Lady Oracle (7 page)

After the recital Miss Flegg was congratulated on her priceless touch with the mothball. Even my mother appeared pleased. “You
did fine,” she said, but I still cried that night over my thwarted wings. I would never get a chance to use them now, since I had decided already that much as I loved dancing school I was not going back to it in the fall. It’s true I had received more individual attention than the others, but I wasn’t sure it was a kind I liked. Besides, who would think of marrying a mothball? A question my mother put to me often, later, in other forms.

A
t first, every time I repeated this story to myself, underneath my pillow or inside the refuge of the locked bathroom, it filled me with the same rage, helplessness and sense of betrayal I’d felt at the time. But gradually I came to see it as preposterous, especially when I thought about telling it to anyone else. Instead of denouncing my mother’s injustice, they would probably laugh at me. It’s hard to feel undiluted sympathy for an overweight seven-year-old stuffed into a mothball suit and forced to dance; the image is simply too ludicrous. But if I described myself as charming and skinny, they would find the whole thing pathetic and grossly unfair. I knew this even when I was ten. If Desdemona was fat who would care whether or not Othello strangled her? Why is it that the girls Nazis torture on the covers of the sleazier men’s magazines are always good-looking? The effect would be quite different if they were overweight. The men would find it hilarious instead of immoral or sexually titillating. However, plump unattractive women are just as likely to be tortured as thin ones. More so, in fact.

The year after the dancing school fiasco, when I was eight, we moved from the cramped duplex where we had been living to a slightly bigger house, a bungaloid box near a Loblaws supermarket. It wasn’t at all the sort of house my mother pictured as the proper dwelling place for her, but it was better than the fugitive quarters, the rundown apartments and the top floors of old houses she’d had to put up with earlier. This meant a new school and a new neighborhood, and my mother felt that the best way to get me adjusted, as she put it, was to enroll me in Brownies. It was characteristic of her that she didn’t choose the nearest Brownies, the one most of the girls in my class actually went to. Instead she picked one farther away, in a better neighborhood, attended by children from different schools entirely. Thus her ploy served none of her purposes. It didn’t help to acquaint me with the girls in my own school, the reverse in fact as I had to leave school early on Brownie Tuesdays in order to get there in time; and at the Brownies itself I was an alien from beyond the borders.

To get to this Brownies I had to take the streetcar, and to reach the streetcar stop I had to cross one of the many ravines that wound through the city. My mother was terrified of this ravine: it crawled with vines and weedy undergrowth, it was dense with willow trees and bushes, behind every one of which she pictured a lurking pervert, an old derelict rendered insane by rubbing alcohol, a child molester or worse. (Sometimes she called them “exhibitionists,” which always caused me to have second thoughts about the Canadian National Exhibition.) Every Tuesday she would give me a lecture about them before I set out for school, wearing, even that early in the morning, my brown uniform and the shoes which I had laboriously polished the evening before. “Don’t talk to any bad men,” she would say. “If one comes up to you in that ravine, run away as fast as you can.” She would deliver this warning during breakfast, in a voice that suggested that no matter how fast I ran I would never be able to get
away, I was doomed, and my oatmeal porridge would twist itself into a lump and sink to the bottom of my stomach. She never suggested what these men would look like or what they would do if they caught me, which left the field wide open to my imagination. And the way she put it made me somehow responsible, as if I myself had planted the bushes in the ravine and concealed the bad men behind them, as if, should I be caught, it would be my own doing.

To cross the ravine you had to walk down a long graveled hill, then across a wooden bridge, which was quite old. It slanted, and some of the planks had rotted away completely so you could see the ground a long way beneath. Then you had to go up a path on the other side, with the leaves and branches almost touching you, like evil vegetable fingers. I would run down the hill and across the bridge, heavily as a trundled barrel, but by the time I got to the upward climb I would be so out of breath I would have to walk. This was the worst part.

