The Gift of Women Read online

  This last night, before the Sisters move me, I’m down beside him, exercise book and pen in hand, to ask a question.

  “Where should everything be?”

  “Where it was.”

  I flinch at this and wonder if he has seen me touch the spade.

  “Trenches were easier, Miss.” He wipes his hands on his hips. “You’re not angry at me, are you?” he asks.

  “Should I be?”

  “Perhaps not – leastways, y’r’ talkin’ to me. Nobody else is. Disgusted, are they?”

  “I think it best I don’t speak for the rest.”

  “Well, I put in the hours, Miss. Thousands and I’m beat.”

  “But you haven’t given me your name for my records!”

  I never knew I could sound so bossy and bold.

  “Bowse Cartey. Do you not remember – the only one who volunteered?”

  Now, he stalks off on me, giving me the view of his back.

  “Volunteered for what?” I call after him.

  A letter to my dad gets one from my grandmother back: “Bowse Cartey joined Sean Redmond’s Southern Volunteers in the Great War. He planted perennials, torch lilies, to come back to, and never saw them. Over there in Belgium, mortally wounded, a Grey Nun nursed him on his deathbed, and in a delirium, he proposed to the nun. People on the estate said he might have confused the nun with Cissy Waterston, who would be your great-great-aunt, were she alive. Bowse followed Cissy with his spade held across his shoulder, like a rifle, as if he were honour guard for her special projects to brighten the gardens. The photo of Cissy will let you understand the added confusions for Bowse with you.

  I can see.

  Cissy’s me with a lovely ruffle collar, running around her neck and all the way down to her waist, small as a wasp’s, like my grandmother says. Not Cissy’s choice for the photograph, but done to please her grandmother. As for the nun, at eighty years of age she finally came over with her order to our gift of Waterston Hall and with this wish from Cartey: for her to visit him where things would look their best.

  They all shook hands at the handing over to become St. Ursa’s. My father always said the nun wore a smile when she looked past them all at the garden, and she talked to it, “Tu sembles bien, mais pas heureux – fatigué, comme tous les homme qui travail pour rendre la nature de plus en plus belle dans son lit. Tu est fiel plus longtemps que la mort.”

  That was the last look she took at anything in this world. Funny old nun, she had been one of the negotiators, responsible for relocating the order after the War.

  Which war?

  This much leaves me feeling like the Belgian nun: a little light in one hemisphere. We know whatever is up with him, you will put him straight. You’re a Waterston and you’re a woman – end of Granny’s letter.

  When did I have my family graduation to woman?

  Several days after I’m moved, Sister Felicitas says my eyes look unhealthy. They have shadows under them like I boot-polished them to pull on a helmet and play some ridiculous sport. Or go on a night raid.

  Will I or won’t I tell her?

  To my mind the sister is SF. Her initials, and being into science and gymnastics makes Sister Felicitas as fantastic to me as science fiction. If she’s not in the lab, she’s in the gym or on a court coaching. Maybe Cartey comes to moon over her. Half of the girls do, some in the demurest and some in the dirtiest way, choosing to work out on the exercise benches or the courts till their nipples stick through the blots of sweat on their sports halters and their armpit hair is treated like the badge of bravery.

  “Has he said anything to you?” Sister Felicitas asks me.

  I don’t know what to answer, so I quote him: “‘I can’t get it right. The place is as bad as ever.’ I think that’s it, but he mumbles.”

  “Is that all?”

  “No, he said I’m a Waterston. Miss Waterston, actually, and it’s all right for me if I keep track of him.”

  “For you to what?”

  “Keep track. Until you moved me, I kept a time sheet of all the times he came and went with his spade in an exercise book.”

  “Is that so? And he talks like someone who isn’t trying to get off with you?”

  “Sister Felicitas. He talks like he’s an employee and I’m his supervisor.”

  “Mistress would be a better word. Well, you’ll have to give him his marching orders, eventually.”

  “I will?”

  “You’re a Waterston, as he said.”

  I’m flabbergasted as Sister Felicitas kisses my cheek.

  “Time to get these fixed,” she says to the bags under my eyes.

