The Romantic (3 page)

Nothing. There’s nothing.

No. There’s a boy, tightrope walking along the peaked stones that form the top of the wall. Shoulder-length dark hair, bare muscled chest shining like tin. A tall, lean boy with a white cloth in one hand and a beer bottle in the other. When he gets to where I am he jumps, and that’s how I know him, by the graceful landing.

“So it
was
you,” he says. The same soft, hoarse voice, only deeper. He comes and stands in front of me. The cloth is a T-shirt. At my eye level a silver belt buckle catches the light.

I swoon.

He grabs my shoulder. “Are you all right?”

I nod.

“Are you sure?”

“I just got a bit dizzy.”

He must think I’m drunk or stoned.

“Can you stand?”

“Why?”

“I want to show you something.”

I come to my feet, dropping the lilac, and he tucks the T-shirt into his belt and takes my hand.

We go over to the wall. “There,” he says, releasing me to point.

Up and down the stones, in the chinks, are dozens of green embers.

“What are they?”

“Glowworms. Look at them all.”

“Glow worms,” I say, remembering that they are the larvae of fireflies and that he showed them to me once before, down in the ravine. I say,“They’re like little Christmas lights.”

He twists around, his expression young and happy, and in his eyes I see him. There he is. He blinks and seems suddenly shy.

“I spotted you on the lawn,” he says. “The back of you. I wasn’t certain. But the walk. I thought, ‘I know that walk.’”

I can’t look at him. I look at his cowboy boots, his bell-bottomed blue jeans, the long slice of his thigh. In my mind, I’d kept him boyish, or at least not so tall. Handsome, of course, but not this handsome. I feel shaky, on the verge of tears. I move back to the bench and sit. “What are you doing here?” I say.

“The hostess is a friend of a friend’s.”

He has friends.

“How about you?” he asks.

“What are you doing
in Toronto?”

“Oh.” He sits beside me. “My dad flew out on business. I tagged along.”

His dad. I imagine him bent over and feeble by now. When they left Greenwoods, Mrs. Richter said it was because the Vancouver climate would be better for Mr. Richter’s rheumatism.

“How is he?” I ask.

“Fine. Working too hard.”

Tears start streaming down my face.

“Hey.” He touches my shoulder. “Are you crying?”

“I guess.”

“What’s the matter?”

“It’s just that …”

“What?”

He offers me his T-shirt and I take it and wipe my eyes. “It’s just that I never thought I’d see you again.”

He glances at me and then down. He grips the bottle in his lap.

“I can’t believe it,” I say.

“It’s been a long time,” he says.

“Four years.”

He takes a sip of his beer.

“Why didn’t you ever write? I wrote you all those letters and you never once wrote back.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“But why didn’t you?”

“I’m not …” He sighs.

“What?”

“I’m not good at writing letters.”

He looks so tormented that I soften and say,“Oh, well, you’re here now. Out of thin air.” I take his hand and lift it. “Abel Richter. In the flesh.”

He sets his beer on the grass and brings both of our hands closer to the lamp. His hands are big, his long fingers cool from the bottle. My fingers are thin and bony but I know he likes them because he said so once, he said I had the hands of a tarsier, which is a small monkey. Another time, in the same fascinated voice, he said my hair was like milkweed tuft.

Frowning, very intent, he runs a finger over the scar on my thumb. All the nerves in my body are flocked there.

“How’d you get that?” he says.

“Slicing onions.” Without even thinking, I say,“I still love you.”

The finger halts. We look at each other. And then we’re kissing.

It’s a long, un frenzied kiss. I never knew you could kiss like this, holding each other so lightly, nothing moving except for your mouths. When it’s over, I say,“We love each other. We never stopped.”

He nods.

“We never stopped.” I stroke his hair, feeling an immense tenderness.

He reaches for the bottle. “Want some?”

“No, thanks.”

I nestle against his chest. Behind us, at the party, people sing along to “All You Need Is Love.” Down here, the ringing of crickets rises like an electric mist I can hardly distinguish from the quivering of my own body. I feel as if I have been lifted out of my life. Only a few hours ago I was sad and unlucky; now I’m one of the lucky ones. The miracle of him being here washes over me like a spell, like
voices murmuring into an anxious dream,“You’re all right, you’re all right.” In a kind of trance, feeling immune now to anything but happiness, I start unbuttoning my blouse.

