Inland Passage

by Jane Rule

“Lots of them.”

  “But do nice girls? Do you?”

  “Yes, I do,” I answered, unaccountably embarrassed as I wasn’t by a good many much more intimate questions.

  Why did I worry? Wally seemed to me a good sort of boy with comfortable, homely notions about love that had to do with remembering to leave his wife enough money and to write to her every day. But Joy knew so little about the world she was going into, and Wally knew so little about her, so incredibly little.

  “Ruth, have you noticed anything about my teeth?”

  “What do you mean?” I said, knowing perfectly well what she meant.

  “I never meant to lie to Wally. I really didn’t. But the first night I met him, how was I to know I was going to marry him? He’d never been to Australia before, and he was talking about all the crazy stories the other sailors had told him just to scare him off: like all the young girls having false teeth. I didn’t lie to him. I just didn’t say anything.”

  “Does he mind?”

  “He still doesn’t know.”

  I tried to make her understand that the United States was very much like Canada, not all mansions with swimming pools and Disneyland, and I tried to explain to her how little money Wally earned. It was difficult, for, while I wanted her to realize that her taste for two pound steaks and half a dozen chops at a time would be a hopeless extravagance, I didn’t want her to think that I was complaining about my own meat bill, which was five times as large as usual.

  “Are there any vegetables you really like?” I asked, after watching her struggle with any that I served.

  “Potatoes,” she answered cheerfully.

  She lived on meat, potatoes, bread, H.P. sauce and strawberry jam. And dreams. Great dreams of the United States where refrigerators and washing machines and automobiles were given away with breakfast cereal. She did not know she was being unrealistic. She was perfectly willing to learn everything. She kept THE JOY OF COOKING and LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER by her bed. And she loved my steam iron so much that I finally gave her one to take south with her.

  Against my worry, I set her capacity to make everyone love her. The landlord took her rollerskating. His wife, a hairdresser, gave her an American styling to go south. Even Derek, who admits that it takes him five years to make friends with anyone, took her to the movies a couple of times when I had to work late.

  “Are you ever going to marry Derek?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “How long will it take you to know?”

  “At least ten minutes longer than it takes him.”

  “You ought to marry him right away and have at least six kids.”

  “How many do you want?” I asked.

  “I’m easy. I think I’m pregnant already. I’d be that pleased!”

  Those three weeks probably seemed very long to Joy, but the day her papers arrived I had to hide real disappointment. I was used to having her around. I knew I’d miss her.

  “I’ve decided,” she announced, coming away from her packing into the kitchen where I was cooking vast amounts of steak.

  “Decided what?”

  “To shave my legs as a very special present for Wally.”

  Right after dinner, I went into my bedroom and got her my electric razor. She didn’t want to do it alone, and so she used the outlet on the stove, setting herself up while I began the dinner dishes.

  “It’s grown there nineteen years,” she shouted wistfully above the buzzing razor and running water. “It tickles.”

  I turned to look. There she sat, one long, bare leg braced against the oven door, her young face intent, her secret false teeth set.

  “Look, Ruth. Look at that scar! That scar is ten years old.”

  Gradually, as she shaved each leg, she rediscovered her whole childhood, a long, slow exposition of her life. Finally she was finished. She looked up with real wonder.

  “I feel as if I’d just got to know myself for the first time. Like drowning. Wait till I tell Wally. He’ll be that amazed!”

  I imagine that he was. I’ve imagined a lot of things about both of them in these last years. Joy was pregnant. They sent the birth announcement to both Derek and me. They had named their son “Derricke.”

  “Good grief! And they can’t even spell it,” he moaned. “If you tell this to anyone, I’m done for. They’ll think I’m the father!”

  Then we both laughed as we hadn’t laughed since Joy was here.

  That was the last of the good news. They were sent overseas. Joy wasn’t very well. I remembered her cough. When Wally went back to the States to get out of the Navy, Joy and Derricke were not with him. We had a note from him, saying that Joy had taken the baby back to Australia. She was homesick. Homesick for what, I wondered: for steak, for a mother she hadn’t seen in years, for her settled Australian, or for the dream she had had of America?

