You know what I mean, she says in a tired voice.
It's not true. I'm sorry. I'm the brute, I got carried away. Anyway it's only a story.
She rests her forehead against her knees. After a minute she says, What am I going to do? After-when you're not here any more?
You'll get over it, he says. You'll live. Here, I'll brush you off. It doesn't come off, not with just brushing. Let's do up your buttons, he says. Don't be sad.
The Colonel Henry Parkman High School Home and School and Alumni Association Bulletin, Port Ticonderoga, May 1998 Laura Chase Memorial Prize to be Presented BY MYRA STURGESS, VICE-PRESIDENT, ALUMNI ASSOCIATION Colonel Henry Parkman High has been endowed with a valuable new prize by the generous bequest of the late Mrs. Winifred Griffen Prior of Toronto, whose noted brother Richard E. Griffen, will be remembered, as he often vacationed here in Port Ticonderoga and enjoyed sailing on our river. The prize is the Laura Chase Memorial Prize in Creative Writing, of a value of two hundred dollars, to be awarded to a student in the graduating year for the best short story, to be judged by three Alumni Association members, with literary and also moral values considered. Our Principal Mr. Eph Evans, states: "We are grateful to Mrs. Prior for remembering us along with her many other benefactions."
Named in honour of famed local authoress Laura Chase, the first Prize will be presented at Graduation in June. Her sister Mrs. Iris Griffen of the Chase family which contributed so much to our town in earlier days, has graciously consented to present the Prize to the lucky winner, and there's a few weeks left to go, so tell your kids to roll up their creativity sleeves and get cracking!
The Alumni Association will sponsor a Tea in the Gymnasium immediately after the Graduation, tickets available from Myra Sturgess at the Gingerbread House, all proceeds towards new football uniforms which are certainly needed! Donation of baked goods welcome, with nut ingredients clearly marked please.
Three
The presentation
This morning I woke with a feeling of dread. I was unable at first to place it, but then I remembered. Today was the day of the ceremony.
The sun was up, the room already too warm. Light filtered in through the net curtains, hanging suspended in the air, sediment in a pond. My head felt like a sack of pulp. Still in my nightgown, damp from some fright I'd pushed aside like foliage, I pulled myself up and out of my tangled bed, then forced myself through the usual dawn rituals-the ceremonies we perform to make ourselves look sane and acceptable to other people. The hair must be smoothed down after whatever apparitions have made it stand on end during the night, the expression of staring disbelief washed from the eyes. The teeth brushed, such as they are. God knows what bones I'd been gnawing in my sleep.
Then I stepped into the shower, holding on to the grip bar Myra 's bullied me into, careful not to drop the soap: I'm apprehensive of slipping. Still, the body must be hosed down, to get the smell of nocturnal darknessoff the skin. I suspect myself of having an odour I myself can no longer detect-a stink of stale flesh and clouded, aging pee.
Dried, lotioned and powdered, sprayed like mildew, I was in some sense of the word restored. Only there was still the sensation of weightlessness, or rather of being about to step off a cliff. Each time I put a foot out I set it down provisionally, as if the floor might give way underneath me. Nothing but surface tension holding me in place.
Getting my clothes on helped. I am not at my best without scaffolding. (Yet what has become of my real clothes? Surely these shapeless pastels and orthopaedic shoes belong on someone else. But they're mine; worse, they suit me now.)
Next came the stairs. I have a horror of tumbling down them-of breaking my neck, lying sprawled with undergarments on display, then melting into a festering puddle before anyone thinks of coming to find me. It would be such an ungainly way to die. I tackled each step at a time, hugging the bannister; then along the hall to the kitchen, the fingers of my left hand brushing the wall like a cat's whiskers. (I can still see, mostly. I can still walk. Be thankful for small mercies, Reenie would say. Why should we be? said Laura. Why are they so small?)
I didn't want any breakfast. I drank a glass of water, and passed the time in fidgeting. At half past nine Walter came by to collect me. "Hot enough for you?" he said, his standard opening. In winter it'scold enough. Wet anddry are for spring and fall.
"How are you today, Walter?" I asked him, as I always do.
"Keeping out of mischief," he said, as he always does.
"That's the best that can be expected for any of us," I said. He gave his version of a smile-a thin crack in his face, like mud drying-opened the car door for me, and installed me in the passenger seat. "Big day today, eh?" he said. "Buckle up, or I might get arrested." He saidbuckle up as if it was a joke; he's old enough to remember earlier, more carefree days. He'd have been the kind of youth to drive with one elbow out the window, a hand on his girlfriend's knee. Astounding to reflect that this girlfriend was in fact Myra.
He eased the car delicately away from the curb and we moved off in silence. He's a large man, Walter-squareedged, like a plinth, with a neck that is not so much a neck as an extra shoulder; he exudes a not unpleasant scent of worn leather boots and gasoline. From his checked shirt and baseball cap I gathered he wasn't planning to attend the graduation ceremony. He doesn't read books, which makes both of us more comfortable: as far as he's concerned Laura is my sister and it's a shame she's dead, and that's all.
I should have married someone like Walter. Good with his hands.
No: I shouldn't have married anyone. That would have saved a lot of trouble.
Walter stopped the car in front of the high school. It's postwar modern, fifty years old but still new to me: I can't get used to the flatness, the blandness. It looks like a packing crate. Young people and their parents were rippling over the sidewalk and the lawn and in through the front doors, their clothes in every summer colour. Myra was waiting for us, yoo-hooing from the steps, in a white dress covered with huge red roses. Women with such big bums should not wear large floral prints. There's something to be said for girdles, not that I'd wish them back. She'd had her hair done, all tight grey cooked-looking curls like an English barrister's wig.
"You're late," she said to Walter.
"Nope, I'm not," said Walter. "If I am, everyone else is early, is all. No reason she should have to sit around cooling her heels." They're in the habit of speaking of me in the third person, as if I'm a child or pet.
Walter handed my arm over into Myra 's custody and we went up the front steps together like a three-legged race. I felt what Myra 's hand must have felt: a brittle radius covered slackly with porridge and string. I should have brought my cane, but I couldn't see carting it out onto the stage with me. Someone would be bound to trip over it.
Myra took me backstage and asked me if I'd like to use the Ladies'-she's good about remembering that -then sat me down in the dressing room. "You just stay put now," she said. Then she hurried off, bum lolloping, to make sure all was in order.
The lights around the dressing-room mirror were small round bulbs, as in theatres; they cast a flattering light, but I was not flattered: I looked sick, my skin leached of blood, like meat soaked in water. Was it fear, or true illness? Certainly I did not feel a hundred percent.
I found my comb, made a perfunctory stab at the top of my head. Myra keeps threatening to take me to "her girl," at what she still refers to as the Beauty Parlour-The Hair Port is its official name, with Unisex as an added incentive-but I keep resisting. At least I can still call my hair my own, though it frizzes upwards as if I've been electrocuted. Beneath it there are glimpses of scalp, the greyish pink of mice feet. If I ever get caught in a high wind my hair will all blow off like dandelion fluff, leaving only a tiny pockmarked nubbin of bald head.