She opened the front door and said in a clear, stilted voice: “I would like you to meet my family.”
The little front room had linoleum on the floor and flowered paper curtains at the windows. There was a glossy chesterfield with a Niagara Falls and a To Mother cushion on it, and there was a little black stove with a screen around it for summer, and a big vase of paper apple blossoms. A tall, frail woman came into the room drying her hands on a dishtowel, which she flung into a chair. Her mouth was full of blue-white china teeth, the long cords trembled in her neck. I said how-do-you-do to her, embarrassed by Lois’s announcement, so suddenly and purposefully conventional. I wondered if she had any misconceptions about this date, engineered by George for such specific purposes. I did not think so. Her face had no innocence in it that I could see; it was knowledgeable, calm, and hostile. She might have done it, then, to mock me, to make me into this caricature of The Date, the boy who grins and shuffles in the front hall and waits to be presented to the nice girl’s family. But that was a little far-fetched. Why should she want to embarrass me when she had agreed to go out with me without even looking into my face? Why should she care enough?
Lois’s mother and I sat down on the chesterfield. She began to make conversation, giving this the Date interpretation. I noticed the smell in the house, the smell of stale small rooms, bedclothes, frying, washing, and medicated ointments. And dirt, though it did not look dirty. Lois’s mother said: “That’s a nice car you got out front. Is that your car?”
“My father’s.”
“Isn’t that lovely! Your father has such a nice car. I always think it’s lovely for people to have things. I’ve got no time for these people that’s just eaten up with malice ’n envy. I say it’s lovely. I bet your mother, every time she wants anything, she just goes down to the store and buys it—new coat, bedspread, pots and pans. What does your father do? Is he a lawyer or doctor or something like that?”
“He’s a chartered accountant.”
“Oh. That’s in an office, is it?”
“Yes.”
“My brother, Lois’s uncle, he’s in the office of the CPR in London. He’s quite high up there, I understand.”
She began to tell me about how Lois’s father had been killed in an accident at the mill. I noticed an old woman, the grandmother probably, standing in the doorway of the room. She was not thin like the others, but as soft and shapeless as a collapsed pudding, pale brown spots melting together on her face and arms, bristles of hairs in the moisture around her mouth. Some of the smell in the house seemed to come from her. It was a smell of hidden decay, such as there is when some obscure little animal has died under the verandah. The smell, the slovenly, confiding voice—something about this life I had not known, something about these people. I thought: my mother, George’s mother, they are innocent. Even George, George is innocent. But these others are born sly and sad and knowing.
I did not hear much about Lois’s father except that his head was cut off.
“Clean off, imagine, and rolled on the floor! Couldn’t open the coffin. It was June, the hot weather. And everybody in town just stripped their gardens, stripped them for the funeral. Stripped their spirea bushes and peenies and climbin’ clemantis. I guess it was the worst accident ever took place in this town.
“Lois had a nice boy friend this summer,” she said. “Used to take her out and sometimes stay here overnight when his folks weren’t up at the cottage and he didn’t feel like passin’ his time there all alone. He’d bring the kids candy and even me he’d bring presents. That china elephant up there, you can plant flowers in it, he brought me that. He fixed the radio for me and I never had to take it into the shop. Do your folks have a summer cottage up here?”
I said no, and Lois came in, wearing a dress of yellow-green stuff—stiff and shiny like Christmas wrappings—high-heeled shoes, rhinestones, and a lot of dark powder over her freckles. Her mother was excited.
“You like that dress?” she said. “She went all the way to London and bought that dress, didn’t get it anywhere round here!”
We had to pass by the old woman as we went out. She looked at us with sudden recognition, a steadying of her pale, jellied eyes. Her mouth trembled open, she stuck her face out at me.
“You can do what you like with my gran’daughter,” she said in her old, strong voice, the rough voice of a country woman. “But you be careful. And you know what I mean!”
Lois’s mother pushed the old woman behind her, smiling tightly, eyebrows lifted, skin straining over her temples. “Never mind,” she mouthed at me, grimacing distractedly. “Never mind. Second childhood.” The smile stayed on her face; the skin pulled back from it. She seemed to be listening all the time to a perpetual din and racket in her head. She grabbed my hand as I followed Lois out. “Lois is a nice girl,” she whispered. “You have a nice time, don’t let her mope!” There was a quick, grotesque, and, I suppose, originally flirtatious, flickering of brows and lids. “ ’Night!”
Lois walked stiffly ahead of me, rustling her papery skirt. I said: “Did you want to go to a dance or something?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t care.”
“Well you got all dressed up—”
“I always get dressed up on Saturday night,” Lois said, her voice floating back to me, low and scornful. Then she began to laugh, and I had a glimpse of her mother in her, that jaggedness and hysteria. “Oh, my God!” she whispered. I knew she meant what had happened in the house, and I laughed too, not knowing what else to do. So we went back to the car laughing as if we were friends, but we were not.
We drove out of town to a farmhouse where a woman sold us a whisky bottle full of muddy-looking homemade liquor, something George and I had never had before. Adelaide had said that this woman would probably let us use her front room, but it turned out that she would not, and that was because of Lois. When the woman peered up at me from under the man’s cap she had on her head and said to Lois, “Change’s as good as a rest, eh?” Lois did not answer, kept a cold face. Then later the woman said that if we were so stuck-up tonight her front room wouldn’t be good enough for us and we better go back to the bush. All the way back down the lane Adelaide kept saying: “Some people can’t take a joke, can they? Yeah, stuck-up is right—” until I passed her the bottle to keep her quiet. I saw George did not mind, thinking this had taken her mind off driving to Owen Sound.
We parked at the end of the lane and sat in the car drinking. George and Adelaide drank more than we did. They did not talk, just reached for the bottle and passed it back. This stuff was different from anything I had tasted before; it was heavy and sickening in my stomach. There was no other effect, and I began to have the depressing feeling that I was not going to get drunk. Each time Lois handed the bottle back to me she said “Thank you” in a mannerly and subtly contemptuous way. I put my arm around her, not much wanting to. I was wondering what was the matter. This girl lay against my arm, scornful, acquiescent, angry, inarticulate and out-of-reach. I wanted to talk to her then more than to touch her, and that was out of the question; talk was not so little a thing to her as touching. Meanwhile I was aware that I should be beyond this, beyond the first stage and well into the second (for I had a knowledge, though it was not very comprehensive, of the orderly progression of stages, the ritual of back- and front-seat seduction). Almost I wished I was with Adelaide.