Cordelia's mother arranges the flowers herself, wearing gardening gloves. My own mother doesn't arrange flowers. Sometimes she sticks a few into a pot and puts them on the dinner table, but these are flowers she picks herself, during her exercise walks, in her slacks, along the road or in the ravine. Really they are weeds. She would never think of spending money on flowers. It occurs to me for the first time that we are not rich.
Cordelia's mother has a cleaning lady. She is the only one of our mothers who has one. The cleaning lady is not called the cleaning lady, however. She is called the woman. On the days when the woman comes, we have to stay out of her way.
"The woman before this one," Cordelia tells us, in a hushed, scandalized voice, "was caught stealing potatoes. She put her bag down and they rolled out, all over the floor. It was so embarrassing." She means for them, not for the woman. "Of course we had to let her go."
Cordelia's family does not eat boiled eggs mushed up in a bowl but out of egg cups. Each egg cup has an initial on it, one for each person in the family. There are napkin rings too, also with initials. I have never heard of an egg cup before and I can tell Grace hasn't either, by the way she keeps silent about it. Carol says uncertainly that she has them at home.
"After you eat the egg," Cordelia tells us, "you have to put a hole in the bottom of the shell."
"Why?" we say.
"So the witches can't put out to sea." She says this lightly but scornfully, as if only a fool would need to ask. But there's the possibility she's joking, or teasing. Her two older sisters have this habit also. It's hard to tell when they mean to be taken seriously. They have an extravagant, mocking way of talking, which seems like an imitation of something, only it's unclear what they're imitating.
"I almost died," they say. Or, "I look like the wrath of God." Sometimes they say, "I look like an absolute hag," and sometimes, "I look like Haggis McBaggis." This is an ugly old woman they seem to have made up. But they don't really believe they almost died, or that they look ugly. Both of them are beautiful: one dark and intense, the other blond and kind-eyed and soulful. Cordelia is not beautiful in the same way.
Cordelia's two older sisters are Perdita and Miranda, but nobody calls them that. They're called Perdie and Mirrie. Perdie is the dark one; she takes ballet, and Mirrie plays the viola. The viola is kept in the coat closet, and Cordelia takes it out and shows it to us, lying there mysterious and important in its velvet-lined case. Perdie and Mirrie make drawling, gentle fun of each other and of themselves for doing these things, but Cordelia says they are gifted. This sounds like vaccinated, something that's done to you and leaves a mark. I ask Cordelia if she is gifted, but she puts her tongue in the corner of her mouth and turns away, as if she's concentrating on something else.
Cordelia ought to be Cordie, but she's not. She insists, always, on being called by her full name: Cordelia. All three of these names are peculiar; none of the girls at school have names like that. Cordelia says they're out of Shakespeare. She seems proud of this, as though it's something we should all recognize. "It was Mummie's idea," she says.
All three of them call their mother Mummie, and speak of her with affection and indulgence, as if she's a bright but willful child who has to be humored. She's tiny, fragile, absent-minded; she wears glasses on a silver chain around her neck and takes painting classes. Some of her paintings hang in the upstairs hall, greenish paintings of flowers, of lawns, of bottles and vases.
The girls have spun a web of conspiracy around Mummie. They agree not to tell her certain things. "Mummie isn't supposed to know that," they remind one another. But they don't like to disappoint her. Perdie and Mirrie try to do what they like as much as they can, but without disappointing Mummie. Cordelia is less agile at this: less able to do what she likes, more disappointing. This is what Mummie says when she's angry: "I am disappointed in you." If she gets very disappointed, Cordelia's father will be called into it, and that is serious. None of the girls jokes or drawls when mentioning him. He is large, craggy, charming, but we have heard him shouting, upstairs.
We sit in the kitchen, avoiding the dust mop of the woman, waiting for Cordelia to come down to play. She has been disappointing again, she has to finish tidying her room. Perdie strolls in, her camel's-hair coat thrown loosely, gracefully over one shoulder, her schoolbooks balanced on one hip. "Do you know what Cordelia says she wants to be when she grows up?" she says, in her husky, mock-serious, confiding voice. "A horse!" And we can't tell at all whether or not it's true.
