Liberty Street

by Dianne Warren

“Who was that?” her mother asks.

  “No one,” says Frances. “Just a boy.”

  “A boy? What did he want?”

  “He wants me to go to the freshie dance with him,” she says. “You don’t know him. He’s new this year.”

  “Did I hear you saying yes?” her mother asks.

  “Why would I say no?” Frances says. “And before you start lecturing about pants-chasing, it’s not pants-chasing when the boy phones you. Plus he’s my own age, and it’s a school dance. School dance, get it? Teachers will be there, ruining everyone’s fun.”

  “Don’t get your shirt in a knot,” Alice says. “I don’t have anything against school dances.”

  She buys Frances a new dress from the catalogue. Frances tries it on when it comes, just in time, and hopes for a big payoff—that is, that her status at school will be elevated when she shows up in the gymnasium with a date. There’d better be a big payoff, she thinks, because the closer it gets to the Friday of the dance, the more she wishes she’d said no.

  The day of the dance, Mark bumps her shoulder as they pass in the hallway and says, “I’ll pick you up at seven. I found out where you live, so.” Then the president of the student council comes on the intercom to remind everyone about the rules—no smoking, no drinking, no hard heels in the gym—and Frances feels an unexpected rush of excitement when she thinks, I, Frances Moon, am going to the dance with a boy named Mark. She wonders if he’ll kiss her when he takes her home afterward, and she’s curious about how that happens, how the first move is made. She assumes it will all be up to him.

  She also assumes one of Mark’s parents will pick her up, but the driver of the truck that pulls into the yard is an older boy whom she recognizes from the hallways at school. Mark gets out of the cab so she can get in and sit in the middle; the driver doesn’t say anything, and she isn’t introduced. As Frances glances sideways at Mark before he pulls the door closed and the dome light goes off, she thinks he looks too polished and shiny, as though his mother had scrubbed him down. She knows she should forgive him for that, but he’s wearing a red shirt, as bright as a fire engine.

  Halfway to town he pulls a mickey of vodka out of the glovebox and offers her some, and then takes a swig himself when she shakes her head.

  “It’s okay,” he says. “They can’t smell vodka on your breath.” He passes the bottle across her to the driver.

  At the dance, in a gym decorated with streamers made from blue and yellow crepe paper—the school colours—Frances can feel (and she’s sure she isn’t imagining this) all eyes on her. What is Frances Moon doing at a dance? And oh my God, look who she’s with—and get a look at that shirt! Frances follows Mark, her date, trying to be invisible, but how can that happen when you’re with someone in a red shirt, wishing you’d just said no when he called, and why did he have to wear that shirt? The older boy, the driver, has disappeared.

  The band is from Yellowhead—the Wild Things—and they’re too loud. Mark keeps asking her questions—shouting in her ear—things like, “What do you do for fun, anyway?” to which she has no answer. When he asks, “Do you want to dance?” she nods her head, even though she doesn’t know how. She has a vague recollection of her mother offering to teach her, Frances rolling her eyes because what would her mother know about dancing? She steps her way through the song, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, trying to figure out what to do with her arms, but she feels as though everyone is watching her—oh my God, look at Frances Moon dancing—and when it’s over, she walks off the dance floor with Mark following.

  “Don’t you like dancing?” he asks, and she says, “Not really.”

  “What should we do, then? Do you want to go sit in the parking lot for a while, in the truck?”

  She knows the mickey is in the truck, and she doesn’t want him drinking any more of that. And why is he asking her what they should do? How should she know? He keeps trying to touch her, slip his arm around her shoulder, tug her toward the dance floor again, brush her hair with his hand. Why? Why is he acting as though they’re going steady or something? There’s that other thing boys do—“feel you up,” she’s heard the girls at school talking. Is that what this is about? He wants to feel her up? He keeps talking about the truck, how they should go out and sit in the truck. All she can think to say in response is “I heard that’s against the rules,” and then more questions, and she wants to shout, “I don’t know! How am I supposed to know what we should do?” but her voice closes up on her and eventually she can’t manage anything, not even a polite “No, thank you” when he asks her if she wants a Coke. All she can do is shake her head.

