Wanda said, \u201cYou should see this girl I know. Well, woman really, I should say woman<\/em>. What a babe.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n A smell of souring fruit and hot leather was everywhere. \u201cWell her name\u2019s Pat and she\u2019s from Halifax or somewheres up there, and she\u2019s about eighteen <\/em>or something and she\u2019s got clothes like a movie star and makeup<\/em>\u2014\u201d Wanda\u2019s eyes rolled back appreciatively \u2014\u201cyou should see<\/em> the makeup.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n I gave the front seat a good swift kick. \u201cArmdale, you say.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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\u2019 had occurred, Wanda, if only by virtue of geography, would quite possibly be the first to know. This was all news to me; it began to dawn on me that there might, after all, be more to Wanda\u2019s claim about the hired girl than met the eye. 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.<\/p>\n The smell.<\/p>\n 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<\/em> thing.<\/p>\n What was that? What did she do, then, from the time Mr. and Mrs. Bennett left for work in the morning until they returned, at supper time?<\/p>\n Oh, she said, she kept track of these<\/em> little buggers (the two boys)\u2014rolling her Egyptian eyes to make it clear that that was no mean feat\u2014and fed them, and did the housework; you wouldn\u2019t believe the housework! There was the laundry, the cooking (what<\/em> 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\u2014a pretty pout, more eye-rolling\u2014of her personal upkeep. She must go around looking like this all the time, then.<\/p>\n 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<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Though Pat seemed about as much aware of the temperature as she was of the state of her employer\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2014how did she manage that, in such heat?\u2014she 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.<\/p>\n All, in fact, as promised. <\/p>\n Seeing her that first time, I recalled a line of poetry I\u2019d 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<\/em>\u2026<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n But when five o\u2019clock 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. 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\u2019 crumbling establishment. It became our habit to wander in there about mid-morning\u2014the \u2018little buggers\u2019 went down then, for their first nap\u2014to 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.<\/p>\n \u201cIn Armdale,\u201d she said, her thick lashes brushing tantalizingly together at the thought, \u201cthere\u2019s this guy? His name\u2019s Cheetah\u2014well his real name\u2019s Donnie Something-or-other, but everybody just calls him Cheetah because he\u2019s so wiry\u2014And every girl, I mean every <\/em>girl is crazy to dance with him, and last weekend (I was home for the weekend) he asked me <\/em>to dance and afterward he kissed me French<\/em>.\u201d Her eyes closed completely at this thought, then slowly reopened. \u201cDo you know how an Armdale boy shows if he likes you?\u201d <\/p>\n How? We were eager, anxious, and desperate to know. Now she spread five perfectly manicured fingers across her own slightly rounded abdomen\u2014\u201cSee? Oohm\u2026\u201d\u2014and closed her eyes again, pouting like a ripe raspberry and swaying to music only she could hear.<\/p>\n 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<\/em>?<\/p>\n 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\u2019 gradually morphed into lessons of a sort, Wanda and I becoming Pat\u2019s grateful and devoted prot\u00e9g\u00e9es in the countless subtleties of grown-up femininity.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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. 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\u2014\u201cyou don\u2019t want the powder kind, you want the stick, like this, it\u2019s easier to blend, see\u201d\u2014 the artful application of hairspray, false eyelashes, nail polish.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n Waltzing, though, was another thing. We couldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n \u201cGrow 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Though there was one thing, one niggling question that managed, annoyingly, to penetrate all this fog: Why did Pat feel the need\u2014surely all that housework and child minding couldn\u2019t be doing her beautiful outfits any good\u2014why 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?<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWell,\u201d she said matter-of-factly, \u201cI do have a boyfriend, a sort of<\/em> boyfriend down here, and we go out when he\u2019s off work, after they\u201d\u2014<\/em> the Bennetts\u2014\u201cget home. He comes to get me right at six o\u2019clock though, and what with these little monsters to run after all day, there\u2019s no way I\u2019d have time to get ready if I waited \u2018til I was done with work.\u201d With one manicured finger she rubbed a shimmer of moisture from below her eye. \u201cI have to start first thing in the morning, and just watch out I don\u2019t get dirty.\u201d<\/p>\n I thought that was a fishy story. I agreed it was a prudent measure.<\/p>\n I noticed\u2014it was the first time I had ever looked at her at such close range\u2014that her nose, whose daunting nobility I had always admired, was ever-so-slightly bent.<\/p>\n Though until the storm breaks, it\u2019s like something has sucked every little bit of air out of the world; all you can do is wait and sweat.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s instruction; the heat had gotten to us; we were silent and introverted, ready to be offended.<\/p>\n \u201cYou bumped me.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Even her kiss-curls looked discouraged.<\/p>\n \u201cNo dancing today,\u201d she sighed when we came stumping up the back steps, \u201clet\u2019s just go sit in the back yard under the lilacs, that way we can hear if the boys wake up.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t inhale, so we had graduated to cigarettes of our own, instead of just being offered training drags on Pat\u2019s. 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.<\/p>\n Pat said, \u201cWhy don\u2019t we practice kissing.\u201d Now we learned that kissing broke down into \u2018necking,\u2019 \u2018petting\u2019, and \u2018french,\u2019 and that it could result, if you weren\u2019t careful, in dirty-looking mouth-shaped neck bruises, called \u2018hickeys.