  “It’s a shame,” Derek said, “but they didn’t have much of a chance, did they?”

  I think it troubled him as much as it troubled me. Neither of us was much encouraged when Wally’s Christmas card arrived. He had a job as a mechanic. Joy thought she might, after all, like to come back. He was saving everything he could, but he also had to send money for her to live on. It was going to take a long time, which was why he was asking us if we saved Green Stamps. He did. He had discovered it was possible to buy a plane ticket with Green Stamps. Already some of his friends were helping him.

  “Green Stamps!” Derek groaned. He’d been involved in the fight to keep trading stamps out of British Columbia. “The poor, young fool. She doesn’t deserve him, you know. Green Stamps!”

  “He’ll never get enough,” I said. “It’ll take years.”

  Three days ago, there was another card which said, “Be sure to watch FACT OR FORFEIT on Channel 10 Wednesday night. Wally.”

  I don’t own a television set, and Derek’s won’t get Channel 10, so I phoned the landlord, who invited us both over this evening to watch.

  “Probably he’s going to try to win some money,” the landlord’s wife said.

  “Poor cluck,” the landlord said, clean-shaven so long now I’d almost forgotten his beard. “He should never have let her go home.”

  We were all tense and sad, that “great wedding,” that “prettiest wedding” a weight on all our consciences because we’d known at the time it was foolish and had gone ahead anyway to be accomplices against any probable future. But what else could we have done? Even Derek, with all his caution and reserve, had given in. One of the pictures he had taken was framed on the mantelpiece above the television set.

  The program began. Three little girls were asked three silly questions and then given a set of automobile tires each. A woman came up from the audience to take part in a drawing. A little boy won a hair dryer and a vacuum cleaner. It was terribly depressing and stupid. I imagined Wally winning a free trip to Disneyland or a home permanent. We sat through the commercial. No one said a word.

  Then there Wally was, standing on the stage with the announcer. He looked older, thinner in the face, but his grin was steady. The “facts” he had to supply were more difficult than those for the other contestants, but he knew them and answered with a voice as confident and enthusiastic as it had been on the day of his wedding.

  “We understand, Wally, that you’re saving Green Stamps,” the announcer said.

  “That’s right.”

  “How many books have you got so far?”

  “Just over 100.”

  “How many do you need, Wally?”

  “Five hundred and fourteen.”

  “That’s a lot of Green Stamps. Would you tell the audience what you want them for?”

  For a moment, Wally hesitated. The landlord’s wife said afterwards she was sure there had been tears in his eyes. There may have been. I was aware only of the rage in me. I didn’t think I could bear to watch another minute of it, even if he did get the Green Stamps he needed. It wasn’t as simple as that. It had never been as simpl
e as that. How did he know, how did anybody know, whether or not Joy would make the trip a second time, Green Stamps or not? One fairy tale a lifetime is all most of us can stand.

  “To bring my wife and baby back from Australia,” he finally answered.

  The announcer signaled, and a huge board, as big as a garage door, was lowered to the stage. Pasted on it were hundreds of books of Green Stamps.

  “Gee, isn’t that great?” Wally demanded. “Man, isn’t that marvelous!”

  “And, Wally, because we happened to know what you were saving stamps for, we decided we’d just go ahead and cash these in for the ticket.”

  The announcer signaled again. The board was raised. There behind it was Joy.

  “But I don’t know what to say to him, Ruth. What shall I say to him?”

  She didn’t say anything. Wally walked over to her, picked her up in his arms, whirled her round and round, set her down again, kissed her, stared at her, kissed her again. For a moment the camera switched to the side of the stage where a small child stood watching.

  “Turn the ruddy thing off!” the landlord said. “I can’t stand one more minute of it.”

  “All we need’s champagne,” his wife said, wiping her eyes.

  “That program ought to be called FICTION AND FORTUNE,” Derek said. “I wonder if he knows yet that she’s got false teeth.”

