The Eliot Girls (7 page)

“I can't explain,” she said.

“What's to explain?” Ruth asked. “Just tell me what happened.”

Audrey let her eyes go in and out of focus on the page of
Oedipus rex
. “No one talked to me,” she said at last.

“Not one person?”

“I guess the other new girl.”

“Well, that's not no one.”

“You haven't seen her.”

“Is she ugly?”

“No, not exactly. It's hard to explain.”

“Well, don't be so picky! You're making up your mind too quickly. About everything. More people will talk to you. That I can guarantee.”

The optimism in Ruth's face only made Audrey feel more glum. She wanted to be happy, to retain her faith in that future whose details were so hazy as to constitute little more than a romantic vapour, but she supposed that she had also always seen her unhappiness as essential, even protective. To exist in a mild state of gloom was to stave off a deeper melancholia. How awful it was to hope for too much.

“Arriving in grade ten, I think it's just…it's too late for me,” Audrey said.

Ruth took a handful of Audrey's hair and shook her head playfully. “Listen to your mother! Kate Gibson didn't start until grade nine. Would I have sent you to Eliot if it hadn't been the best thing for you?”

Audrey stared intently at the diagonals on her duvet, willing the tears away. Over the blanket, Ruth put a hand on Audrey's knee and looked away, as though reluctant to witness such a moment. “I promise you,” Ruth said. “You're going to love Eliot so much, you'll forget you ever felt this way.”

But for the first time, Audrey's future was not a pretty delusion, not a utopia peopled according to her brightest thoughts, but rather a reality standing darkly in front of her. And it no longer mattered what Ruth had to say about it.

 

 

Cha
p
ter
Fi
ve

THE FOLLOWING WEEKS AT
Eliot unfolded for Audrey in much the same way as the first day. Like a dying watch, she kept falling out of time: lagging imperceptibly, then noticeably. All of a sudden, like a watch reset, she would land back in the present, dazed by the sudden travel, but within minutes she was lagging again, the battery still failing. Normalcy was descending—the perpetual excitement of the girls had softened, the rigours of study asserted themselves—but for Audrey there was little pleasure in the warm tedium of routine. Each day was a locked vault. She could find no way to get inside.

Life at Eliot demanded a new language. It was this, perhaps, more than anything, that made Audrey certain her exile would be an unchanging condition. Sometimes she could barely understand what was being said around her. This defiant new syntax—built on inside jokes and scornful hyperbole, the unrelenting rhythms of mockery—was so puzzling that she thought it must be no less hard to decipher than Mandarin. Audrey tried to smile good-naturedly as the words flew past her. She hoped to give the impression of a kind of den mother affection, as though her exclusion were a choice she had made, stemming from maturity rather than cluelessness. At the most basic level were the popular words—
la toilette
for bathroom;
danke schön
for thank you; “rad,” used ironically, as a throwback to the eighties; “scruff,” invented by the most popular girl in the class, Arabella Quincy, to convey a messy, unattractive feeling.

Even more mystifying than the vogue words was everything that wasn't expressed directly, the cryptic outcries and varieties of laughter. Audrey was often certain, when she heard a muffled snicker coming from behind her, that she was the subject of mockery—perhaps there was something in her hair, or she had mispronounced a word when called on by a teacher, or she had offended in some way far more abstract and therefore beyond the bounds of correction.

On a rainy Monday morning, the first in October, Audrey half-ran across the quad and took her seat in the chapel. As she squeezed the droplets of water from the ends of her hair, all the talk around her was of the second period math quiz, the first test of the year. Most of the girls claimed to be certain they would fail and were desperately quizzing each other in the hopes of gleaning some key piece of last-minute information. A girl named Vanessa Blair had been brought to the verge of weeping by her faith in her own inadequacy. The girls sitting on either side of her put their arms around her and murmured assurance, but she was inconsolable.

Audrey was trying to ignore all of it. She knew she would do abominably on the test—there was no doubt, no encouraging margin of uncertainty. Every week, she fell further behind. All she wanted now was quiet. The chapel was her favourite part of the school. Although its uses were mainly secular—the Anglican prayers and hymns during assembly were ceremonial flourishes rather than expressions of religious feeling—it resembled a miniature Gothic church and felt to her like the most sacred place she had ever been. During assembly, she was as relaxed as she ever got at Eliot. She was free, finally, to be just a spectator. Observation had never struck her as a particularly debasing activity until recently. Everywhere the class went, she watched from the fringes, feeling like a salivating voyeur peering into a bedroom window. In chapel, though, nothing was expected of her. There were no conversations she should be having, no answers she should know. It was the only place where she was able to recapture her old reverence for Eliot, the memory of the magic it had once held.