Cordelia has a whole cupboard filled with dress-up costumes: old dresses of Mummie's, old shawls, old sheets you can cut up and drape around yourself. These used to be Perdie's and Mirrie's, but they've outgrown them. Cordelia wants us to act out plays, with her dining room and its curtain for the stage. She has an idea that we'll put these plays on and charge money for them. She turns out the lights, holds a flashlight under her chin, laughs in an eerie manner: this is how such things are done. Cordelia has been to plays, and even the ballet, once: Giselle, she says, offhand, as if we know. But somehow these plays never take shape the way she wants them to. Carol giggles and can't remember what she's supposed to say. Grace doesn't like being told what to do, and says she has a headache. Made-up stories don't interest her unless they contain a lot of real things: toasters, ironing boards, the wardrobes of movie stars. Cordelia's melodramas are beyond her.
"Now you kill yourself," says Cordelia.
"Why?" says Grace.
"Because you've been deserted," says Cordelia.
"I don't want to," says Grace. Carol, who is playing the maid, starts to giggle.
So we merely dress up and then trail down the stairs and out across the newly sodded front lawn, our shawls dragging behind us, uncertain what's supposed to happen next. Nobody wants to take boys' parts because there are no good clothes for them, though from time to time Cordelia draws a mustache on herself with Perdie's eyebrow pencil and wraps herself up in an old velvet curtain, in a last-ditch attempt at plot.
We walk home from school together, four now instead of three. There's a little shop on a side street halfway home where we stop and spend our allowances on penny gumballs, red licorice whips, orange Popsicles, sharing everything out equally. There are horse chestnuts in the gutters, wet-looking and glossy; we fill the pockets of our cardigans with them, uncertain what to use them for. The boys of our school and the Catholic boys from Our Lady of Perpetual Help throw them at one another, but we would not do that. They could put out your eye.
The dirt path going down to the wooden footbridge is dry, dusty; the leaves of the trees which hang over it are dull green and worn-out from the summer. Along the edge of the path is a thicket of weeds: goldenrod, ragweed, asters, burdocks, deadly nightshade, its berries red as valentine candies. Cordelia says that if you want to poison someone this would be a good way. The nightshade smells of earth, damp, loamy, pungent, and of cat piss. Cats prowl around in there, we see them every day, crouching, squatting, scratching up the dirt, staring out at us with their yellow eyes as if we're something they're hunting.
There are empty liquor bottles tossed into this thicket, and pieces of Kleenex. One day we find a safe. Cordelia knows it's called a safe, Perdie told her that once, when she was little and mistook one for a balloon. She knows it's a thing men use, the kind of men we're supposed to watch out for, though she doesn't know why it's called that. We pick it up on the end of a stick and examine it: whitish, limp, rubbery, like something inside a fish. Carol says "Ew." We carry it furtively back up the hill and shove it through a grating in the pavement; it floats down there on the surface of the dark water, pallid and drowned-looking. Even finding such a thing is dirty; even concealing it.
The wooden bridge is more askew, rottener than I remember. There are more places where the boards have fallen away. As a rule we walk down the middle, but today Cordelia goes right to the railing and leans on it, looking over. One by one and gingerly we follow. The stream below is shallow at this time
of year; we can see the junk people have dumped into it, the worn-out tires, the broken bottles and rusty pieces of metal.
Cordelia says that because the stream flows right out of the cemetery it's made of dissolved dead people. She says that if you drink it or step into it or even get too close to it, the dead people will come out of the stream, all covered with mist, and take you with them. She says the only reason this hasn't happened to us is that we're on the bridge and the bridge is wooden. Bridges are safe, over dead people streams like this one.
Carol gets frightened, or acts frightened. Grace says Cordelia is being silly.
"Try it and see," says Cordelia. "Go on down there. I dare you." But we don't.