  “And a bad chest,” I began, obsessively co-operative, “and an appetite for steak and a firm conviction that in the United States they give away automobiles and refrigerators and airplane tickets with breakfast cereal.”

  “For Green Stamps,” the landlord said. “What is the matter with Green Stamps, Derek? I always meant to ask you.”

  “You’re paying double for what you think is free.”

  “That’s what he’s done all right,” the landlord said, nodding his clean-shaven chin.

  “Nothing is free,” I agreed, for, after all, I came to Canada to get away from Green Stamps and all they represent, but I am still American enough in secret to be glad that Wally can’t admit Joy is too expensive, even the second time round. Nothing is free.

  A MATTER OF NUMBERS

  IF THIS WERE A good magazine story, I would be a twenty-five-year-old widow and Frank would be a twenty-three-and-a-half-year-old graduate student. We’d struggle through twelve columns of my qualms until that eighteen month gap between our ages became a problem we were big enough and in love enough to live with. Some kind of gimmick—an ideally married Dean and his wife could confess to the same circumstance?—in column number eleven would do it. We’d carefully not walk off hand in hand into the classroom together since I’d still be on one side of the desk and he on the other, but the chalk dust would turn to stardust just the same. Probably there are such stories to be told, but mine isn’t that kind.

  I am a thirty-eight-year-old divorcée and Frank is a twenty-year-old undergraduate. I don’t like the implications of that any more than an editor would. It’s not just bad for the ads (Think how sinister that dreamy bubble becomes: “He forgets that I’m fifty” or even “Buy him a Webster’s Collegiate”); it’s immoral. And I wouldn’t have read any farther either if I’d been reading at all, but I wasn’t.

  A mathematics lecturer, whose skill with figures has nothing to do with her own, worries about students falling asleep, not in love. Any student who lingers at the end of a lecture is either afraid of the exam or as hypnotized by numbers as I am. It is even safe to go out for coffee or beer. A woman mathematician is, after all, one of the boys. Add to these general observations my specific attitude toward students: my interest in them has always been strictly academic. Theoretically, I understand that they, like other members of the human race, have colds, girls, breakdowns, and mothers: practically I am concerned with their brains in relation to mathematics. I know that makes me sound limited as a teacher, but I have found that students learn more from being taken seriously than they do from being treated with personal sympathy, except in extreme cases.

  Frank was not an extreme case. I was aware of his test results long before I was aware of his face. Brilliance in mathematics is not extraordinary, but there is beauty in it about which I always feel relief. I have the same response to Bach and to some of Stella’s paintings. So, marking papers, I soon learned to anticipate Frank’s, to rest through it before going on to the complex and irrational mistakes of other students. He was not the sort of student to ask questions in class, nor did he stay after class to argue. The first time he spoke, polite but not quite diffident, was to point out an error I had made and was already frantically looking for. Certainly I couldn’t have detected then any private motive in his concern. Nor would it have been sensible for me to suspect my own gratitude. During the next class, I doubt that I would have picked him out in the crowd. I was perhaps a little more relaxed, but I always am when there are other intelligences in a room.

  The second part of the course I was teaching is a matter of alternative solutions, and, when we came to it, Frank took part in discussions dutifully. He did not need to think aloud. Perhaps I should have wondered then why he came to class so regularly, but bright students often have a sense of social responsibility. It’s hard to describe him as I saw him then. Colorless, I should probably say, or military color, khaki from his hair to his wash trousers. All bone, from his thin skinned skull to his long, thin legs. Even his teeth were long so that he closed his lips purposefully, but I’m sure I didn’t notice that. His eyes perhaps, that somewhere between brown and green called hazel, but I would have noticed not the color but the intelligence of them. Are they intelligent eyes? I saw his mind and was relieved by it.