“What are you doing?” he says quietly.

“Taking off my clothes.”

I stand and remove the blouse and drape it over the back of the bench. “I want us to be together,” I say. I reach around and unhook my bra and let it fall on the grass. I am very serene, but excited, too. I know what he sees. Me fearlessly undressing. How white I am, the breeze off the water raising goosebumps on my skin.

He stands and faces me. He looks almost frightened. Hasn’t he done this before either? “You’re so pretty,” he says, as if he wishes I weren’t.

Nearer the creek, away from the light, we lie on the grass. Just before he enters me I am seized by a bursting feeling and I cry out, startled, then lose myself as the feeling branches down my legs in delicious, subsiding jolts. The pain of penetration is like a hundred tiny bones snapping, but it lasts only seconds.

“Are you all right?” he gasps. “Is this okay?”

Afterwards, after we have our clothes on, we smoke a joint. Holding our shoes, we walk across the creek and climb the bank onto a neighbouring lawn where we lie down and watch the sky, our old occupation. There it all is: the Milky Way, the North Star, the Little Dipper. He says Polaris, Cassiopeia, Ursa Major and Minor, Hercules, names he’d taught me and I’d forgotten.

What I see, though, isn’t constellations, but a code, like Braille, all the stars positioned so as to tell us something. I
ask him what he thinks it is and he says it’s,“Look. Look up.” Only that. He rests a hand on my belly. I pull him toward me.

And then Tim Todd is hovering over us with his white spaceship face. He’s the one who, driving me home, says,“How do you know you’re not knocked up?”

Greenwoods takes its name from the oak and maple forests that the developers have bulldozed, and like any other Canadian subdivision, it has the bungalows, the wide looping streets, the young housewives with their herds of children. As an only child I am regarded as strange and spoiled, and while I can’t argue with strange, the presumption that I get whatever I want couldn’t be more wrong. All I get are clothes. Which I never wanted.

Clothes
is my word. My mother rarely uses it, she’s more specific—she says “your tunic,” “your organdie,” “your pink cotton empire.” Speaking of my clothes all together she says “wardrobe”—“Let’s consult your wardrobe.” Which we do, daily. We fret over it, tend to it, expand it, weed it out.

It contains at least twenty outfits, one for every school day in a month. Certain outfits are the child’s version of the lady’s. I have the leopard-patterned skirt and jacket, my mother has the leopard-patterned coat and Juliette hat. How do we afford this? My father isn’t a full-fledged lawyer, he’s only a law clerk, and yet he doesn’t seem to worry about money. Where we get the clothes I know well enough. From the Eaton’s catalogue, which guarantees our satisfaction. If something fails in the tiniest detail, such as a slight swerve in a line of stitches, back the outfit goes. The
ease of these transactions strikes my mother as hilarious and unsound. She’ll wear a dress for an entire day and then return it the next day to “those suckers.”

My heart sags when the Eaton’s truck pulls up and the driver climbs out and starts unloading. To spend an entire morning or afternoon watching my mother pose before her full-length mirror while she leans against the door frame or cha-chas with one hand on her stomach would be entertaining if I didn’t know that my turn would come next. Never do I feel more like a scrawny genetic aberration than when I slowly twirl before my raving beauty of a mother while she laughs at how awful I look. “Like a pinhead!” Or,“Like Zazu Pitts!” Whoever
she
is.

Some of the girls at school get their clothes from Eaton’s as well, which I realize when Julie MacVicker shows up in a reversible tartan kilt exactly like mine, but their mothers never go so far as to buy the matching blouse and jacket, the beret, the gloves. And nobody owns the volume of outfits I do. In my class, girls tend to wear the same dress at least twice a week. Girls with older sisters wear hand-me-downs. Small wonder I gall them.

Well, I don’t, I am too unremarkable; it’s my wardrobe that gets them worked up. And as soon as they hear about my mother’s disappearance it’s my wardrobe they seek to comfort. They pat my angora bolero sweater, my rabbit-fur coat, they beg me to wear my sailor dress and my umbrella-patterned flare skirt. A big bossy redhead named Maureen Hellier tells me a vote has been taken and I am now allowed to join a club she formed called the Smart Set Club, whose members do nothing except leaf through catalogues and
magazines, cut out pictures of the models and paste the pictures into scrapbooks. At the Thursday-afternoon meetings, I pretend to gush over the child models my mother must have wished I looked like, the woman models she
does
look like. In the most recent Eaton’s catalogue some of the models have on clothes I own, as Maureen never fails to notice. The captions, which she reads out loud, are especially excruciating for how they include descriptions of the outfit’s ideal wearer: “Swirl-skirted charmer to suit
a pert little miss.”
“Glamour cardigan for
the young sophisticate.”