  Since so many of the pupils at St. Ursa’s have parents in business, Small Business Essentials is on the curriculum for the upper-level girls. We don’t ever ask, “What about big business?” One girl who did was told, “For big, do the same, only more.”

  Taking on and laying off, humanely, is introduced, since many of us – the privileged – will be called upon to do it, and therefore are fit subjects for the topic. Once upon a time, we are told, dismissal training would have been for suitors, a specialty of the finishing schools, but the sisters are here to prevent us from cutting people dead and conducting an inhumane and spiritless business.

  “For most,” Sister Bénédicité tells us, “the hardest lesson is learning when to quit. In an ideal world we would recognize our own incompetence or redundancy. We should see it in our own faces, but that isn’t the way it works.”

  I have the creepy feeling I am the sole object of these weird remarks or someone sitting directly behind me is.

  During history, Sister Beatrix reprises the insult to Redmond and the Southern Volunteers. No officers, unable to issue their own orders. They stood in wait for commands to be given by Englishmen, which suited some.

  Is that what Cartey waits for?

  I see him at the end of the nine-hour night, leaning his head against the chemistry lab wall. He twists his fist on the handle of his spade, like a throttle. He mutters at me or someone, doubles over till the top of his head buries itself in the ivy on the wall. He reaches down and plucks at the sacking around his trouser bottoms, like he’s trying to read the few letters that are left there from the brand of sugar it held.

  “Well?” he says, and turns to look at my exercise book and pen, then my wristwatch. I tap my pen on my exercise book.

  “Just say the word.”

  “You’re sacked,” I say, experimentally. Then, without a second thought, “Pick up your things and go.”

  His relief frightens me. It’s like lightning.

  As for Bowse Cartey’s work and enslavement to loyalty, I’d love to find a torch lily he planted, especially when I discover it’s a nice name for a red-hot poker, and take it in to Sister Cecilia, who teaches botany and music. But I come across no such thing. The gardens are all low-maintenance. Perhaps it’s better so, otherwise Bowse might come back and spend eternity seeing to the torch lilies’ welfare.

  LILY OF THE BELLY

  Lily’s début engagement was at the Candia Taverna on 10th Avenue. Initially, the Candia suggested vouchers and Herbie said okay. The Taverna did a good pizza, great chicken and Greek salad. Herbie liked the wooden booths – maybe stalls described them better – for four or for two people. One served a party of twelve by the window; the cops used it, which added an aspect of public safety to the cuisine.

  This double-sided row of dining stalls ran from the front door down to the bar at the back. To Lily, her Candia Taverna performance – swinging her hips, raising her arms, clicking her fingers and looking down at the diners, who looked up at her from their fodder in the stalls – was like belly dancing in a stable. Too much wagging in the aisle and Lily’s lace skirt would be soaked in sauce, but the cash was easily stuffed into Lily’s belt as she passed. Even the city police came back and poked in the odd five spot for her seven o’clock show.

  People would be dipping into their fasolada soup when Lily’s brown belly appea
red right beside the pale brown beans. Doh-ray-me-fah-soh-lah-doh soup, Herbie called it because a while after you supped it, the stuff sang.

  The next venue was the Achilles on Broadway. Here Lily had a centre to the floor, but it wasn’t as good as the Candia for getting her belly into close quarters with the customers. However, the ambience of whitewashed walls, hinting at poverty and parched afternoons by the Aegean, turned the hunger and thirst on. Wine flowed between its larger selection of tables, and with those in the balcony upstairs, its numbers made the belly business there more lucrative than at the Candia.

  While Lily danced, there was always a pause while the guys got over their embarrassment and pegged a bill to her belt. It happened as soon as they saw the women were more enthusiastic about Lily than they were. For Lily always danced to the women, demonstrating what women of her age had, what they could do with their own belly, if they had a mind to.

  Herbie spent a lot of brain power explaining it to himself because he was both jealous and excited, no matter how hard he tried to keep business-like about it and just count their assets: his favourite, the kidney-shaped tub and Jacuzzi, added on the strength of her gyrations. Sometimes Lily would turn the jets off and agitate the water herself, for the exercise and to give Herbie a thrill. Lily, the one-woman whirlpool.

