by Gee, Maurice
She turned on her side with her back to Dolores. If she didn’t stop talking she would bawl. She was closest to it when she was being nasty. It wasn’t because she liked Hollis Prime, but a feeling that something inside her was being twisted, and it hurt. My heart is being twisted, she thought, then grimaced at the corniness of it. Not her heart: her eagerness – people always said how eager she was – and her openness. She felt that she had lost something and would be smaller from now on. She certainly wouldn’t trust any boy.
Dolores turned a page in her magazine. You can have him, Ellie thought, and I hope it hurts. Then she thought of her mother and George, and started to cry.
Dolores sat beside her and stroked her shoulder, thinking, of course, all the wrong things.
In the May school holidays Ellie’s mother told her that she and George Brownlee were getting married.
‘When?’ Ellie said, terrified.
‘We haven’t set a date. Sometime soon. I want you to be pleased, Ellie. I couldn’t stand it if you weren’t pleased.’
Ellie said she was. She acted being pleased, with exclamations and hugs; and cried with her mother, neither of them loudly, with handkerchiefs dabbing their eyes. She was not sure why her mother cried, unless it was from having failed. She must have wanted someone better than George. The houses she had put rings around in the paper were ones he would never be able to afford. Love, she thought, was out of it. Love was impossible. The only time she’d ridden in George’s taxi she couldn’t believe how badly it had smelled – beer, sweat, cigarettes, fish and chips, upholstery vomited on, and some sickly stuff he cleaned it with: humanity, she wanted to say, but felt it was a word with another side and George didn’t fit. Now, she thought, he’ll be my step-father. She prayed, almost formally, that she would not have to call him Dad.
She wanted just to shake hands with him when he called that night. Instead he caught her in a bearhug and she felt her breasts squashed against a man who wanted to be liked, only that, and wanted ease and happiness. She endured him, smiled, promised herself that she would try. He wiped his eyes with long sweeps of the backs of his hands. She expected he would always be kind.
‘Where will we live?’ she asked her mother.
‘George has got a house in Brooklyn. We thought we’d live there. It’s not very big, love, but maybe later on …’
Oh, later on, Ellie thought; later on never came. What would come was moving from House 4 and changing schools.
‘There’s Wellington Girls’ College,’ her mother said. ‘You’ve never liked Willowbank much, have you?’
‘No,’ Ellie whispered. She could not explain that liking and not liking were made up of shifting parts and what mattered was being in a place, being able to stand there and be certain. House 4 and Willowbank were inside her as well as outside and she did not want them rooted out. They were part of the picture she might draw of her life.
‘What’s the matter, Ellie?’ Mrs Nimmo asked on the first day back.
‘Nothing. Why?’
‘You don’t seem your usual cheerful self.’
This sort of remark usually annoyed Ellie, because it seemed to say she was simple minded, with nothing more to her than a laugh; but Mrs Nimmo meant everything exactly – it was a principle with her – and Ellie had learned to listen to what she said.
She concealed that her mother was getting married; said they were moving to Brooklyn which meant going to another school. Mrs Nimmo was the person she would miss, leaving Willowbank. Mrs Nimmo with her darned cardigans, wrinkled stockings, lopsided shoes; with her haystack hair and spectacles mended with sellotape. Her name among the pupils was The Baglady – a term Jenny Dodson had brought back from America (Jenny’s father was a diplomat). Ellie wondered why a school like Willowbank, where the first instructions she had had were to smarten herself up and tone herself down, kept Mrs Nimmo on, especially as she made no secret of being a communist. (Not the Russian sort, mind you, after 1956.) Her lessons were full of things in pairs: exploitation/hunger, empire/oppression, brotherhood/peace, with stories that seemed personal to accompany them. Ellie loved the way they balanced out and made her see. She left these lessons with her mind buzzing, and sometimes with an anger she could scarcely conceal. ‘Now off you go,’ Mrs Nimmo said, stating no opinion, ‘off you go to Divinity.’
Ellie topped the class in Social Studies. She did well in English and French. But although she enjoyed the stories in Divinity she could never climb above halfway. She did not understand how she could have faith: it seemed to vanish out the door every time she turned her eyes in the direction it should be.
