The Eliot Girls Page 8

  “I’m concerned about the results of her first quiz. She has a really weak grasp of trigonometric ratios.”

  “Oh.”

  “Have you thought about getting her a tutor?”

  “I was hoping she wouldn’t need one.”

  Chandra Howard, who sat on Ruth’s other side, looked over with a sympathetic smile.

  Chuck scratched his head. “It’s probably best to…I’m sure Audrey could benefit. Get on the need sooner rather than later.”

  Ruth tried to look appreciative of the advice. “I’ll look into it.”

  “How long will this meeting last, do you guys think?” asked Chandra. “I need to pump.”

  Chandra Howard, a Senior School biology teacher whose maternity leave had ended over a year ago, was the mother of two children, aged two and four. It was said that she was still breastfeeding both of them. Ruth knew little of her but often heard her bragging about how sleep-deprived she was. And she did, indeed, look perpetually bedraggled and virtuous, with her canvas Big Carrot bags and her unkempt hair, which was overrun with coarse and kinky grey strands.

  “Not long, I’m sure,” replied Elaine Sykes, a young chemistry teacher who was sitting on Chandra’s other side, patting Chandra’s knee.

  “I only got three hours of sleep last night,” Chandra said.

  “Insomnia?”

  “Wouldn’t that be a luxury! No, if it wasn’t Sienna wanting to eat, it was India. Just one of those nights.”

  Elaine stuck out her bottom lip. “What if Gus gave them a bottle of milk so you could sleep longer?”

  Chandra fixed her with an appalled stare. “Would you feed kangaroo milk to a baby elephant?”

  “Well,” said Elaine, looking confused. “No.”

  “It’s all worth it, though. Isn’t breastfeeding the greatest thing in the world, Ruth?”

  Ruth had barely been listening to the conversation, so busy was she worrying that Audrey would refuse more tutoring, but she snapped to attention at the sound of her name.

  “Oh. Yeah!” Ruth paused. “Actually, I only breastfed for a few months.”

  “Ohh,” said Chandra, her voice falling. “Breastfeeding can be really hard for some people. You have to really keep at it.”

  Elaine nodded in agreement.

  “I know this mom who had so much trouble breastfeeding her first child that she just gave up, and of course she was devastated. And then her second came along a year later, and nothing could have been easier. So the older kid, who’s no fool, says, ‘Hey, I want some.’ And Sue said it was just like a light bulb went off for her. She said, ‘What the hell,’ latched her toddler back on, and breastfed both kids for another two years. I thought that was such an inspirational story.”

  “Did you know that breastfed children have higher IQs?” said Elaine. “Isn’t that something?”

  Ruth let out a clumsy, honking laugh. “Well, then, I suppose I have only myself to blame that Audrey’s doing so poorly in math!”

  There was an awkward silence, and Chandra and Elaine looked uncomfortably at each other. Ruth turned to Chuck Marostica and sheepishly muttered, “A tutor is a really good idea, Chuck. Thanks.” Some minutes later, Ruth was thankful to hear Larissa’s approach. She stalked into the room, flicked the lights on and off, and promptly announced, “The flasher is back.”

  The response Larissa was hoping for—a collective gasp, the stirrings of shock and concern—was diluted by the way the teachers were spread out across the room. Several guiltily muffled snickers issued from various corners. Larissa’s habit—a consequence of what Ruth thought of as the theatricality of the severe—was to follow such major announcements with silence, in which she basked until someone asked for more information. She finally got the response she wanted from Michael Curtis, who raised her hand and asked in a stricken voice whether the police had been alerted.

  “Of course,” said Larissa. “As soon as I heard of the incident from a parent this morning.”

  “When I think of my own wee ones…” Michael said, staring despondently into the middle distance.

  “The police,” Larissa said, “are taking this very seriously.”