\u2019 I felt my eyes widen. Wanda, scornful of my inexperience, seemed to have had a lot of this material before. \u201cDummy, why do you think Brenda Pineo always wears turtle-necks to school,\u201d she snorted, \u201cwhere\u2019ve you<\/em> been?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWith \u2018french\u2019 the important thing to remember,\u201d drawled Pat, who had automatically slipped into teacher mode, \u201cis to let just the littlest bit of your tongue stick through your teeth, like this.\u201d<\/p>\n There, between her lips, peeked Pat\u2019s dainty member. \u201cYou\u2019re going to be a good necker,\u201d Pat crooned. \u201cYou ar<\/em>e.\u201d<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n 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\u2019s exit. \u201cThat\u2019s an improvement, eh?\u201d she murmured. \u201cYou are you know,\u201d (smiling again), \u201cgoing to be good.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI am?\u201d I said weakly, hoping the words didn\u2019t come out in too much of a squeak.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n I felt less like a spectator when sometime later\u2014a minute? An hour?\u2014a 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. <\/p>\n \u201cMust have fallen asleep,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n \u201cGo home,\u201d he muttered as I booted it for the door, but his eyes were on the stairs.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWhere\u2019ve you<\/em> been?\u201d said my mother, spooning Spaghetti into my baby brother as I hurtled through the door.<\/p>\n \u201cOh,\u201d I said, gladder than I ever meant to be to see her, \u201cnowhere.\u201d<\/p>\n 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 (\u2018shifts\u2019 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.<\/p>\n Wanda\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Then Shirley mentioned the Bennetts, \u201cYou know, they fired the hired girl.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIs that so?\u201d said my mother, calculating a pass, \u201cAnother one?\u201d A week is a long time when you\u2019re 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\u2019d been.But I hadn\u2019t stopped thinking about boys. What came to me, as we stopped in at Peter Cleale\u2019s 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 \u2018Armdale.\u2019<\/p>\n And that, if somewhere there was an Armdale, couldn\u2019t there be more? <\/p>\n So, yeah,\u201d said Shirley, \u201cthat\u2019s what Wannie was tellin\u2019 me.\u201d Going Forward Wanda said, \u201cYou should see this girl I know. Well, woman really, I should say woman. What a babe.\u201d 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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":4085,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=324"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4731,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324\/revisions\/4731"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n \u201cOh?\u201d I didn\u2019t for a minute believe Wanda knew any babe; though I did need a diversion, so I decided to test her powers. \u201cWhat about her?\u201d<\/p>\n
\nDespite my habitual skepticism where Wanda was concerned, I could feel interest stirring.
\n \u201cWhere does she live then?\u201d
\n \u201cCloser than you might think.\u201d
\n I flicked away a blackfly. \u201cYou\u2019re such a bullshitter.\u201d
\n Wanda\u2019s eyes narrowed with pleasure and self-importance; for she was once entirely equal to my scrutiny. \u201cFor your info, she lives with the Bennetts. They brought her down here from Halifax\u2014well Armdale, actually\u2014to look after the kids during the day.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n \u201c\u2018Course she\u2019s not the first one they\u2019ve had in there. There\u2019s been two or three in before her, but they never stick around for long. They always seem to end up gettin\u2019 in her<\/em> bad books and takin\u2019 off after they\u2019ve been in there a few weeks. Must be hard on them kids, poor little buggers.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\u201cSo,\u201d I said with as much indifference as I could manage, \u201cwhat\u2019s she like then, this Pat\u201d?<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue25\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/16\/2019\/03\/leave-image-1.png\")
<\/p>\n
\nThat<\/em> was for her to know\u2014with a thick-lashed wink, she soon said so\u2014and for us to find out.<\/p>\n
\n \u201cI don\u2019t know what anyone would ever see in that<\/em> hot thing,\u201d I carped, as Wanda and I went our separate ways.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\n\u201cHis thing gets hard and he pushes it against you from behind\u201d\u2014the thick lashes closing again\u2014\u201cand he kind of rubs it back and forth, like this.\u201d She made a
\n
\n
\nstartling movement with her pelvis at the same time as her beautifully painted lips curved up in a savoring smile. \u201cThat\u2019s how you know when an Armdale boy really<\/em> likes you.\u201d Her glance fell momentarily on me. \u201cIn Armdale,\u201d she continued, \u201cit\u2019s an honor to be carrying a hippie\u2019s baby. If an Armdale girl\u2019s pregnant by a hippie? She dances like this, with her hand on her belly.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n \u201cLook at the cow on ice!\u201d I cackled, watching Wanda\u2019s lumpen attempts, only to be hooted at by her when I doubled over, trying to inhale.
\n\u201cCut it out, you dumb-asses,\u201d warned Pat with an expert drag on her own cigarette, \u201cthere\u2019s nobody here but us, so smarten up and try,\u201d a slow wink, \u201ctry, again. You want to know how to do this when school starts, don\u2019t you?\u201d<\/p>\nIn that part of the country there will sometimes come a late-summer event that the locals call \u201ca terrific storm.\u201d 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. <\/p>\n
\n\u201cYeah, no.\u201d
\n \u201cYou did so, you bumped into my hip, you know you did. Ow<\/em>.\u201d
\n\u201cHips that big, no wonder they get bumped.\u201d
\n\u201cAt least I\u2019ve got hips!\u201d
\n\u201cYou\u2019re pathetic!\u201d
\nYou\u2019re pathetic!<\/em><\/p>\n
\nThere too, looking like ground beef, thrust Wanda\u2019s; 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\u2019s, I tried it. <\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\n\u201cThem people go through girls,\u201d mused Shirley, \u201clike shit through a tin horn.<\/p>\n
\n \u201cWhat do you suppose it was this time?\u201d my mother wondered with a glance at the rear-view, to see if I was listening.
\n \u201cWe\u2019ll never know,\u201d said Shirley.
\n \u201cNo,\u201d sighed my mother, \u201cwe never will.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"