Part 26 (1/2)

Then Bet would come back from seeing the woman to the door and groan and say, ”Touch her face in the dark and you'd never know the difference from sandpaper.”

Queenie didn't seem interested in hearing about these things.

And there was not much time, anyway. Before we had finished our c.o.kes there were quick hard steps on the gravel and Mr.

Vorguilla came into the kitchen.

”So look who's here,” cried Queenie. She half got up, as if to touch him, but he veered towards the sink.

Her voice was full of such laughing surprise that I wondered if he had been told anything about my letter or the fact that I was on my way.

”It's Chrissy,” she said.

”So I see,” said Mr. Vorguilla. ”You must like hot weather, Chrissy, if you come to Toronto in the summer.”

”She 's going to look for a job,” said Queenie.

”And do you have some qualifications?” Mr. Vorguilla asked.

”Do you have qualifications for finding a job in Toronto?”

Queenie said, ”She 's got her Senior Matric.”

”Well, let's hope that's good enough,” said Mr. Vorguilla. He ran a gla.s.s of water and drank it all down, standing with his back to us. Exactly as he used to do when Mrs. Vorguilla and Queenie and I were sitting at the kitchen table in that other house, the Vorguillas' house next door. Mr. Vorguilla would come in from a practice somewhere, or he would be taking a break from teaching a piano lesson in the front room. At the sound of his steps Mrs. Vorguilla would have given us a warning smile. And we all looked down at our Scrabble letters, giving him the option of noticing us or not. Sometimes he didn't. The opening of the cupboard, the turning of the tap, the setting of the gla.s.s down on the counter were like a series of little explosions. As if he dared anybody to breathe while he was there.

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When he taught us music at school he was just the same. He came into the cla.s.sroom with the step of a man who had not a minute to lose and he rapped the pointer once and it was time to start. Up and down the aisles he strutted with his ears c.o.c.ked, his bulgy blue eyes alert, his expression tense and quarrelsome. At any moment he might stop by your desk to listen to your singing, to see if you were faking or out of tune. Then he 'd bring his head slowly down, his eyes bulging into yours and his hands working to shush the other voices, to bring you to your shame.

And the word was that he was just as much a dictator with his various choirs and glee clubs. Yet he was a favorite with his singers, particularly with ladies. They knit him things at Christmas. Socks and m.u.f.flers and mitts to keep him warm on his trips between school and school and choir and choir.

When Queenie had the run of the house, after Mrs. Vorguilla got too sick to manage, she fished out of a drawer a knitted object that she flapped in front of my face. It had arrived without the name of its donor.

I couldn't tell what it was.

”It's a peter-heater,” Queenie said. ”Mrs. Vorguilla said don't show it to him, he would just get mad. Don't you know what a peter-heater is?”

I said, ”Ugh.”

”It's just a joke.”

Both Queenie and Mr. Vorguilla had to go out to work in the evenings. Mr. Vorguilla played the piano in a restaurant. He wore a tuxedo. And Queenie had a job selling tickets in a movie theater. The theater was just a few blocks away, so I walked there with her. And when I saw her sitting in the ticket booth I understood that the makeup and the dyed puffed hair and the hoop earrings were not so strange after all. Queenie looked like some of the girls pa.s.sing on the street or going in to see the movie with their boyfriends. And she looked very much like - 252*

some of the girls portrayed in the posters that surrounded her.

She looked to be connected to the world of drama, of heated love affairs and dangers, that was being depicted inside on the screen.

She looked-in my father's words-as if she didn't have to take a back seat to anybody.

”Why don't you just wander around for a while?” she had said to me. But I felt conspicuous. I couldn't imagine sitting in a cafe drinking coffee and advertising to the world that I had nothing to do and no place to go. Or going into a store and trying on clothes that I had no hope of buying. I climbed the hill again, I waved h.e.l.lo to the Greek woman calling out her window. I let myself in with Queenie 's key.

I sat on the cot on the sunporch. There was nowhere to hang up the clothes I had brought, and I thought it might not be such a good idea to unpack, anyway. Mr. Vorguilla might not like to see any sign that I was staying.