After I had gone a number of times by myself, my mother hit on a solution. Like most of her solutions, it was worse than the problem. She discovered that several other mothers on our side of the bridge had aspirations like her own; or at any rate they’d enrolled their own daughters in the same Brownies. I’d known this for some time but hadn’t told her, because these girls were older than I was, they were in higher grades, and they seemed formidable to me. Though we followed the same route to Brownies, I made sure that I walked either a safe distance ahead of them or a safe distance behind, and on the streetcar I kept at least four seats between us. But my mother was a great arranger at that period of her life, and she phoned up the other mothers, who knew about the bad men too, and simply arranged that I was to walk to Brownies with these girls. They made me nervous, but I did feel a little safer crossing the ravine with them.

The trouble was that despite the terrors involved in getting there, I worshiped Brownies, even more than I had worshiped dancing
classes. At Miss Flegg’s you were supposed to try to be better than everyone else, but at Brownies you were supposed to try to be the same, and I was beginning to find this idea quite attractive. So I liked wearing the same baggy uniform with its odd military beret and tie, learning the same ritual rhymes, handshakes and salutes, and chanting in unison with the others,

There was even some dancing involved. At the beginning of every session, when the slightly dilapidated papier-mâché toadstool which was the group fetish had been set in place on its grassy-green felt mat, and the gray-haired woman in the blue Guide uniform had said with a twinkle in her eye, “Hoot! Hoot!” the Brownies would hurtle from the four corners of the room, six at a time, and perform a whirling, frenzied dance, screeching out the words to their group songs as loud as they could. Mine was:

This was not strictly true: I didn’t help my mother. I wasn’t allowed to. On the few occasions I’d attempted it, the results had not pleased her. The only way I could have helped her to her satisfaction would have been to change into someone else, but I didn’t know this yet. My mother didn’t approve of my free-form style of making beds, nor of the crashes and fragments when I dried the dishes. She didn’t like scraping charcoal off the bottoms of pots when I tried to cook (“a cooked dessert” was one Brownie test requirement), or having to reset the table after I’d done it backwards. At first I tried to surprise her with sudden Good Turns, as suggested in the
Brownie handbook. One Sunday I brought her breakfast in bed on a tray, tripped, and covered her with wet cornflakes. I polished her good navy-blue suede shoes with black boot polish. And once I carried out the garbage can, which was too heavy for me, and tipped it down the back steps. She wasn’t a very patient woman; she told me quite soon that she would rather do things right herself the first time than have to do them over again for me. She used the word “clumsy,” which made me cry; but I was excused from household chores, which I saw as an advantage only much later. I sang out the words unflinchingly though, as I stomped around the toadstool in clouds of church-basement dust, with a damp Gnome hand clutched in each of mine.

The lady who ran the pack was known as Brown Owl; owls, we were told, meant wisdom. I always remembered what she looked like: the dried-apple face, the silvery gray hair, the snapping blue eyes, quick to spot a patch of tarnish on the brass fairy pin or a dirty fingernail or a poorly tied shoelace. Unlike my mother, she was impartial and kind, and she gave points for good intentions. I was entranced by her. It was hard to believe that an adult, older than my mother even, would actually squat on the floor and say things like “Tu-whit, Tu-whoo” and “When Brownies make their fairy ring, They can magic everything!” Brown Owl acted as though she believed all this, and thought that we did too. This was the novelty: someone even more gullible than I was. Occasionally I felt sorry for her, because I knew how much pinching, shoving and nudging went on during Thinking Time and who made faces behind Brown Owl’s back when we were saying, “I promise to do my duty to God and the King and to help others every day, especially those at home.” Brown Owl had a younger sidekick known as Tawny Owl. Like vice-principals everywhere, she was less deceivable and less beloved.

The three girls with whom I crossed the ravine each Brownie day were called Elizabeth, Marlene and Lynne. They were ten, and
almost ready to join the Girl Guides; “flying up,” it was called if you had obtained your Golden Wings. Otherwise you had to walk up. Elizabeth was going to fly, no doubt about it: she was plastered with badges like a diplomat’s suitcase. Marlene probably would, and Lynne probably wouldn’t. Elizabeth was a Sixer and had two stripes on her arm to prove it. Marlene was a Pixie and I can’t remember what Lynne was. I admired Elizabeth and feared the other two, who competed for her attention in more or less sinister ways.