  Few others, however, seemed to be. No one was genuinely afraid of the flasher, except Larissa, who carried pepper spray in her purse. (Ruth said to Audrey and Richard later, at dinner, “Of course she’s petrified. She’s never laid eyes on a penis. Which, of course, she can only bring herself to refer to as a ‘member.’” “As in, an upstanding member of the community?” Richard responded, making them groan.) The flasher was said to be in his mid-forties, grey haired and balding, pudgy. He wore a tan trench coat (with a poppy, apparently, around Remembrance Day), and he kept a respectful distance, so that in the end no one had ever gotten a good view of what he was so compelled to show off. Ruth felt that he was harmless, ultimately. There almost seemed an element of play about it, though she knew that thinking such a thing was naive, that this exhibitionism had something much darker at its core. There was a true danger of these displays escalating.

  The students also found the flasher funny and considered it a badge of honour to be selected as his victim. Those who had actually been flashed basked in fame for weeks afterward. “Watch out for the flasher!” the girls called to each other when they set out in the direction where he was known to loiter, on the pathway that ran beside the fence on the school’s western border. Ruth understood their perverse fascination, the warped pride of the chosen ones. Larissa, however, was furious when she got wind of the flasher’s actions being taken lightly.

  “So the question is, what can we do to keep our girls safe?” Larissa said, passing around handouts summarizing the flasher protocol. The teachers were to alert their classes to the threat and make clear the importance of notifying an adult if the flasher struck. Girls walking home must be always in pairs. Portable music devices, an impediment to hearing, were to be banned. It was essential that the students understand that the flasher was not a joke.

  Sheila nodded vigorously as she reviewed the handout. “Pairs, I like that. That could be a truly impactful solution.”

  Ms. McAllister stopped moving suddenly, as though someone had unplugged her internal wiring. Then she marched over to the dictionary and read aloud the definition of impact, and the list of its legitimate derivations. “This is the second time I have heard you employ the word ‘impactful,’ Sheila,” said Larissa. “‘Cuiusvis hominis est errare, nullius nisi insipientis in errore perseverare.’ ‘Anyone can err, but only the fool persists in his fault.’”

  Sheila nodded again, this time in perplexed shame, studying her handout.

  “If I may ask,” said Michael, raising her hand. “Who was the victim?”

  “Deborah Fields.”

  Michael shook her head. “That poor, darling girl.” Always quick to appoint herself the mouthpiece for thwarted female justice in the world beyond the Eliot enclave, Michael stood now and gathered the teachers to her with an embracing, outraged stare. “Imagine simply being on your way home from school in broad daylight and being accosted by the sight of a stranger’s dangling phallus. Although God knows dangling is certainly preferable to the alternative.”

  Henry Winter, Ruth noticed now, was sitting near Michael, listening with apparent interest as she spoke. Ruth had hardly seen him since his introduction in the staff room, though she had nearly crossed paths with him just the other day in the parking lot. She had been applying lipstick in her rear-view mirror when he pulled in next to her in his car, a beaten-up old black Saab with a dented door and red duct tape where the glass was missing from one of the brake lights. Through her peripheral vision, Ruth saw him register her presence, and after he locked his door he paused for a moment between the cars, possibly waiting for her to get out and accompany him into the school. Wanting to avoid early morning small talk, she had pretended to rummage around for somethin
g in her briefcase until he disappeared. On her way into the school, she noticed on his car a bumper sticker that said, “My other car is a bicycle.” She was surprised, having failed to detect in him any environmental zeal.

  “How dare men use their genitalia as a threat. A weapon of intimidation.” Michael’s voice had fallen to a haunted, impassioned hush. “It’s sickening. I remember back in my single days how awful it was never having a moment’s peace when I was out with my girlfriends. Men constantly interrupting. Pushing themselves into our conversations. Insisting upon buying me drinks. Sitting on bar stools with their legs spread wide, thrusting their groins at the world.”

  Demoralized at the recollection, she sank to her seat and Lorna Massie-Turnbull patted her shoulder.

  “Don’t worry,” said Larissa. “We’ll get this bastard.”

  A delighted, nervous titter rose up from her audience. Larissa was known for reviling curse words as the lazy man’s mode of self-expression.

  “Let’s see how brave he is then,” put in Chandra Howard.