  But her waters never broke in the way a woman’s should. Maybe Herbie was too comfy with her at home, too sedentary, driving and delivering, waiting while his balls got grilled in the winter with the car heater on, waiting till she whipped through the back door and out into the alley in her trench coat.

  So many stops at Greek Tavernas along Broadway and up 10th Avenue. Herbie wondered if there was enough feta cheese left in Greece for the Greeks to eat.

  He watched them wheel the stuff in by the barrel along with the olives. If he ever did poke his nose in the back door to see her show, he caught the pails of Kalamata stench from the olives! Those times, the cooks would pass Herbie samples and before long his cholesterol was two times what it should be and he would sit in their kidney-shaped tub with his own testimonial to the belly sticking out.

  Lily said she liked him fatter, and now that he was, she told him they could do some belly ballet, but Herbie wasn’t so sure she wasn’t screwing herself in the mirror of his belly.

  As for Herbie not being able to make her a kid, it left him feeling condemned to be her bouncing babe in the bath.

  One night there was a knock-knock at his car window in the lane behind Achilles.

  “Business good?”

  There was this new officer, fresh out of the Justice Institute on 4th Avenue. He pointed at a set of wooden steps going up to the flat-topped apartment over the store, next to the Achilles.

  “Girls have been running in and out of there, pretty steady.”

  “Those are the Chou girls,” said Herbie.

  “Uh-huh, and who would the Chous be?”

  “The girls you see downstairs in Chou’s fruit and veg – Broadway Greens is what they call it.”

  “Uh-huh,” the constable nodded. “I got a few girls myself. Makes you worry. What about you?”

  “No girls, no boys. That’s why Lily, the wife, took up belly dancing. Lily of the Belly is her trade name.”

  “Nice and catchy.”

  “We think so.”

  “And you wait to see if she gets out safely?”

  “I do.”

  “Sensible of you, sir. Traffic down these back lanes isn’t all blackberry pickers.”

  “Uh-huh, here she comes.”

  The constable straightened up to look over the top of the car at Lily. He blinked at the beauty spot and the stars she had sprinkled on her body to give it some flash when she danced.

  “We were talking about the Chou girls and the officer’s daughters,” Herbie informed her through the window.

  Lily nodded to the constable and gave Herbie a look as she swung herself and the trench coat she had tightened around her into the car.

  Herbie immediately started the car and looked at the policeman through the open window, taking a moment for a polite farewell, when the uniform introduced himself as Constable Cone.

  “Some men,” Constable Cone explained, “have a little message in them that says: make women…” And before he had the chance, most likely to add, ‘It would be nice to have a boy,’ Lily leaned across Herbie to ask him, “Which way do you mean make and how many have you made?”

  “Three.”

  So, if he didn’t say it, Herbie said it for him.

  “And you’re after a boy now, to keep you company?”

  “Not really. I like that I’ve made women.”

  “You have…” Lily paused, “with a little bit of help from a wife, I hope.”

  It was dark and the rain started. A drop or two bounced onto Herbie off the peak of the constable’s cap. Lily had settled into her seat with the trench coat still wrapped tight, but her knees poked out as brown as Kalamata olives.

  She kept up her colour at the Tanning Parlour on Dunbar, climbed into that coffin with those lights once a week. Part of the overhead, and white flesh frightened Lily.

  In the dark of the car, the constable couldn’t see what colour her knees were but with the proximity of the cop, Herbie could almost taste them in his mouth.

  Home, and in the house, Lily laughed at him, “What are you licking at those for? You should have gone into the kitchen at Achilles. They would have looked after you.”

  “I’m off Greek food,” said Herbie.

  “You are,” and she looked down at his head between her knees. “Don’t go skinny on me,” she warned him.

  He lifted his head from Lily’s round, deep brown thighs. In the mauve light cast by the lampshade above their bedside table, her skin turned the colour of eggplant, and it put Herbie in mind of a Chou girl, standing with one in her hand, badgering her father about a boy.