At first they tolerated me, on those long perilous walks to the streetcar stop. I had to walk a little behind, but that was a small enough price to pay for protection from the invisible bad men. That went on through September and October, while the leaves turned yellow and fell and were burned in the sidewalk fires that were not yet illegal, during roller skating and skipping, past knee socks and into long stockings and winter coats. The days became shorter, we walked home in the dark across the bridge, which was lit only by one feeble bulb at either end. When it began to snow we had to go into leggings, heavy lined pants that were pulled on over our skirts, causing them to bunch into the crotch, and held up by elastic shoulder straps. In those days girls were not allowed to wear slacks to school.

The memory of this darkness, this winter, the leggings, and the soft snow weighing down the branches of the willow trees in the ravine so that they made a bluish arch over the bridge, the white vista from its edge that should have been so beautiful, I associate with misery. Because by that time Elizabeth and her troop had discovered my secret: they had discovered how easy it was to make me cry. At our school young girls weren’t supposed to hit each other or fight or rub snow in each other’s faces, and they didn’t. During recess they stayed in the Girls’ Yard, where everything was whispering and conspiracy. Words were not a prelude to war but the war itself, a devious, subterranean war that was unending because there were no decisive
acts, no knockdown blows that could be delivered, no point at which you could say
I give in
. She who cried first was lost.

Elizabeth, Marlene and Lynne were in other grades or they would have found out about me sooner. I was a public sniveler still, at the age of eight; my feelings were easily hurt, despite my mother, who by this time was telling me sharply to act my age. She herself was flint-eyed, distinct, never wavery or moist; it was not until later that I was able to reduce her to tears, a triumph when I finally managed it.

Elizabeth was the leader of the Gnomes, and I was one of her five followers during those dusty Tuesdays of rituals and badges and the sewing on of buttons. It was over knots that I came to grief. We had mastered the reef, and Tawny Owl, who was the knot specialist, had decided we were ready for the clove hitch; so with her lanyard – from the end of which hung a splendid and enviable silver whistle – looped over a chairback, she was demonstrating. I was cross-eyed with concentration, I was watching so hard I didn’t see a thing, and when it came my turn to duplicate the magic feat the rope slipped through my fingers like spaghetti and I was left with nothing but a snarl. Tawny Owl did it again, for my benefit, but with no better results.

“Joan, you weren’t paying attention,” Tawny Owl said.

“But I
was”
I said earnestly.

Tawny Owl huffed up. Unlike Brown Owl, she knew about the things that went on behind her back, which made her suspicious. She took my protest for lippiness. “If you won’t cooperate, Gnomes, I’ll just have to go over and work with the Pixies. I’m sure they are more interested in learning.” And she marched off, taking her whistle with her. Of course I started oozing right away. I hated being falsely accused. I hated being accused accurately too, but injustice was worse.

Elizabeth narrowed her eyes. She was about to say something, but Brown Owl, ever alert, came trotting over and said brightly,
“Now, now, Joan, we don’t like to see unhappy faces at Brownies; we like to see cheerfulness. Remember, ‘Frowns and scowls make ugly things, Smiling gives them fairy wings.’ ” This only made me cry harder, and I had to be secluded in the cloakroom so as not to embarrass everyone until I had, as Brown Owl put it, got my Brownie smile back again. “You must learn to control yourself,” she said kindly, patting me on the beret as I heaved and choked. She didn’t know what a lot of territory this covered.

That blue-black evening, as we crunched our way home over the snow, Elizabeth paused under the last streetlight before the bridge and looked at the others. Then, without warning, they all took off down the hill in a flurry of hilarious giggles and disappeared into the darkness of the ravine before I knew what was happening, shouting back, “The bad man’s gonna getcha!” – abandoning me at the top of the hill to make the crossing by myself. First I called, then I ran after them, but they were too far ahead. I sniffled over the bridge, wiping my mucous nose on the backs of my mittens and glancing fearfully behind me, though of course no child molester or exposure artist in his right mind would have been abroad in near-zero weather. They would all have been lurking in railroad stations or the backs of churches, but I didn’t know this. I heaved my way up the final hill; they were waiting in ambush at the top.