  Larissa made a lengthy note on her clipboard, then looked sharply in Ruth’s direction.

  “May I ask why you are smiling, Ruth?”

  Ruth’s gaze had been fixed on the handout in her lap. The more she had tried to tell herself that the situation was not humorous, the sillier it had seemed. She had tried to imagine Audrey being a victim, how upset she would be, but all she could think of was how they would laugh about it together. She was sure that teenagers weren’t permanently scarred by that kind of thing.

  “Was I?” Ruth answered. “I’m very sorry, Larissa. Something else entered my mind.”

  “I’m sorry this news fails to hold your attention.”

  All the teachers had turned around in their seats to look at her.

  “I’m sorry, Larissa. It was a momentary lapse. I assure you that I’m just as concerned about the flasher as you are.” Ruth bowed her head to convey her shame, and as the meeting drew to a close she remained in her chair, unmoving, as though held down by the lingering weight of the reprimand.

  As Larissa withdrew to the side of the room to discuss the morning’s musical program with Lorna Massie-Turnbull, some teachers rose from their seats, stretching with a somewhat post-coital contentment. Chandra and Elaine began conversing in hushed tones, making Ruth suspicious that they were talking about her. In the centre of the seating area, Michael, flanked by Henry and Sheila, was animatedly describing her methods for training her children not to speak to strangers. After a year or so of what she called total intimidation (“and we spare them no gruesome details!”), she and her husband arranged to have an acquaintance attempt an abduction in a crowded mall or grocery store. So far, only one of her children had failed this test, a lapse that, given the number of children involved, struck her as an acceptable record of success.

  Others joined their cluster, and the conversation turned back to the flasher. Ruth couldn’t hear them well now, but she thought she heard someone say, “Apparently not small at all!” She decided she must have been mistaken—Larissa was still in the room, after all—but then she noticed that Henry was laughing, though the sound could barely be classified as a laugh. It was very contained, almost reluctant, a rustle in his throat: an acknowledgment of humour more than a release of mirth.

  For the past month, rumours about Henry had been vigorously circulating. Some people claimed that he had left his University of Toronto job after a nervous breakdown. Others guessed that he’d had an affair with a student. What was known was that he had recently married Clayton Quincy, the mother of Arabella. Out of this lone fact, the teachers spun a simple but epic tale. Clayton Quincy was perhaps the only single mother in the Eliot world. And although the fact that she could well afford to send her daughter to the school separated her from the truly disadvantaged, that she had been widowed in Arabella’s infancy was compensation enough. Ruth herself had no concrete recollection of the woman from Arabella’s time in grade four, but someone recalled that she had once been a cellist. Sheila had extracted the nugget that they had been engaged on top of a mountain. That Henry held himself apart, offering scant information, only inflamed their interest; speculation was more arousing than knowledge anyway. A Byronic hero had happened into their own little school.

  Ruth tried to stay out of these conversations, not because she disliked gossip as a rule, but because she disapproved of the subject, resenting Henry’s unearned renown.

  Secretly, she preferred to dwell on the probable disgrace that had ejected him from the University of Toronto. This projection of the noble romance, love after widowhood, hit a nerve. She didn’t care whether he’d proposed on a mountaintop or the car ride home after a night in jail. There was nothing in his story that merited such fervour. Wasn’t there something a little weird about a fortyish bachelor anyway?

  People were beginning to wander away now. Conversation had turned to talk of dinner plans. The heavy door opened and closed, opened and closed, as one person after another left. Michael and Henry were still standing in the circle, alone now, and Michael was speaking in an intense whisper. Henry had leaned in and his head was cocked slightly, his ear bent towards her mouth. When Michael finished, with a troubled nod, Henry put a hand on her upper arm and left it there. Of course, Ruth thought. How tedious of him.

  The clock was moving towards five o’clock. Ruth closed her eyes for a moment of repose, and when she came to, everyone had left.