I know this is a game. My mother goes down there for her walks, my brother goes there with other older boys. They slosh through the culverts in their rubber boots and swing from trees and from the lower beams of the bridge. The reason the ravine is forbidden to us is not the dead people but the men. All the same, I wonder what the dead people would look like. I believe in them and I don't believe in them, both at the same time.
We pick blue and white weed flowers and some of the nightshade berries, and arrange them on burdock leaves by the side of the path, a horse chestnut on each. They are pretend meals, but it isn't clear who they're for. When we're finished we walk up the hill, leaving these arrangements behind us, half wreath, half lunch. Cordelia says we have to wash our hands really well because of the deadly nightshade berries; we have to wash off the poisonous juice. She says one drop could turn you into a zombie.
The next day when we come home from school these flower meals of ours are gone. Probably boys have destroyed them, it's the sort of thing boys destroy; or else the lurking men. But Cordelia makes her eyes wide, lowers her voice, looks over her shoulder.
"It's the dead people," she says. "Who else could it be?"
15
When the handbell rings we line up in front of GIRLS, two by two, holding hands: Carol and me, then Grace and Cordelia back behind us because they're a grade ahead. My brother is over there in front of BOYS. During recess he disappears into the cinder playground, where last week he had his lip kicked open during a soccer game and had to have stitches. I've seen the stitches, up close, black thread surrounded by swollen purple. I admire them. I know about the status conferred by wounds.
Now that I've changed back from pants to skirts, I have to remember the moves. You can't sit with your legs spread apart, or jump too high or hang upside-down, without ridicule. I've had to relearn the importance of underwear, which has a liturgy of its own:
I see England, I see France,
I can see your underpants.
Or else:
Me no know, me no care,
Me no wear no underwear.
This is said by boys, while making faces like monkeys.
There's a lot of speculation about underwear, especially the underwear of the teachers; but only that of the female teachers. Male underwear is of no importance. There aren't very many male teachers anyway, and the few that do exist are elderly; there are no young men, because the war has eaten them. The teachers are mostly women over a certain age, women who aren't married. Married women don't have jobs; we know this from our own mothers. There's something strange and laughable about older, unmarried women.
At recess, Cordelia doles out underwear: lavender frills for Miss Pigeon, who's fat and saccharine; plaid for Miss Stuart, lace-edged to go with her hankies; red satin long johns for Miss Hatchett, who's over sixty and wears garnet brooches. We don't believe any of this underwear actually exists, but thinking about it is a nasty joy.
My own teacher is Miss Lumley. It's said that every morning before the bell rings, even in late spring when it's warm, she goes to the back of the classroom and takes off her bloomers, which are rumored to be of heavy navy-blue wool and to smell of mothballs and of other, less definable things. This isn't repeated as speculation or as part of the underwear invention, but as fact. Several girls claim they've seen Miss Lumley putting her bloomers on again when they've had to stay in after school, and several others say they've seen them hanging in the cloakroom. The aura of Miss Lumley's dark, mysterious, repulsive bloomers clings around her and colors the air in which she moves. It makes her more terrifying; but she is terrifying in any case.
My teacher of the year before was kindly but so unmemorable that Cordelia doesn't even mention her in the underwear game. She had a face like a dinner roll and blancmange-colored skin, and ruled by wheedling. Miss Lumley rules by fear. She's short, and oblong in shape, so that her iron-gray cardigan falls straight from shoulder to hip with no pause in between for a waist. She always wears this cardigan, and a succession of dark skirts, which can't possibly be the same one. She has steel-rimmed glasses, behind which her eyes are hard to see, and black shoes with Cuban heels, and a tiny lipless smile. She does not send children to the principal for the strap, but does it herself, in front of the class, holding the hand out flat, bringing the black rubber strap down in sharp quick efficient strokes, her face white and quivering, while we watch, wincing, our eyes filling with involuntary tears. Some girls snivel audibly while she does this, even though she isn't doing it to them, but this isn't wise: Miss Lumley hates sniveling, and is likely to say, "I'll give you something to cry about." We learn to sit up straight, eyes front, faces blank, both feet on the floor, listening to the whack of rubber on cringing flesh.