  Finally the band takes a break and Mark says, “What’s the matter with you, anyway?” and he goes into a sulk, and then he leaves her alone and finds some older boys to hang out with—the driver among them—and she sits by herself on one of the chairs lined up along the gym wall. All eyes are definitely on her now. Has Frances Moon been jilted by the boy in the red shirt? She thinks about what he’d said—“What’s the matter with you?”—and begins to get mad.

  When Mark comes back, he asks her if she can call her dad and get him to pick her up so his brother (he hadn’t even told her the other boy was his brother) doesn’t have to drive all the way out to the dairy farm to take her home. Frances has been sitting by herself for half an hour, and by this time she is furious and no longer cares what people think, especially not Mark from some hick town without even its own high school. She finds her voice, and stands up and says, “Of course my dad can’t pick me up. He’s blind.” Which isn’t completely true, but he never drives to town anymore. Fucking idiot, she thinks as she heads for the payphone in the hallway outside the gym. “Fuck” is a word she has never said, but now she knows what it’s for. Myrna Samples and another girl from her grade are standing at the entrance to the gym under a drooping valance of streamers. Frances glares at them—What the fuck are you looking at?—and they step aside.

  Naturally, Frances’s mother peppers her with questions when she pulls up in front of the school and Frances gets into the car.

  “At least tell me if you had a good time,” Alice says.

  Frances gives her the most disdainful look she can manage and says, “Do I look like I had a good time? Would I be calling for a ride home if I was having a good time?”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “It was the worst night of my life. I hate the whole idea of a stupid dance and a student council and stupid school colours. What a bunch of idiots. I will never go to another school dance. Ever. I swear. Don’t even call me to the phone if another boy gets it into his head to invite me. Not that one will. Anyway, that’s that. The dating phase of my life is over, and I don’t want to talk about it. Ever. Again.”

  Frances’s mother says, “At least I won’t have to worry about you running off and eloping before you get that education.”

  “I don’t know what education you’re talking about,” Frances says. “And you don’t have to sound so pleased, and God, I wish just for once that you’d quit harping.”

  At home in her room, she hangs up the new dress, which she likes. It’s navy blue with a white collar, and it’s short. Her mother had thought it was too short. She looks at the dress on its hanger and decides to wear it—her failure—to school on Monday, just to show Mark Whatever-his-name-is that she didn’t get the dress just for him, and to show everyone else that in her opinion, school dances are nothing special.

  It’s sort of true, since they are regular occurrences. There’s another one for Hallowe’en, one before Christmas holidays, and a few more before the year is done. Valentine’s Day is a big one. It seems as if the student president is always on the intercom with his “no drinking, no smoking” warning. Whenever she hears him, she thinks about Mark and his mickey of vodka. She’d like to tell a teacher what goes on in the parking lot, but she knows what the consequences of that would be.

  True to her word, she doesn’t even think about going to
another dance.

  Also true: no one asks.

  WHEN FRANCES HITS grade ten, her mother insists that she make supper once a week. She tries macaroni and cheese, but it looks more like day-old porridge. (How much flour did you use? A cup? Surely not.) Her mother says, “Even a career woman needs to know how to cook.” It sounds like the closing statement in a debate, and Frances is driven to point out the contradiction in her mother’s logic, mainly to be argumentative, and says that an educated woman—the kind her mother admires so much—might not want to get married at all.

  “And hypothetically,” Frances says, “a career woman might earn enough money that she wouldn’t have to cook. She could eat in restaurants. She could eat Kentucky Fried Chicken every day if she wanted.” Kentucky Fried Chicken is now the holy grail of food to Frances. It has replaced Teen Burgers as her meal of choice when they go to Yellowhead.

  “What kind of job would earn you enough money for that?” her mother asks.