  Chapter Six

  WHEN AUDREY ROSE EARLY the next morning, she noticed her parents’ bedroom door ajar. No stirrings were audible in the darkness beyond the door, other than the measured rise and fall of Stevie’s snores. Although they didn’t speak of the practice, Audrey knew that Ruth sometimes left her door open in case Audrey became scared in the night, and Audrey always felt somewhat irritated when she encountered the sight in the morning, that portal flung wide, the invitation she had outgrown yet her mother persisted in believing she needed. Her parents’ realm was one she now preferred they keep private. No longer did she desire the barrier torn down, certain she was safer between them. She tiptoed over and closed the door noiselessly, then headed downstairs, grateful to have even a minor fraction of the morning to herself.

  Outside, the wind was blowing hard, with a hollow, haunted sound she found comforting. In the dusky hall, she paused before the mirror, detecting the outline of her reflection, but not the thing itself. She liked herself better this way, scarcely visible. As a girl, she had often pretended that she was the main character in certain of her favourite books: Sara in A Little Princess, Pauline Fossil in Ballet Shoes, Anne Frank, even. Now, she required something more than imagination to help her effect this transfiguration, and here in the dimness, it was easier to impose on her image a quality that was not otherwise there. The sensation was romantic, a fleeting escape, and she lingered before the mirror, letting her gaze drift in and out. Then she glanced down and remembered herself. Her biology textbook was peeking out of the top of her knapsack. There was a test that afternoon, and she had risen early to do some last-minute studying.

  In the kitchen, Audrey turned on only the pendant light over the kitchen table, and under its interrogation-room spotlight, she attempted to focus. Ploddingly, she took notes and made an effort to memorize key definitions. She had done poorly on several recent tests—not just math, but French and geography—and the pressure to perform decently this time, combined with the dullness of the material, made concentration a challenge. Valiantly, she tried to commit the chapters to memory, but how hard it was to do any of the real work related to Eliot.

  She began each day with the intent to study harder, better. But at the first sight of a textbook, her purpose wilted. Although Eliot was forever on her mind—she thought about it constantly, with the kind of possessed anger, the fluctuating love and hatred, of a romantic infatuation—she found it impossible to direct those musings along more productive
channels. The academic angle of school felt secondary to everything else. Certainly, getting back tests and essays on which she’d received marks in the sixties and seventies was humiliating, not to mention alarming—Ruth told of girls expelled for too many of such shoddy grades—but still she struggled to engage in the lessons themselves. The tumult of Eliot’s social realm seized all her attention. She felt unspeakably privileged to be at Eliot, so privileged, in fact, that the question of whether or not she actually liked the school was immaterial. Eliot was her chance to craft a new identity, but what was it that she wanted? To be athletic? Brainy? Popular? Yes, she knew that popularity was what she wanted, as impotently and potently as some people desired fame. It was a shameful ambition, for the embarrassingly low-minded. This was popularity in an abstract, amorphous sense. She thought only of the result, the golden glow of happiness and success. How she might get there was a mystery.

  The obstacle, she sensed, was nothing more terrible and specific—nothing less surmountable—than the very core of her. Did she even have what people thought of as a self? She intuited, from time to time, some obscure nucleus, but it was so elusive and mutable as to be totally useless. All her life, her desires had been Ruth’s desires for her. Her mother was like a trespasser in her fantasies, and when she imagined herself trying to achieve something, all she could picture was Ruth pushing her from behind, like a certain kind of parent willing her child up onstage at a beauty pageant. For so long, she had believed that she and her mother were on the same side. They had walked up that driveway and shared the sublime surge of admiration, that desire to be part of something remarkable. They had felt it together. Or so she had thought. Now she began to wonder whether the things she felt had ever really been her idea. How could she even know the difference between her mother’s wishes and her own? How was she to achieve anything at Eliot when she was confounded by so basic a notion as personal identity?

  The kitchen had grown light by now, and Audrey had robotically amassed three pages of notes, but she was more certain than ever that she was completely unprepared for the test. The sound of dog feet prancing across the hardwood, followed by the rushing of water in the bathroom, signalled the true start to the morning. And after a time, Ruth appeared on the stairs, dressed for school, but looking as though she had just staggered out of bed.