I thought that Mr. Vorguilla's looks had changed, just as Queenie 's had. But his had not changed, as hers had, in the direction of what seemed to me a hard foreign glamour and sophistication. His hair, which had been reddish-gray, was now quite gray, and the expression of his face-always ready to flash with outrage at the possibility of disrespect or an inadequate performance or just at the fact of something in his house not being where it was supposed to be-seemed now to be one of more permanent grievance, as if some insult was being offered or bad behavior going unpunished all the time, in front of his eyes.

I got up and walked around the apartment. You can never get a good look at the places people live in while they are there.

The kitchen was the nicest room, though too dark. Queenie had ivy growing up around the window over the sink, and she had wooden spoons sticking up out of a pretty, handleless mug, just the way Mrs. Vorguilla used to have them. The living room had the piano in it, the same piano that had been in the other living room. There was one armchair and a bookshelf made with bricks and planks and a record player and a lot of records sitting - 253*

on the floor. No television. No walnut rocking chairs or tapestry curtains. Not even the floor lamp with the j.a.panese scenes on its parchment shade. Yet all these things had been moved to Toronto, on a snowy day. I had been home at lunchtime and had seen the moving truck. Bet couldn't keep away from the window in the front door. Finally she forgot all the dignity she usually liked to show to strangers and opened the door and yelled at the moving men. ”You go back to Toronto and tell him if he ever shows his face around here again he 'll wish he hadn't.”

The moving men waved cheerfully, as if they were used to scenes like this, and maybe they were. Moving furniture must expose you to a lot of ranting and raging.

But where had everything gone? Sold, I thought. It must have been sold. My father had said that it sounded as if Mr. Vorguilla was having a hard time getting going down in Toronto in his line of work. And Queenie had said something about ”getting behind.” She would never have written to my father if they hadn't gotten behind.

They must have sold the furniture before she wrote.

On the bookshelf I saw The Encyclopedia of Music, and The World Companion to Opera, and The Lives of the Great Composers.

Also the large, thin book with the beautiful cover-the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam-that Mrs. Vorguilla often had beside her couch.

There was another book with a similarly decorated cover whose exact t.i.tle I don't remember. Something in the t.i.tle made me think I might like it. The word ”flowered” or ”perfumed.” I opened it up, and I can remember well enough the first sentence I read.

”The young odalisques in the harim were also instructed in the exquisite use of their fingernails.”

I was not sure what an odalisque was, but the word ”harim”

(why not ”harem”?) gave me a clue. And I had to read on, to find out what they were taught to do with their fingernails. I read on and on, maybe for an hour, and then let the book fall to the - 254*

floor. I had feelings of excitement, and disgust, and disbelief.

Was this the sort of thing that really grown-up people took an interest in? Even the design on the cover, the pretty vines all curved and twisted, seemed slightly hostile and corrupt. I picked the book up to put it back in its place and it fell open to show the names on the flyleaf. Stan and Marigold Vorguilla. In a feminine handwriting. Stan and Marigold.

I thought of Mrs. Vorguilla's high white forehead and tight little gray-black curls. Her pearl-b.u.t.ton earrings and blouses that tied with a bow at the neck. She was taller by quite a bit than Mr.

Vorguilla and people thought that was why they did not go out together. But it was really because she got out of breath. She got out of breath walking upstairs, or hanging the clothes on the line.

And finally she got out of breath even sitting at the table playing Scrabble.

At first my father would not let us take any money for fetching her groceries or hanging up her was.h.i.+ng-he said it was only neighborly.

Bet said she thought she would try laying around and see if people would come and wait on her for nothing.

Then Mr. Vorguilla came over and negotiated for Queenie to go and work for them. Queenie wanted to go because she had failed her year at high school and didn't want to repeat it. At last Bet said all right, but told her she was not to do any nursing.

”If he 's too cheap to hire a nurse that's not your lookout.”

Queenie said that Mr. Vorguilla put out the pills every morning and gave Mrs. Vorguilla a sponge bath every evening.

He even tried to wash her sheets in the bathtub, as if there was not such a thing as a was.h.i.+ng machine in the house.