‘Don’t worry,’ Mrs Nimmo said, ‘you’ll find your own way. I’ll be surprised if you meet any sort of god waiting at the end.’
Mrs Nimmo could get fired for stuff like that. It was even worse than communism, in a church school.
‘I bet I don’t find any teachers as good as you,’ Ellie said.
She went to the pictures several times with fat Barry, the tennis player – not really fat and not only a tennis player, but she was going through a spell of exaggeration, of smartness and verbal savagery – held hands with him and let him buy ice creams. He walked her to the door of House 4, where they kissed because it was a part of going out. Ellie was relieved when he stopped inviting her, although he could be funny now and then – saying how all the tough guys must have to learn slow-motion so John Wayne could get his punch in first – and wasn’t scared of serious talk about the things he liked, brass bands especially, where he played the cornet.
She sat on her bed and watched Dolores getting ready to go out. Dolores in her dragon dressing gown – red, green, orange, black – which made her look cheap and expensive at the same time. Dolores smelling sudsy from her bath, then turning sweet – lemon tea with sugar – as she put her make-up on. Shaved legs that must be as smooth as velvet to touch. Pink silk scanties you could see a dark vee through. She sat at the table and cleaned nicotine from her fingers with a piece of pumice.
‘What does his leg look like when he’s got his pants off?’ Ellie said.
‘Don’t be nasty, it doesn’t suit you,’ Dolores said. ‘And I haven’t seen.’
‘Where do you go? He can’t dance.’
‘Curiosity killed the cat,’ Dolores said. She grinned at Ellie. ‘At least I don’t get my toes trodden on.’
The Morris Minor waited over the road, with Hollis Prime smoking patiently. His face lit up then faded the way jellyfish swelled and contracted. He did not climb out and open the door when Dolores appeared, as Bevan had with a manly flourish; and did not walk her to House 4 when they came home, which seemed to show they were serious. Ellie could not quite see whether he lit her cigarette in his mouth, Hollywood style, then handed it over. Probably not. After a time people had no need to be phoney.
‘Are you getting serious?’ she said.
‘Who wants to know?’
‘Me, Dolores. I found him for you.’
‘You did not. I found him myself. In fact, we met.’
‘Have you been to his house?’
‘God no. I’m not going there.’
‘Why does he still live at home if he’s twenty-two?’
‘There’s nothing wrong with it,’ Dolores flared. ‘Anyway, he’s getting a flat.’
Ellie hummed the wedding march, although her throat was thick and she almost cried. ‘Flat’ filled her with envy. It was such an exciting word.
‘But he’s not a Catholic,’ she said.
‘Oh, shut up,’ Dolores said.
Ellie watched them drive away. Hollis the Morrie Minor, she thought. It was better than Bevan the Jag. Cars weren’t everything, in fact weren’t much, and pink was more interesting than black. And Hollis Prime was a mystery; he was more than one thing – which Dolores, bloody Dolores, was finding out.
George arrived in his taxi to take Mrs Crowther to a little gathering – ‘What’s a gathering?’ Ellie said – in Upper Hutt. George the Stinky Old Taxi,
she complained. She sat in her bedroom and read a book. Later on she went to the lounge and sang out-of-date songs round the piano with half a dozen stay-at-home girls. ‘Gimme a little kiss, willya, huh?’ they sang. ‘What is this thing called love?’ ‘Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?’ ‘Am I blue?’ It struck Ellie after a while that nearly all the songs were asking questions.
The taxi and the Morris Minor arrived back at House 4 at the same time. It was almost as if they’d had a race and the little coloured car had won. Ellie, kneeling on her bed, watched through an opening in the curtains. George escorted Mrs Crowther in and didn’t stay, which relieved Ellie of the awful suspicion that her mother was ‘doing it’. The Minor sat alone, with heads melting into each other, big long kisses and, she expected, busy hands too. She would have to see if all Dolores’ buttons were done up, and knew that she would look with an appalled sort of wonder at her hands, if they had been touching him down there. She felt guilty watching, and a bit sick, and lay down and pulled the sheet over her eyes.