  Oh, her mother is so obvious, seizing on the fact that higher earnings—the ones that buy you Kentucky Fried Chicken—result from higher education. Even the word “career” coming from Frances’s mouth is, to her mother, an opening.

  “I’m not talking about me,” Frances says. “But a lawyer, say. Some hypothetical woman lawyer.”

  The way the word “lawyer” creates hope in her mother’s eye.

  Frances’s father says, “She’s got you there, Mother. No woman lawyer could cook like you do. I’d bet the farm on that.”

  “Oh, how would you know?” Alice snaps. “And she could be a lawyer, if she set her mind to it. I have dreams for you, Frances. You’re not going to end up married to a few half sections of bush and cow shit if I can help it.”

  Even Alice looks shocked by what she’s said.

  “I hope that’s not yourself you’re talking about there,” Basie says.

  “And what if it is?”

  Silence.

  “She’s got you there, Dad,” says Frances, attempting levity.

  Neither one of her parents laughs.

  “Well, stop worrying,” Frances finally says to her mother. “I have no interest in signing on as some man’s domestic help.” She points her fork at the macaroni-and-cheese casserole and says, “If I did, he would be disappointed.”

  Still no laughs.

  The evening passes with nothing further said about Frances’s future. Before they all go to bed, her mother says, as though apologizing, “You have to admit, Basie, farming is nothing but work.”

  Not long after, her mother’s obsession with grandiose career choices goes into overdrive. She reminds Frances that Esme Sullivan left money for tuition, so that should not be a concern; she can afford to be picky. Frances is lucky, she says—not everyone has that kind of freedom to choose. The career suggestions come up at the supper table, in the car on the way to town, in front of the television.

  “Women make good doctors. Dr. Frances Moon. I can see it on an office door. Give me one good reason why not.”

  “I’ll give you one,” Frances says. “I don’t want to be a doctor. Is that good enough?”

  Her mother had just learned about library science, having seen a program on the National Library of Canada. “What about that?” she asks. “You like books.”

  “Seriously, you want me to pay a bunch of money to learn the Dewey decimal system?”

  Biology, then. What about biology?

  “You mean a lab tech?”

  “Lab tech? You need to be more ambitious than that, Frances. You want to be head of the lab, not just a technician.”

  “All right. Here’s ambition for you. I’m going to beauty school, and I’m going to be a hairdresser to the stars. Figure out how to make that happen, and I’ll do it.”

  That look again.

  Frances begins walking around the house with her transistor radio in her hand, even when her mother’s talking. (The song about knowing the way to San Jose . . . Where is San Jose, anyway?)

  “It’s not just me, Frances,” her mother says. “Your father wants you to get a good education too.”

  “He doesn’t care,” Frances says. “He’d be just as happy if I married a farmer and started having babies, one after the other.”

  Worse than horrified.

  “That, Frances, would be a terrible mistake. I couldn’t bear it.”

  Frances feels bad, but not bad enough. She finds herself telling her mother there’s a rumour at school that Myrna Samples is pregnant and the father is Buddy Hynde, a boy from St. Agnes, and everyone is saying they might get married.

  “But Myrna is in your class, isn’t she? She’s only fifteen.”

  “Sixteen,” Frances corrects. “She’s turned sixteen.”

  Her mother’s face turns pale, as though she’s just learned that someone died.

  That night, Frances lies in bed in the dark and tries to picture herself in Myrna Samples’s life, her future, Buddy and babies. Then she tries, just for the heck of it, to picture herself in the life her mother wants for her—university, an apartment in some city—but all she can see is herself in the back seat of a car with a map in her hand.

  The next morning Frances wakes up cranky—the crankiest she’s ever been—and it gets worse as she rummages for clothes and gets herself dressed for school. She doesn’t want to go, but there’s a test they’ve been told not to miss. She looks at herself in the bathroom mirror and despises what she sees. She doesn’t know what she wants, maybe to go back to bed and stay there for the rest of her life. When just she and her mother are left at the breakfast table, she says, “You’re the one who wanted to make something of yourself. Why don’t you go to university? Become whatever it is you always wanted to be. I’ll stay here and look after Dad, and we’ll be fine without you.”

