Liberty Street (18 page)

Once she hits grade twelve, her mother asks, over and over again, in a panic that seems to have no effect on Frances, “What are you going to do next year? The time for university applications will be here before you know it.”

Frances says, over and over again, “It's my life, not yours.”

Just to get her mother off her back—to get university and doctors and lawyers out of her head—she tries once more to convince her to look into hairdressing school in Yellowhead, but her mother won't hear of it.

Her mother says, “Esme Sullivan did not leave you money to waste learning how to put curlers in people's hair.”

“Esme said I should do whatever I want,” Frances says. “You weren't there, but that's what she told me.”

One day Frances's father tires of the arguing and says that he doesn't want to hear another word.

“Let the girl make up her own mind,” he snaps at Alice. “You should know by now that she's going to anyway.”

“Thank you,” Frances says.

“Don't take that to mean I'm on your side,” her father says. “I'm just sick of hearing about it.”

The tone of his voice throws her for a loop. Up until now, she'd assumed that her father
was
on her side, or was at least ambivalent. His desertion is a bit of a blow.

The stomach aches Frances had frequently as a child come back, but she doesn't say anything. She misses a fair amount of school with what she says are headaches, and her mother accuses her of staying up too late watching TV and reading novels. “You're getting dark circles under your eyes,”
she tells her. Frances looks in the mirror and sees it's true. She's surprised to realize that she has apparently become as concerned with her future as her mother is. It has snuck up her. She starts buying concealer at the drugstore in town to cover the circles. She wonders if she's dying of some rare disease. Her mother takes her to an optometrist because of the headaches and it turns out she needs glasses.

She tells herself,
Something is bound to present itself
, but she's beginning to think that perhaps nothing will.

Then it does.

I
T
'
S A MYSTERY
to Frances what exactly catches the attention of Joe Fletcher. In the spring, when she's seventeen, not quite an adult but almost, she notices him looking at her when she goes into the parts dealership with her father. She has a book with her and sits in a chair by the window to read while she waits. Her father stands at the counter as usual while Joe leafs through the parts catalogue. She can hear them talking about the weather and seeding and, eventually, the tractor part her father needs and how much it will cost and whether a used one might be available somewhere.

At first, when Frances notices Joe Fletcher looking at her, she thinks he must be trying to figure out what she's reading. Then, immediately,
How ridiculous that he would be interested in my book
, and she knows that he's looking at her. There he goes again, talking about something in the parts book but looking at her, because she's a girl (almost a woman) and has a girl's body and is wearing shorts with her bare legs on display. She crosses her legs in what she hopes is an attractive way and pretends she doesn't see him looking.

Later, in front of the bathroom mirror, she wonders,
What is it that Joe Fletcher sees when he looks at me? What is it that men see
?

She tries to make an honest assessment of the flaws and assets of her face, as recommended by the teen magazine years ago, and she wonders if maybe Joe Fletcher likes her hair. She's always hated her red hair, but she seems to recall reading that men like it. She regrets her choice of glasses; they're too big, and she shouldn't have let them talk her into the grey frames when she'd wanted the pink. She turns sideways and looks at her profile—her breasts are too large, and she wishes she could hide them somehow. She remembers the teen magazine telling her she should stand in front of the mirror naked and analyze her body for the purpose of “enhancing” her assets, and so she strips down and gives her body (or at least as much of it as she can see in the bathroom mirror) a good look—only she isn't thinking about what clothes to wear, she's wondering what Joe Fletcher might think if he were to see her naked. She feels her temperature rising, as though she's flushed with fever, and she has the thought that someday a man will see her naked and touch her body (
everywhere
!) and she quickly steps back into her clothes.

There's a knock on the bathroom door. Her mother.

“What are you doing? You've been in there for an hour.”

“I'm minding my own business,” Frances says, trying not to sound guilty. She straightens her clothing and gives the bathroom to her mother.