Mostly it's boys who get the strap. They are thought to need it more. Also they fidget, especially during sewing. We are supposed to sew pot holders, for our mothers. The boys cannot seem to do this right; their stitches are large and clumsy, and they stick one another with the needles. Miss Lumley stalks the aisles, whacking their knuckles with a ruler.
The schoolroom is high-ceilinged, yellowy-brown, with blackboards at the front and along one side and tall many-paned windows above the radiators on the other side. Over the door to the cloakroom, so that you feel you're being watched from behind, there's a large photograph of the King and Queen, the King with medals, the Queen in a white ballgown and diamond tiara. High wooden desks that sit two, with slanted tops and holes for inkwells, are arranged in rows. It's like all the other schoolrooms at Queen Mary, but it seems darker, possibly because there's less decoration. Our old teacher brought paper doilies to school in her many efforts at appeasement, and her windows were always crawling with paper vegetation. But although Miss Lumley observes the seasons in this way too, the plants we bring forth under her glittering steel-rimmed eyes are smaller, shriveled-looking, so that there are never enough of them to cover the bare spaces of wall and glass. Also, if your fall foliage leaf or your pumpkin is not symmetrical, Miss Lumley won't put it up. She has standards.
Things are more British than they were last year. We learn to draw the Union Jack, using a ruler and memorizing the various crosses, for St. George of England, St. Patrick of Ireland, St. Andrew of Scotland, St. David of Wales. Our own flag is red and has a Union Jack in one corner, although there's no saint for Canada. We learn to name all the pink parts of the map.
"The sun never sets on the British Empire," says Miss Lumley, tapping the roll-down map with her long wooden pointer. In countries that are not the British Empire, they cut out children's tongues, especially those of boys. Before the British Empire there were no railroads or postal services in India, and Africa was full of tribal warfare, with spears, and had no proper clothing. The Indians in Canada did not have the wheel or telephones, and ate the hearts of their enemies in the heathenish belief that it would give them courage. The British Empire changed all that. It brought in electric lights.
Every morning, after Miss Lumley blows a thin metallic note on her pitch pipe, we stand up to sing "God Save the King." We also sing,
Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves;
Britons never, never, never shall be slaves!
Because we're Britons, we will never be slaves. But we aren't real Britons, because we are also Canadians. Th
is isn't quite as good, although it has its own song:
In days of yore, from Britain's shore,
Wolfe, the dauntless hero, came
And planted firm Britannia's flag
On Canada's fair domain.
Here may it wave, our boast, our pride
And join in love together
The thistle, shamrock, rose entwine
The Maple Leaf forever.
Miss Lumley's jaw quivers in a frightening way when we sing this. Wolfe's name sounds like something you'd call a dog, but he conquered the French. This is puzzling, because I've seen French people, there are lots of them up north, so he couldn't have conquered all of them. As for maple leaves, they're the hardest part to draw on our red flag. Nobody ever gets them right.
Miss Lumley brings newspaper clippings about the Royal Family and sticks them to the side blackboard. Some of them are old clippings, and show Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret Rose, in Girl Guide uniforms, making radio and other speeches during the Blitz. This is what we should be like, Miss Lumley implies: steadfast, loyal, courageous, heroic.
There are other newspaper pictures too, showing thin-looking children in scruffy clothes, standing in front of piles of rubble. These are to remind us that there are many starving war orphans in Europe, and we should remember that and eat our bread crusts and potato skins and everything else on our plates, because waste is a sin. Also we should not complain. We are not really entitled to complain, because we are lucky children: English children got their houses bombed and we did not. We bring our used clothing, from home, and Miss Lumley ties it up into brown paper packages and sends it to England. There isn't much I can bring, because my mother tears our worn-out clothing up for dusters, but I manage to salvage a pair of corduroy pants, once my brother's, then mine, now too small, and a Viyella shirt of my father's that got washed wrong by mistake and shrank. It gives me a strange feeling on my skin to think of someone else, someone in England, walking around in my clothes. My clothes seem a part of me, even the ones I've outgrown.