  Slap. A hand comes across the table so fast she hardly sees it.

  Frances is so shocked that she just sits at the table and stares at her mother, whose face is such a mix of rage and hurt, gaskets and tear ducts about to burst like dams, that Frances has to acknowledge she went too far. Her mother has never raised a hand to her before—no one has—and Frances can’t cry foul or act indignant because she knows she deserved the slap. What is the matter with her?

  They are both saved when Frances’s dad comes through the door smelling like the barn, and because of his failing eyesight, he can’t see the looks on both their faces, although he catches the tension in the silence and knows something is going on, and he says, “Well, what hornet’s nest have I walked into here?”

  Frances’s mother manages to say, “Frances and I were talking about her future.”

  Basie says, “Oh, I see. That hornet’s nest.”

  Frances fights back tears, hating both her mother and herself because they are becoming more and more alike.

  AT SCHOOL, ALL eyes and ears are on Myrna Samples. When she misses two days in a row, the know-it-all gossip girls begin to whisper things like, “I wonder if it’s premature labour.” As if they know anything, Frances thinks. Then it begins to circulate that Myrna Samples isn’t actually home sick but has taken off with Buddy Hynde to get married, and then stupid Daphne Rose reports that she has first-hand knowledge—has it right from Myrna—that Myrna’s mother is trying to force her to give the baby up for adoption and forget about Buddy, and the two of them must have decided not to let Myrna’s mother ruin their lives.

  Daphne says, “I wonder where they are right now. It’s so romantic. And Buddy Hynde, only the cutest boy between here and Yellowhead. Myrna is so lucky.”

  Frances wants to throw up at the melodrama, even though she can’t stop herself from listening. There’s a song she likes, about a couple moving from town to town, following a dream that never pans out, and she imagines Myrna and Buddy Hynde on the road to some unknown place, perhaps Nashville, where she’d once imagined her mother on a stage belting out country songs.

  After lunch that day the principal comes into Frances’s homeroom class and ask
s if anyone knows where Myrna has gone, because it is very serious to run away, and if anyone knows, he says, they should speak to him privately in his office. If they know anything at all, he says, they should come forward, because Myrna’s parents are very worried about her. Frances wonders why he doesn’t mention Buddy, and whether Daphne will say anything, since she claims to have spoken with Myrna.

  When Frances gets home from school, her mother says she learned at the post office that Buddy Hynde abducted Myrna from her house, took her from the breakfast table right in front of her mother. And apparently he’d said he had a knife. Myrna had tried to make him leave, but he wouldn’t. Then, as he was dragging her from the kitchen, she’d grabbed her mother’s arm and pulled her housecoat right off. And Buddy had pushed Myrna into his car and they’d driven away, and Myrna’s mother is now, obviously, just beside herself.

  “Do you know anything about this?” Frances’s mother asks her. “The kids must have been talking about it at school.”

  “The principal came to our class,” Frances says. “But he didn’t tell that part of the story. He just said Myrna was gone and her parents were worried. Someone said she and Buddy ran off together.”

  “Well, they certainly didn’t just run off,” Alice says. “That Hynde boy took her.”

  The story is on the provincial news. Two minors from north of Yellowhead are missing, the radio says, the girl taken against her will and presumed to be in danger. Descriptions of Myrna, Buddy, and the car follow, along with the supposed direction they are travelling. No names are given.

  “Look at that,” says Alice. “We’re in the news again. What must people think of us?” Frances knows she’s referring to Silas Chance all those years ago, his death a mystery that has never been solved.

  A couple of hours later the phone rings and it’s someone Alice knows in town saying that the two have been found. Buddy’s father discovered them at his hunting cabin, the woman says. They were trying to keep warm with only a wood stove. They all went to the RCMP detachment, and now Buddy is under arrest and Myrna is home with her parents. Alice shakes her head, as though it’s all too sordid and ignorant, the result of pants-chasing and not enough attention paid to the future.