It's perplexing for Frances to realize that she likes having caught Joe Fletcher staring at her. Is it possible that he's as old as her father? He likely has a wife somewhere, a bunch of kids. Still, a couple of times at lunch hour she
walks from the school to the dealership and pretends to be looking for her father. The first time, Joe is there and she brazenly goes to the counter and asks, “Has my dad been in? Just wondering.”

Joe shakes his head and then Frances isn't sure what to do or say next. She finally says, “If you do see him, tell him I'm looking for him.”

Then she turns and walks back out again, enjoying the fact that she can feel Joe's eyes watching her walk. She's pleased with herself and wonders if what she's done could be called flirting.

The next time she goes in on the pretext of looking for her father, Joe isn't there. The owner's wife, Mrs. Borsa, is standing at the parts counter with the till drawer open.

Mrs. Borsa closes the drawer and says, looking at Frances over her reading glasses, “Can I help you?”

“No, that's okay,” Frances says.

“You must have come in here for some reason.”

Frances knows her face is turning red. Mrs. Borsa can tell she's up to something. Then Joe comes in from the warehouse out back, wiping oil off his hands, and Mrs. Borsa says, “Joe, this girl here—Basie Moon's daughter—just came into the shop for no good reason. What do you make of that?” She says it as though she suspects Frances of being up to some girl-flirting trick.

“I'm looking for my dad,” Frances manages to say. “He comes here sometimes, and he needs me to read for him.”

“Haven't seen him today,” Joe says.

“Well,” Mrs. Borsa says, “I knew there had to be a reason. High school girls don't normally come here and then blush to beat sixty when you ask them what they want.”

Frances turns and leaves the shop as quickly as she can. This time she doesn't care whether Joe's eyes follow her or not. All she can think is that Mrs. Borsa is a first-class old bitch. How did she know that Frances had come in to show herself off for Joe?

But how could she know? Unless Joe himself knows—can tell what Frances is up to—and has said something, but that's not likely. Joe barely talks, that's what her father says about him, he's a man of few words, and besides, all Frances had done was ask for her father. Anyway, Frances thinks, she wasn't really flirting
with Joe
, if that's what the old bag thought. She was just practising.

She crosses the street and goes into the grocery store to buy a Coke, and when she comes out she sees that Joe is standing in front of the dealership smoking a cigarette. He gives her a nod. (
Was she just imagining that?
) She pretends not to see him and hurries back to school.

When she gets home later, Frances says to her mother, “Were you and Dad in town today?”

“No, why?”

“I thought I saw Dad in the parts shop at noon, and when I went in, Mrs. Borsa was really rude.”

“She can be that way. I hope you were polite all the same. We do business there.”

“Next time I see her, I won't be polite. Maybe I'll take one of those courses—bookkeeping, or whatever it's called—and come back and get
her
job. See how she likes that.”

“Her husband owns the business, so I hardly think that will happen. And bookkeeping is a menial job, not much better than hairdressing.”

“Oh, stop it,” Frances says.

A few days later, on a Saturday, her father wants her to go to the dealership with him and she says no.

“No?” he asks. “Why not?”

“I'm sick of going in there,” Frances says. “I'm never needed anyway.”

“I need your driving,” he says. “A blind man relies on his chauffeur.”

She agrees to drive him to town, but she's not going in with him. She'll stay close, she says, in case he needs her for something.

On the way into town, Basie tells Frances that he has a new joke. “What does a turkey say when he sees a blind man with an axe?”

“Moo,” Frances says. “That's as old as the hills.”

She parks the truck and then goes into the drugstore while her father takes care of his business at the dealership. She sees a sign on the counter advertising an ear-piercing sale—the piercing is free if you buy the earrings—and right then and there she decides to do it, get her ears pierced. The pharmacist's wife is the piercer, and she asks Frances if she has her parents' permission and Frances lies and says she doesn't need her parents' permission because she's eighteen. The pharmacist's wife freezes Frances's earlobes with ice cubes and sticks a needle through, and then she inserts little gold sleepers and tells her to turn them several times a day and apply rubbing alcohol to prevent infection.