The car door slammed and the Minor plugged away. Mrs Crowther padded out to lock the House door, which meant that Dolores had got inside exactly on the curfew. Ellie heard them murmur, heard them laugh, which seemed like a betrayal. Her mother should laugh only with her. Dolores came in and turned on the light.
‘What’s the time?’ Ellie yawned, pretending to wake.
‘One o’clock. I feel like staying up all night.’
‘I don’t mind as long as you turn out the light.’
She did not want it out because she wanted to keep on looking at Dolores. She was flushed. She was smeary. She was, Ellie decided, remembering a line from a song, on cloud nine. If you got close enough you would smell sex on her, if sex had a smell – which it ought to, and probably not altogether nice.
‘How’s Hollis?’ she said. He must be different with Dolores from what he’d been with her. Twenty-two. The number turned him hugely older suddenly, and made her almost shrink with fear at where she had been, who she’d been with on that night. He was utterly strange. Dolores was strange. Stockingless, barefooted, down to her slip, hair unpinned – she was on the other side of something, the other side of knowing; and Ellie felt tiny in her ignorance, but still with a kind of newness that made her feel she had not lost.
‘Do you know what his leg looks like now?’
Dolores laughed. ‘What’s a leg, Ellie. Don’t be a dope. Hey, he was telling me about his mum and dad.’
‘I’ve met them.’
‘He does their voices. You should hear him, especially his dad – you know, stuck up.’
‘I liked his dad.’
‘When his sister has parties he likes to sort of work the girls into a corner and stand close.’
‘Who, Hollis?’
‘No, dumbo, his dad. He tells them jokes, and everyone thinks they’re going to be dirty but they’re not. His sister keeps on calling out, “Daddy, stop.” Do you want to hear one?’
Ellie was wondering why she hadn’t been invited to the parties. A wider gap was opening, with the Hutt Valley in halves tilting away and the Primes on the other side.
‘There was this family of skunks,’ Dolores said. ‘There was Mummy Skunk and Daddy Skunk and two little baby skunks called In and Out.’
‘No, don’t,’ Ellie said.
‘Wait. Wait. One day In got lost in the jungle and Mummy and Daddy searched and searched but they couldn’t find him. So little Out said, “Let me try,” and soon he came back bringing In. “How did you do it?” Mummy and Daddy cried. “It was easy,” Out said. “In stinked.”’
‘Ha, ha,’ Ellie said.
‘That’s what they all did. They groaned. And the sister said, “Oh, Daddy, why don’t you go and sit in your yacht?” He keeps a yacht in the garage.’
‘I know,’ Ellie said. She felt a revulsion from Hollis Prime. He should not have let Dolores think the yacht was a joke.
‘His mother was an actress, did you know? She used to be in amateur plays, she was always the “ingenoo”. You should hear Hollis say it. She had to get kissed on stage and Hollis’s old man didn’t like it. But then she had to be the older sister and then the maid and she got all snooty and she quit.’
‘Stop talking,’ someone called from the next room.
‘Cheeky cow,’ Dolores said.
She made a left/right wriggle out of her slip, shed her bra, stepped out of her scanties and was wrapped in her dragons before Ellie could see if her body had been used – if it had known pleasure. The ideas contended as Dolores grabbed her toilet bag and towel and left for the bathroom. Used by him for his pleasure, or by her for her own? That left his body out of things, but Ellie shivered away from it as something white and damp – all of him, not just his foot. She almost cried again, with a swelling and choking in her throat, because love must be different from what she had imagined, because she must be wrong, she could not know, and because Dolores was so happy.
Another thing she could not imagine was Hollis Prime and Dolores married, even in a flat. When she tried to see one of them – eating at a table, washing dishes – the other became hazy. They were like two colours that wouldn’t mix. So what was going on with them, in Hollis’s car? Was there time to look in Dolores’ scanties in the corner to see if there were marks on them, if they were wet or something, or had grains of sand?
No, she thought; said it: ‘No.’ It was disgusting. If she crossed the room she would come back different: all dark and wrinkled, with nothing worth having of her old self left. It was something she knew, even if she could not know about love. Ellie hugged her chest. She turned over and faced the wall and pretended to be asleep when Dolores came in.
‘Night,’ Dolores breathed.
