow.”
“Hips that big, no wonder they get bumped.”
“At least I’ve got hips!”
“You’re pathetic!”
You’re pathetic!
Even Pat, when we arrived, seemed a little less crisp than usual; I was startled to note dark rings of perspiration under the arms of her blouse, a shiny caste to her makeup. A fine film of moisture stood out on her upper lip, beading in the soft down of dark hair in the corners of her mouth.
Even her kiss-curls looked discouraged.
“No dancing today,” she sighed when we came stumping up the back steps, “let’s just go sit in the back yard under the lilacs, that way we can hear if the boys wake up.”
When we got to the lilac-bushes though, it was clear that the temperature was no different there than anywhere else, so we dragged ourselves back into the house, pulled the heavy living room drapes against the sun, flopped on the couch, and got out the cigarettes.
By now, Wanda and I could pass for seasoned smokers. We knew the ways of holding, gesturing, and blowing shapely smoke rings, and I was fairly good at concealing the fact that I still didn’t inhale, so we had graduated to cigarettes of our own, instead of just being offered training drags on Pat’s. The combination of the darkened room and the cigarettes made us feel sophisticated, worldly, pleasurably jaded. Inevitably, the conversation turned to boys and what you were supposed to do with them, a subject that reliably made Pat wiggle her hips, moisten her lips, close her deep-set eyes. Wanda and I exchanged looks through the haze; I began to feel warm in a way that had nothing to do with the weather; a comfortable buzzing in my head made me think I must have forgotten myself, and started to inhale.
Pat said, “Why don’t we practice kissing.” Now we learned that kissing broke down into ‘necking,’ ‘petting’, and ‘french,’ and that it could result, if you weren’t careful, in dirty-looking mouth-shaped neck bruises, called ‘hickeys.’ I felt my eyes widen. Wanda, scornful of my inexperience, seemed to have had a lot of this material before. “Dummy, why do you think Brenda Pineo always wears turtle-necks to school,” she snorted, “where’ve you been?”
“With ‘french’ the important thing to remember,” drawled Pat, who had automatically slipped into teacher mode, “is to let just the littlest bit of your tongue stick through your teeth, like this.”
There, between her lips, peeked Pat’s dainty member.
There too, looking like ground beef, thrust Wanda’s; still painfully mindful of her snarky comment about the hickeys, I chuckled with disgust. Then, remembering to keep my tongue thin and flat like Pat’s, I tried it.
“You’re going to be a good necker,” Pat crooned. “You are.”
That was enough for Wanda, whose efforts had not been complimented, and who was half out of her head with the heat. Muttering something about not having to take this sort of thing from nobody, she flounced out of the room.
Distantly, the back door slammed. I looked over at Pat, with whom, I realized, I had never before been alone. Leaning against the cushions on the other side of the couch, smiling in her strange way, her cigarette dangling from one slender hand, she blew a smoke ring in the direction of Wanda’s exit. “That’s an improvement, eh?” she murmured. “You are you know,” (smiling again), “going to be good.”
“I am?” I said weakly, hoping the words didn’t come out in too much of a squeak.
What had I imagined she meant? Further discussion? A brief treatise on the history of smooching? The next instant she was on top of me, her hands moving under my thin summer clothes, her tongue, far from peeking discreetly through her teeth as shown, invading my own. Though I had never been kissed or touched in any sexual way before, the cigarette’s poison distanced and pleased me, enabling me to experience only a mild subterranean stirring, mixed with good natured curiosity, almost as though I were a spectator of the odd and sweaty business happening to my body.
I felt less like a spectator when sometime later—a minute? An hour?—a car-door banged and Pat was up the stairs like a shot, leaving me to get myself vertical, and to greet a startled-looking man in dirty green overalls.
“Must have fallen asleep,” I mumbled pathetically as I lurched past, leaving Mr. Bennett, I assumed, to wonder who I was, and how I had come to be sprawled semi-labile on the couch with his hired girl, in the middle of the afternoon.
“Go home,” he muttered as I booted it for the door, but his eyes were on the stairs.
It occurred to me, as I scrambled through the first fat drops of rain, that Mr. Bennett must have come home to cover up his old cars against the storm, which, while Pat and I had been lolling there with the curtains pulled, had finally started darkening toward its moment.
“Where’ve you been?” said my mother, spooning Spaghetti into my baby brother as I hurtled through the door.
“Oh,” I said, gladder than I ever meant to be to see her, “nowhere.”
Hurricane Donna lasted a week, overflowing the swamp, backing up the sewers and turning the lane to impassable muck. By the time it was safe to come out, school was only a few days away, and suddenly everyone was brisk, in a hurry, cheerfully busy. I spent the cool, brilliant days driving around with my mother, buying school supplies and new shoes and material for dresses (‘shifts’ were the thing that fall, slab-sided sacks for which my flat chest made me grateful) to start grade nine in. Already, I was calculating the marks I was going to need going forward, in order to sneak into university.
Wanda’s mother, Shirley, had an appointment with a skin specialist over in Wolfville, so we took her along on one of those school supply trips. In the back seat, watching the reddening trees stream by, I half-listened to the conversation in front. The storm was discussed, its destruction deplored, the cost to the farmers speculated upon.
Then Shirley mentioned the Bennetts, “You know, they fired the hired girl.”
“Is that so?” said my mother, calculating a pass, “Another one?”
“Them people go through girls,” mused Shirley, “like shit through a tin horn.
A week is a long time when you’re fourteen. Already, thanks to the prospect of new shoes and crisp notebooks and fresh dresses to start grade ten in, I had mostly stopped thinking about Pat and who, or whatever, she’d been.But I hadn’t stopped thinking about boys. What came to me, as we stopped in at Peter Cleale’s in Kentville, to buy me the one pair of ass-hugging Leroys that would have to last me all of that year, was that there might actually be an ‘Armdale.’
And that, if somewhere there was an Armdale, couldn’t there be more?
So, yeah,” said Shirley, “that’s what Wannie was tellin’ me.”
“What do you suppose it was this time?” my mother wondered with a glance at the rear-view, to see if I was listening.
“We’ll never know,” said Shirley.
“No,” sighed my mother, “we never will.”