When the chapel was nearly full, everyone seated, there were some moments of waiting during which something seemed to be happening offstage, and then the person who bounded out was not Ms. McAllister, but Ms. Massie-Turnbull. For some minutes she fussed with the microphone until finally, unable to adjust it adequately, she withdrew to the darkened side of the chapel, then reappeared carrying a stool, which she clambered onto and kneeled atop, finally at the microphone's height. Ruth had told Audrey that Ms. Massie-Turnbull had been a gifted jazz singer in her youth, a story that summoned a vixenish sophisticate difficult to reconcile with the woman who perched before the assembly now, so tiny she might have been mistaken from behind for a child, dressed in a pink sweater emblazoned with a needlepoint white cat, one of whose button eyes dangled from a loose thread.

Ms. Massie-Turnbull now clasped her hands in delight and embarked on her yearly explanation of the morning music program. She was so happy to see everyone, she said. When she looked at the Eliot girls, she couldn't help seeing not just their faces, but the multitude of beautiful voices. Summertime was lovely but left her at a bit of a loose end. Being a choir mistress with no choir to direct, she submitted, was a bit like being a prime minister without a country, a policeman without criminals, a chauffeur with no passengers, forced to drive the limo around and around in aimless circles in a parking lot. A single voice was all well and good—she hoped they had kept their voices exercised during the humid summer months—but a choir? A choir was a testament to unity and individualism, to formality and collaboration. True fellowship was found through the process of harmonizing, the soprano melody (“But we don't let them get all the glory,” she laughed) strengthened by the complementary alto.

As everyone knew, she continued, a key part of the school's music program was the musical prelude performed by a student as everyone arrived in the chapel for assembly. Every year, she made it her business to ferret out the students who took private piano lessons and recruit them to perform a piece before chapel each morning. This was not, Ruth had already warned Audrey, a job with status. Performances tended to consist of Royal Conservatory minuets and sonatinas played stiffly, with all the joy of detention attendance. The extracurricular obligation was strong, however, and performers were rewarded with points for their school houses if they played several times a month. There were four houses in all—Balmoral, Chiswick, Harewood, and Leighton—and the one that had amassed the most points by the end of the year won the house cup. At Eliot, the pressure to serve the collective was fierce, stronger than the warring impulse to serve the self, and in convincing Ms. McAllister to allot three points per performance, Ms. Massie-Turnbull revealed in herself a streak of savvy that belied her seemingly childlike enthusiasm.

Her fingers fluttered nervously as she announced that this year, there was to be an exciting addition to Eliot's musical landscape. She didn't want to say too much—she would let the music speak for itself—but she knew that the students would be as enraptured as she was by what they were about to witness.

It was then that Seeta Prasad strode out onto the platform, carrying a guitar case. When she reached Ms. Massie-Turnbull, she set the case, which was covered in peace symbols and stickers bearing political messages such as “My Canada Includes Quebec,” on the ground and hiked up her knee socks, while Ms. Massie-Turnbull placed the stool in front of her. As Seeta climbed onto the stool and tuned her guitar, Ms. Massie-Turnbull retreated to the side of the platform, where she stood wringing her hands like a mother at a child's piano recital. In her face was an illumination like none the students had ever quite seen: it was hope allowed finally to admit its imagined zenith, the seizing of potential, fantasies of a quest undertaken and followed to its golden climax. A guitar act on the chapel platform. Instead of stilted classical notes, a fevered, though tasteful, rock performance. An unprecedented rejuvenation of the morning musical scene.

Seeta smiled fondly at her audience and said that before she began, she'd like to offer a few words about what the guitar had meant to her life.

“I think Jimmy Page summed it up as only he could,” she said. “He said, ‘I always thought the good thing about the guitar was that they didn't teach it in school.'” She winked in the direction of the teachers. “No offence, Ms. McAllister.”

Audrey felt a bolt of terror bound through her. Indeed, if all in the grade ten class were not initially appalled by the sight of Seeta onstage, even the most open-minded among them felt their goodwill falter when Seeta began to discuss her spiritual journey with her guitar. A physical tension spread along the row, a shift towards the vigilance of perfect posture, as Seeta bowed her head in a private smile and went on to describe her soul's awakening to the paradise that lay in the strings of an instrument, her soul's belief in the heaven-bound supremacy of guitar music, her soul's search for the musical destiny that was a world unto itself, the generally unshakable marriage of guitar to soul.

She told of how her father presented her with her first guitar on her twelfth birthday, how he had said, “Never abuse it, Seeta. It will be your friend in good times and bad.” And when she described how her father left her alone, then, in her bedroom, the speech enveloped the entire class in her shame, as she recounted in luxurious detail her fingers' exploration of her first, very own guitar.