The soft happy whisper made Ellie smile, and she was suddenly happy herself, softened by it, expanded as though her edges stretched and took in spaces outside herself. She wondered at how up and down she was, tripping as though in gutters one moment and standing on hilltops the next. It’s interesting, she thought, and wonderful.
How interesting everything could be.
Ellie rode her bicycle to church in the morning. She did not often go because she could not find a religious reason for being there. It was as though there were something she reached for but could not hold. It made her skin seem rubbery and her fingers thick. But then there would be singing, and the priest and the choir would float up from the floor and take an inward slant like strokes in a painting. The coloured light from the windows, the sound of the voices and the organ, upheld them – and that was weird enough to count as religious, she supposed.
The sermon was a snake writhing from the preacher’s mouth. It changed colour – red, gold, blue, then black for the warnings about sin. As for communion, ‘begone’ was the word that came to Ellie as she knelt. She wanted to pick the wafer off her tongue and nip her lips closed with her fingernails.
She fetched her bike from the side of the church.
‘Ellie,’ said a bendy woman, tilting her long brow.
‘Hello, Mrs Prime. I didn’t see you.’
Mr Prime was standing back, turning his hat in his hands.
‘I wonder if you and I could have a word?’ said Mrs Prime.
‘Sure. I don’t mind.’
‘You must forgive me if I seem to pry. But I feel that it’s my duty as a mother.’
‘Yes, all right,’ Ellie said, although it was not.
‘We – Harold and I – have to take Hollis’s best interests to heart, because of his disability, do you understand?’
‘It hasn’t got anything to do with me, Mrs Prime.’
‘Yes, I realise. But he’s inclined to be secretive and you are in a position to know. Because of where you live. There is a girl there, isn’t there?’
‘There’s hundreds of girls,’ Ellie said.
Mrs Prime’s eyes grew bright. A little self-enjoying smile raised the sharp corners of her mouth. ‘What I’d like to know is her name. Angela has told me
that you share a room with her.’
‘Excuse me, Mrs Prime. I’ve got to go.’
‘I’m not asking you to betray any confidences. But Hollis – well, you’ve met him. More than once, I understand.’
‘He’s twenty-two,’ Ellie said.
‘In some ways Hollis is a child.’
‘Madeleine, I think we should call it a day,’ Mr Prime said.
‘In a moment. Her name is Dolores, or Dollie, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t know,’ Ellie said.
‘And she’s a Catholic?’
‘What does it matter what she is?’
‘And also she’s a goodtime girl?’
‘You’ve got no right to say that. Her morals are better than your son’s. Angela shouldn’t tell you stuff I say at school.’
‘And you, young lady, shouldn’t be at that school. As far as I can tell you’re straight out of the Mazengarb Report.’
‘Madeleine, stop it,’ Mr Prime said.
‘Somebody has to tell the truth.’
Ellie swung her leg over her bike. ‘I think you’re barmy. And so’s your daughter. So’s your son.’ She rode a short way, then stopped. ‘Dolores is too good for him.’
I’ll never go back to that church, she told herself. Yet she was elated, riding again. She had answered back in a way that almost seemed inspired. Dolores was too good and they were barmy, the truth was like an angel sliding on a beam of light. The Primes were crooked people and Dolores was beautiful – and she was too; she saw it as a kind of revelation: blonde and blue eyed, round and smooth, like an illustration in a religious book. Mr Prime had blotches; Mrs Prime had knobs on the back of her neck; Angela was all boney, and had pimples for breasts, and thought that doing ballet and coming top in French and saying ‘très intéressant’ and ‘pour’ and ‘avec’ all the time made her better than anyone else. As for Hollis Prime, he was crippled, which was a judgement probably.
‘Mazengarb Report,’ she said. Her mother still kept a copy somewhere. The government had sent one to every household in the country after the scandal four years ago, when teenagers up the valley had been caught drinking beer and having sex, and ones in Wanganui were dancing naked in graveyards and using bottles of fizz to stop getting pregnant. Ellie had read about it in Truth, but hadn’t got far with the Mazengarb Report. It seemed to be asking for more religious teaching in schools and better moral standards – and it was one of the reasons why her mother had been so quick to shift her from Hutt Valley High to Willowbank.