  She wanted to bring this boy home. Every time she whispered the boy’s name, she lifted the eggplant closer to her father’s face.

  “You always waan a son, doan you?”

  Old Chou took the eggplant from her and walked over to the place for the eggplants, patted it and gently set it down.

  “That belong to some guy who pay good money. Eggplan not your doll. You waan play house with this boy? You know he jus’ waan come eat off us – he jus’ a refugee from Mainland. He migh’ be communis’ spy, aan still think what udder people got is his.”

  Herbie bought that eggplant. He brought it home and watched Lily cut it up and batter it for the pan. He kissed both Lily’s knees after that lovely dinner, on the tops where they were sticking up out of the tub.

  “You like eggplant?” Herbie asked, gazing at the deep brown, almost purple glaze on Lily’s knees in the bath, a long while after that episode with the Chou girl and the eggplant. “You like it, don’t you?”

  “Herbie, are you all right?” Lily scoured Herbie’s face for an answer.

  Herbie realized Constable Cone kept up a casual surveillance on them. It broke up Herbie’s Friday or Saturday night if he came by to talk.

  At Achilles or the Candia, he’d stand beside Herbie’s car out back, as they waited for Lily. Herbie joked Constable Cone about waiting there to arrest the berry-pickers in the back lane, if it was blackberry time. At other times he’d say to him, “Still here, trying to get a hold of those squatters…” – a family of skunks that had burrowed under a telegraph pole in the lane behind Achilles and arranged their lodgings underground in such a way that the pole began to tilt.

  “Haven’t I told you, Herbie, I’ll leave the skunks to B.C. Hydro,” Constable Cone would answer on cue and chuckle.

  Then, one time Herbie asked, “You’re not hanging out here to see if the Achilles is seasoning the salad with hash instead of oregano?” – but got no answer.

  “It wouldn’t be right to evict them,” Constable Cone changed the subject.

  Herbie wasn’t sure if Cone was referring to the Chous because
Cone was looking up at the railing on the Chous back deck above the storehouse.

  “I saw them go in. There’s three of them.”

  “Three?”

  Then, Herbie realized Cone wasn’t referring to the Chou girls, but to the skunks. Herbie asked Constable Cone if he wondered why this skunk family never sprayed or caused a nuisance.

  “Maybe because it’s too near home and they don’t want to draw attention to it.”

  “Or they’re out all night doing their rounds,” Herbie added his two bits.

  In any case, neither Cone nor Herbie ever caught a whiff of that burnt-out rubber smell, as Herbie described it, or the underarm odour of a thousand-year-old armpit, as Lily once told him, being very body-conscious at the time, after a performance and getting into the car, lifting her elbow and wrinkling up her nose, like she inhaled an exact match.

  Herbie was telling Cone about this and they were laughing, when suddenly the lights over the back door to Achilles died like a pair of eyes and Cone quick-marched for the door to go see inside what was up. Ten minutes later, the lights came back on and Cone appeared with his arm around Lily.

  Somebody had thrown the main breaker inside, and somebody else plucked the money off Lily’s belt while trying to feel her up, and poor Lily was still dancing as hard as she could on the spot, there, in the dark. She began to wallop anybody who came within range of her hands. Tramped the tiled floor and shook faster and faster in a tantrum, her belt and tiny clappers jangling, like a hundred little cymbal players in a mad Salvation Army Band – or a whole set of alarm bells.

  One of those who got hit was Cone, approaching her to offer assistance. But that wasn’t the worst. In the car, Lily told Herbie how Cone said it would be awful for anybody to maul her. Like somebody pawing over his mother.

  “What did you say to that, Lily?”

  “I told him. ‘What would you make of a mother, belly dancing, who never had a baby?’”

  Cone was back inside to check if there was someone with Lily’s scratches on their face, for they would be the robber. Basic detective work. Lily had told Cone she did get her claws into the bugger, but not deep enough. Then, in the dark – who knows? It may have been that the bastard was putting money in, not taking it out. She kept dancing on the spot, waiting for the candles to be lit. Damn odd they hadn’t been, on every table, from early on.