Because it's a slow day in the drugstore, the pharmacist's wife—who is the closest thing the town has to a cosmetologist—offers to make up Frances's eyes with liner and shadow and mascara, just for fun. Frances lets her and is pleased with the new look. Even with her glasses on, her eyes look
better. She picks out some pink lipstick (pale pink, Baby Blush, because of her hair) and puts it on. She's wearing a new brown-and-green-striped T-shirt that she'd ordered from the Eaton's catalogue, and the whole effect is, she thinks, very stylish. She wonders if she should grow her hair long, if there's any chance she could tame the curls so she wouldn't look like a rag doll.

The ice cube freezing wears off and Frances's earlobes begin to burn. She pays for the earrings, lipstick, and eye makeup, along with a bottle of rubbing alcohol and also a Popsicle because her ears are so hot she needs something to cool herself down. The pharmacist's wife has her write her name on a piece of paper for a draw for an LP, and Frances drops it in a huge pickle jar on the counter.

When she gets outside, she doesn't want to eat the Popsicle in case it ruins her lipstick, so she puts it in the truck, which is parked in the shade. Then she waltzes into the dealership to show off her new self and collect her father, hoping that Mrs. Borsa will be there so she can ignore her. She sticks her hair behind her ears so her earrings will show up better.

Joe is inside but not her father.

“Oh,” she says. “Where's my dad?” She hates the way that sounds, as if she's twelve years old instead of seventeen.

“He left,” Joe says. “Didn't say where he was going.” Frances is sure he's noticing the earrings and makeup. She straightens her back, showing herself off, something she would never, ever do in front of the boys at school.

“Well,” she says, “if he comes back tell him I'm at—” Where, where should she go? Where would she sound more grown-up? “Tell him his limousine is leaving in fifteen minutes. I don't have all day to wait around.”

And Joe laughs. “I'll tell him that,” he says.

“Okay, then,” she says, pleased with herself, pleased that Joe Fletcher
appreciated
her sass, and she tries to look
sassy
as she steps back outside and lets the screen door to the dealership swing closed after her.

She finds her Popsicle melted all over the seat of the truck, right where her father will have to sit, no hiding it. She looks under the seat and in the truck box for something to clean it with but comes up empty-handed. Then her father comes along and jumps into the truck before she can stop him, and he sits right in the melted Popsicle. He's all for going into the dealership to ask Joe for water and a rag, but she can just hear her father telling Joe that she'd melted her Popsicle as though she were a child. She convinces him it can wait until they get home.

“And I'm the driver,” she says, “so I get to decide.”

“You're getting bossy in your old age,” he says, but he goes along. He throws the sticky wrapper on the floor and avoids the mess on the seat as best he can.

“Joe Fletcher's wife must talk enough for the both of them,” Frances says as she starts the truck.

“I don't think he has a wife,” her father says, squeezing himself up against the door.

When they get home, her mother, predictably, has a fit about the earrings and the eye makeup, but then she says, “Well, you're almost an adult, so I guess I can't stop you. Not that I ever could.”

Within a week, one of Frances's earlobes is so infected she can hardly stand it. It feels as though red ants are biting. She's in the bathroom cleaning both lobes with alcohol when her mother comes in, has a look, and says, “I think you're going to have to take those out and let the holes grow over.”

“Never,” Frances says. Her pierced ears represent the new Frances. The one who wears makeup and knows how to get grown men like Joe Fletcher to look at her.

When she's done cleaning her ears for the umpteenth time that day, she slumps in a living room chair, miserable with the fear that her mother might be right and she'll have to let her ears grow over, and there's Patsy Cline looking at her from an album cover, and she puts the album on the record player and listens to it.

Poor Patsy Cline. Her future: nothing, because she's long dead.