“Oh, Louise!” she cries. “Cut her out!”

While I still have a mother, my clothes mark me for a show-off and imposter. “Miss La-di-da,” Maureen says when I come to school wearing something new. The day I turn up in a lime-green cardigan that has a pompom drawstring collar and she says everybody knows only redheads are supposed to wear lime green, I take the cardigan off and hand it to her. “Go ahead,” I say. “It’s too big for me anyway.”

She considers, then accepts, holding it by one pompom. “It’s drenched in her germs,” she informs the other girls. She carries it to a puddle and lets it drop.

I may as well leave it there. I know I’ll never wear it again. My mother sends all our clothes, aside from underwear, socks and pyjamas, to the cleaners; anything too soiled for the cleaners she tears into rags or throws out. Easy come, easy go, and lucky me I’m not slapped when I spill grape juice on a white dress, but I am unsettled by how smoothly she slides from worship to indifference. A nice new sweater,
that’s what you live for. The same sweater with a stain on it never existed.

When I show her the muddied lime-green sweater, she stuffs it in the metal wastepaper basket and sets a match to it. “See how it burns?” she says. “Sizzling like hair? There’s nylon in the weave, I knew there was. I knew that pure-virgin-wool label was crap.”

The next day, in front of Maureen, I deliberately smear my pink chenille jacket with grease from a bicycle chain.

‘You’re a mental case!” Maureen cries, but at least I have graduated from contemptible to alarming.

After that I occasionally poke a pencil through a skirt, pour finger paint on velvet. My mother is irritated only by what seems to be the onset of a clumsiness from which I, the daughter of a woman whose many beauty-queen trophies include two for comportment, should be exempt. The carnage to my wardrobe she almost welcomes, since it necessitates buying the replacements. Here, of course, is the catch. Every time I ruin something (and if you ruin a blouse, you might as well throw out the matching skirt) I have to try on a half-dozen new outfits before she decides on the one that doesn’t make me look like a pinhead.

What are these clothes for? My mother’s, I mean. She leaves the house only when she has to, to shop for groceries, get her hair done, occasionally to take me to the dentist’s or doctor’s. Unlike everybody else’s mother she doesn’t attend church, she isn’t a member of any committee or club. Her friend, Phyllis Bendy, always comes to
our
house for coffee.
My mother is a woman who goes nowhere, both in the sense of being a homebody and then, when she packs her bags and leaves, of heading off to a place so undiscoverable it may as well not exist.

But the clothes don’t accompany her. Even the police detective is flabbergasted by what she abandons—“Is that real mink?” She takes her jewellery, her beauty-queen crowns and trophies (which, alone, must fill one suitcase), a framed picture of her father as a young man in his soldier’s uniform (chosen over the photograph of me as a baby that hung next to it) and the white satin bedsheets. It’s my father’s conviction that she has been enticed away by a “smooth-talker,” “a fancy Dan lady’s man.” And yet how can this be? When I am grilled for possible candidates, I can only come up with the Eaton’s delivery man and Mr. LaPierre, whose first name is Daniel and who kisses her neck at our charades parties.

Every year up until the year my mother disappears, on the Saturday night nearest to January eighteenth, we invite people to our house to play charades. These people aren’t neighbours or friends (my mother hates our neighbours, and she has only the one friend), they are the men my father works with and their wives, and January eighteenth is no monumental date unless you’re my father and then you celebrate the birthday of Peter Mark Roget, the compiler of the first thesaurus. My father loves synonyms. He himself can hardly ever say “love” without adding “cherish” or “adore” but his delivery tends to be self-mocking and theatrical, he makes people laugh. My mother laughs when the words lean toward the racy or ridiculous. Now
and then she surprises us with her own string of synonyms, a sarcastic burst. I remember her cooking eggs one morning, and my father asking,“Are they scrambled?” and her slapping his portion onto a plate and saying,“No, as a matter of fact, they’re mixed up, confused, rattled,” and so on, all the way to “stark raving mad,” by which time my father looked petrified.