Lady Oracle

  "Tulip Time" and "Anchors Aweigh" went off without a hitch. We changed costumes backstage, in a tangle of arms and legs, giggling nervously and doing up each other's hooks and zippers. There was a crowd around the single mirror. The Tallers, who were alternating with us, did their number, "Kitty Kat Kapers," while Miss Flegg stood in the wings, evaluating, waving time with her pointer, and occasionally shouting. She was wrought up. As I was putting on my butterfly costume, I saw my mother standing beside her.

  She was supposed to be out in the front row where I'd left her, sitting on a folding chair, her gloves in her lap, smoking and jiggling one of her feet in its high-heeled open-toed shoe, but now she was talking with Miss Flegg. Miss Flegg looked over at me; then she walked over, followed by my mother. She stood gazing down at me, her lips pressed together.

  "I see what you mean," she said to my mother. When resenting this scene later on, I always felt that if my mother hadn't interfered Miss Flegg would have noticed nothing, but this is probably not true. What she was seeing, what they were both seeing, was her gay, her artistic, her spiritual "Butterfly Frolic" being reduced to something laughable and unseemly by the presence of a fat little girl who was more like a giant caterpillar than a butterfly, more like a white grub if you were really going to be accurate.

  Miss Flegg could not have stood this. For her, the final effect was everything. She wished to be complimented on it, and wholeheartedly, not with pity or suppressed smiles. I sympathize with her now, although I couldn't then. Anyway, her inventiveness didn't desert her. She leaned down, placed her hand on my round bare shoulder, and drew me over to a corner. There she knelt down and gazed with her forceful black eyes into mine. Her blurred eyebrows rose and fell.

  "Joan, dear," she said, "how would you like to be something special?"

  I smiled at her uncertainly.

  "Would you do something for me, dear?" she said, warmly.

  I nodded. I liked to help.

  "I've decided to change the dance a little," she said. "I've decided to add a new part to it; and because you're the brightest girl in the class, I've chosen you to be the special, new person. Do you think you can do that, dear?"

  I had seen enough of her to know that this kindness was suspect, but I fell for it anyway. I nodded emphatically, thrilled to have been selected. Maybe I'd been picked to do the butterfly duet with Roger, maybe I would get bigger, more important wings. I was eager.

  "Good," said Miss Flegg, clamping her hand on my arm. "Now come and hop into your new costume."

  "What am I going to be?" I asked as she led me away.

  "A mothball, dear," she answered serenely, as if this were the most natural thing in the world.

  Her inventive mind, and possibly earlier experiences, had given her a fundamental rule for dealing with situations like this: if you're going to be made to look ridiculous and there's no way out of it, you may as well pretend you meant to. I didn't learn this rule till much later, not consciously. I was wounded, desolated in fact, when it turned out that Miss Flegg wanted me to remove my cloudy skirt and spangles and put on one of the white teddy-bear costumes the Tensies were using for their number, "Teddy Bears' Picnic." She also wanted me to hang around my neck a large sign that said MOTHBALL, "So they'll all understand, dear, what you're supposed to be." She herself would make the sign for me, in the interval between the rehearsal and the performance.

  "Can I wear my wings?" I asked. It was beginning to seep through to me, the monstrousness of the renunciation she was asking me to make.

  "Now, who ever heard of a mothball with wings?" she said in what was supposed to be a jocular but practical manner.

  Her idea was that once the butterflies had finished their cavorting, I would lumber in among them in the white suit and the sign, and the butterflies would be coached to scatter. It would be cute, she told me.

  "I liked the dance the way it was," I said tentatively. "I want it to be the way it was." I was on the verge of crying; probably I had already begun.

  Miss Flegg's manner changed. She put her face down close to mine so I could see the wrinkles around her eyes up close and smell the sour toothpaste smell of her mouth, and said, slowly and distinctly, "You'll do as I say or you won't be in the dance at all. Do you understand?"

  Being left out altogether was too much for me. I capitulated, but I paid for it. I had to stand in the mothball suit with Miss Flegg's hand on my shoulder while she explained to the other Teenies, sylphlike in their wispy skirts and shining wings, about the change in plans and my new, starring role. They looked at me, scorn on their painted lips; they were not taken in.

  I went home with my mother, refusing to speak to her because she had betrayed me. It was snowing lightly, though it was April, and I was glad because she had on her white open-toed shoes and her feet would get wet. I went into the bathroom and locked the door so she couldn't get at me; then I wept uncontrollably, lying on the floor with my face against the fluffy pink bath mat. Afterwards I pulled the laundry hamper over so I could stand on it and look into the bathroom mirror. My made-up face had run, there were black streaks down my cheeks like sooty tears and my purple mouth was smudged and swollen. What was the matter with me? It wasn't that I couldn't dance.

  My mother pleaded briefly with me through the locked bathroom door, then she threatened. I came out, but I wouldn't eat any dinner: someone besides me would have to suffer. My mother wiped the makeup off my face with Pond's Cold Cream, scolding me because it would have to be done over, and we set out again for the auditorium. (Where was my father? He wasn't there.)

  I had to stand enviously in the wings, red-faced and steaming in the hated suit, listening to the preliminary coughs and the scraping of folding chairs, then watching while the butterflies tinkled through the movements I myself had memorized, I was sure, better than any of them. The worst thing was that I still didn't understand quite why this was being done to me, this humiliation disguised as a privilege.

  At the right moment Miss Flegg gave me a shove and I lurched onto the stage, trying to look, as she had instructed me, as much like a mothball as possible. Then I danced. There were no steps to my dance, as I hadn't been taught any, so I made it up as I went along. I swung my arms, I bumped into the butterflies, I spun in circles and stamped my feet as hard as I could on the boards of the flimsy stage, until it shook. I threw myself into the part, it was a dance of rage and destruction, tears rolled down my cheeks behind the fur, the butterflies would die; my feet hurt for days afterwards. "This isn't me," I kept saying to myself, "they're making me do it"; yet even though I was concealed in the teddy-bear suit, which flopped about me and made me sweat, I felt naked and exposed, as if this ridiculous dance was the truth about me and everyone could see it.

  The butterflies scampered away on cue and much to my surprise I was left in the center of the stage, facing an audience that was not only laughing but applauding vigorously. Even when the beauties, the tiny thin ones, trooped back for their curtsey, the laughter and clapping went on, and several people, who must have been fathers rather than mothers, shouted "Bravo mothball!" It puzzled me that some of them seemed to like my ugly, bulky suit better than the pretty ones of the others.

  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.

  CHAPTER SIX

  At 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, especia
lly 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,

  A Brownie gives in to the older folk;

  A Brownie does NOT give in to herself.

  There was even some dancing involved. At the beginning of every session, when the slightly dilapidated papier-mache 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:

  Here you see the laughing Gnomes,

  Helping mothers in our homes.

  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 Gi
rl 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.