  More and more often he joined the coffee drinkers after class. He never set himself apart from the others or called particular attention to himself. His intelligence didn’t shine so much as glow like the live light of a fire. That I did feel, and I responded to it with insensitive pleasure. There was nothing personal about it for me, at least not in the ordinary sense. I never thought how proud his mother must be of him. I never wondered at all about his private life, the friends he had or the girls he went out with, if he went out. I did begin to wonder what he planned to do, and one day I asked him. I liked what I heard, the certainty in him about an academic career. After that it seemed natural enough for him to come to the office occasionally to talk about fellowships at other universities, the men he might study under. Never in any of those discussions did we exchange personal information. I suppose I treated him more as an equal than as a student, but it would have been foolish not to. It would not be long before he was my superior.

  Perhaps nearly anyone else would have begun to notice little things, the careful courtesies, the book left occasionally on my desk, the sometimes odd nervousness. I didn’t, or, if I did, I dismissed them all as pleasant but unimportant idiosyncrasies of the brightest student I had ever had. What I didn’t notice in him I might have noticed in myself. I began to think about Frank. I even began to talk about him, but nearly every teacher talks about good students. When did I really begin to notice that purposeful closing of mouth, the long shape of his fingernails, the habit he had of thumbing his shirt cuff? When did I begin to recognize him in the coffee shop just by the tender back of his neck? I don’t know. I had had one very long and very bad bout of love from which I had recovered. I so firmly believed I was now immune that it never occurred to me to consider I would fall in love again. And certainly falling in love with a twenty-year-old student was so far from a possibility that it couldn’t even seem ridiculous.

  On a wet spring afternoon, Frank walked me to my car under his umbrella. I was talking more than usual, vaguely aware, I suppose, that he was unusually quiet, but I didn’t worry about that. I never worried about Frank. He opened the door of the car and dropped my books behind the driver’s seat. I was standing close to him under the umbrella when he straightened his boy’s body to his man’s height and looked down at me.

  “What are we going to do?” he asked.r />
  There was no intimate gesture. Even the expression on his face was familiar, the deliberate mouth, the concerned eyes. For me, it was as if a hand had reached to the center and torn me loose from myself. But I imagine my face changed no more for him than his had for me.

  “I don’t know,” I said, and I got into the car and drove away.

  At first I did not think at all. I moved around my apartment, fixing supper, with the same automatic defenses I might have had if I’d just been in an automobile accident or heard that my father was dead. Then, when I sat down to eat, I couldn’t. I stared at the adequate meal I had made for myself and asked aloud the melodramatic and pointless question of all hideous errors, “What have I done?” The answer is always so grossly obvious. But pain of certain sorts tries to perpetuate itself. I reviewed every moment until I had collected all the innocent past into present guilt. And then I admitted, again aloud, the two important facts: “Frank is in love with me, and I am in love with him.” I was appalled. I called myself names. I paced. I wept. I thought of his mouth, his eyes, his long boy’s body, the thumb on his shirt cuff. And I waited for him to telephone or to arrive at the door so that I could hold him against the damage I had done to him. Caught in that absurdity, I wept again, but I was still waiting, and I went on waiting until after two in the morning.

  I did not know how I would get through my lecture the next day. I dreaded seeing him again, but I hurried to class. He wasn’t there. I turned my back on my students and filled three boards with figures. He couldn’t have done anything foolish, not Frank. But how did I know? He might be sick. He might simply be embarrassed, regretting what he had said. He was not in the coffee shop either nor in any of the crowds of students I watched all day, realizing that at some time I must have memorized his traffic pattern.

  At home that night, I wondered if I should telephone him. I did not know where he lived, whether with his parents or in a dormitory or in an apartment of his own off campus. At any other time, I would not have hesitated to call university information. Now, I was suddenly afraid of what might be said. It was ridiculous. Two days ago, I didn’t count the number of times I spoke his name quite openly to other students and to colleagues. Now I worried about getting his number from a girl in information. What would I say if I did telephone him? Perhaps I would have to speak to his mother. I couldn’t ask him to my apartment. Someone might see him. But I couldn’t meet him in the coffee shop or any other public place. Perhaps we could go for a drive. But that was dangerous, too. And what did I intend to say or do?