“My fingers were shaking because I couldn't believe what was finally happening to me. I wanted to go slowly, but another part of me just wanted to go ahead and do it, to pick it up and give it all I had. But I didn't know what I was doing, so I just traced my finger along the neck. I was so nervous, touching the nut, it was like I was afraid I was going to press too hard and break it, but then I gained courage because it felt so right. I got to know every ridge and crease as I moved down to the body and held its curves in my hands. It was like nothing I had ever experienced. My father came back half an hour later and I was still running my fingers all over the neck and the body, and he said, ‘What are you waiting for? It's not going to hurt.'”

Recalling this, she laughed.

“And it didn't hurt either, once I got going. Well, actually, it did hurt my fingers a little. But practice made it easier, until I finally felt I knew what I was doing. I want to share some of that with you, my new friends.”

Her selection of song—Simon and Garfunkel's “Feelin' Groovy”—did not help matters. Nor did it help matters that she was highly musical to the point of becoming oblivious to her surroundings. Hers wasn't a voice that sought to impress with power. It seemed almost to be a natural extension of her speaking voice. In its higher registers, rather than becoming shrill, it opened up, pure and pretty. With earnest ardour and a lighthearted tossing of her head, Seeta made her way through “Feelin' Groovy.” Every now and then, she would stop strumming so that she could snap her fingers and jiggle her head amiably. At one point during the song, she stopped playing altogether and incited her schoolmates to
Get up and feel it, feel the music,
as she clapped a beat with both arms above her head. When she came to the line “I'm dappled and drowsy and ready to sleep,” she enacted with lilting eyelids and a coy smile what it might look like to be dappled and drowsy. And when she sang, “Life, I love you,” she looked choked with happiness. The problem was that Seeta did seem to be feeling groovy, far too groovy for anyone of sound mind to admit.

When she finished, she held her hand to her heart and mouthed, “Thank you, thank you,” as if answering to a standing ovation rather than to a smattering of applause and Ms. Massie-Turnbull's clear, measured claps.

As Ms. McAllister took to the platform to read a prayer, Seeta, flushed with delight, took a seat at the far end of Audrey's row. There was a slight, reluctant shift in bodies to accommodate her. She balanced on the edge of her seat, looking restlessly around, as if waiting for the deluge of congratulations. When she caught Audrey's eye, Audrey looked quickly away. Audrey was as mortified as if she had been singing herself. The misfortune of ending up seated next to Seeta struck her as freshly catastrophic.

After the final hymn had been sung—with even less feeling than usual, a possible compensation for Seeta's ardour—Seeta stood and held her guitar to her chest as students began to file outdoors. Arabella and her best friends, Whitney Oke and Katie Douglas, spilled out into the aisle behind her.

“Hey, Seeta,” Arabella said. “Are you going to Scarborough Fair this weekend?”

“Oh,” Seeta replied, stopping. “Um. I'm not sure.”

“I'm definitely going!” Whitney exclaimed in a singsong voice. “So awesome. You can get all these cool things. Like parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme.”

Katie Douglas was giggling too convulsively to speak.

“Okay, good, well, have fun.” Seeta was frowning slightly.

What Audrey felt then was not compassion for Seeta or dislike of Arabella—she knew that she might well have wished for some waiting fund of morality, but she was too busy worrying about herself, and besides, you couldn't rage, not really, against the inevitability of this—but what she did feel was a longing for escape. Not to the far past or the distant future, or to somewhere else entirely, but back to the time when she had simply wanted to be an Eliot girl. How curiously pleasurable it had been, to see and hear things so indistinctly.

 

THAT SAME AFTERNOON, RUTH
was getting ready to head outside for playground duty when word came that Ms. McAllister had called an emergency after-school meeting.

“Do you know what's going on?” she said to Sheila in the hall.

Sheila was fussing with the placement of the black beret on her head. “Haven't heard!” she said.

“Well, I'm not sure I can make it. It's such short notice.”

“Yikes,” Sheila replied with a wince. “Larissa said it's essential that all staff be present. If you're a no-show, you better have a darn good reason.”

Ruth did not have a good reason. But she was sure that Larissa owed the teachers reasonable notice if she wanted them to stay past the workday. She was tired. In her first years at Eliot, she had drifted through weeks, months, in a haze of giddy idealism, barely aware of work as work, barely aware even of the passage of time. The Christmas holidays would arrive when it seemed autumn had just begun. Back then she had walked home from work every day so that she could work off the skittish energy that was the after-effect of her enthusiasm. Now she felt panicky at the thought of having to make it through the evening at home without the post-work catnap she'd been promising herself all afternoon.