Crying for the Moon, page 4
“Stupid door on the stupid locker is stupid stuck, Sister! Stupid!” Maureen said, hitting the offending door with each “stupid.”
“Well, keep it down to a quiet roar!” said Sister Monique, rolling her eyes as she stepped back in her classroom and firmly shut the door.
Maureen flew out the front door and almost ran into Dicey Doyle and her friend Sam—two-thirds of the Three Musketeers. Dicey and Sam were laughing uproariously as they sailed down the steps of Mercy Convent to freedom. The girls were going on the pip, and they somewhat grudgingly invited Maureen to join them.
The first time Maureen had gotten in tack with the Musketeers was on the steps leading down from the basilica one Sunday morning as she was escaping the end of 12:15 Mass. According to the Rules of the Mass, you could get away with coming into Mass as late as the Gospel and tear out of there right after the Consecration of the Host and still manage, just by a hair’s breadth, not to commit the mortal sin of missing Sunday Mass. That Sunday, Maureen had ducked out and was racing down the basilica steps, thinking how they were too narrow for two footfalls but really too wide for one—weren’t there any step rules? Weren’t they supposed to be standardized? Wasn’t it kind of dangerous for them all to be different widths? Maureen was working herself up into a bit of a fit about how half-assed city council was, when she almost banged right into a girl, a tall girl with coal-black hair, who was standing in the middle of the steps, smoking what looked to be a rollie. Maureen had never seen a girl smoke a rollie before, and this girl was spitting loose tobacco off her tongue. She was wearing a black trench coat, pegged Newfoundland tartan pants, black short boots and a white turtleneck. Maureen had never clapped eyes on anyone decked out quite like that before. Newfoundland tartan pants? Pegged? Short boots? Nobody wore short boots anymore, not since people stopped wearing Beatle boots. It was all so wrong, but on this girl, it was all, somehow, so right, right and true. It turned out her name was Dicey—well, really her name was Patsy Anne, Patsy Anne Doyle, but her father used to call her Dicey when she was little because she was always so thirsty and drank so much milk, she was just like the Old Woman in the Irish song who drank too much, Dicey Riley. The name stuck.
That morning on the steps, Dicey, of the small mouth and the crooked teeth and the great big brown eyes, had a bruise on the side of her face, which she made no attempt to hide. She’d been up on Signal Hill, parking—“car-free parking,” Dicey said, “all the fun with none of the expense,” and laughed. Maureen laughed too, just to be polite. She had no idea what Dicey was going on about. Dicey must have read the confusion in her face.
“You know, how everybody goes parking up on Signal Hill?”
“Yes,” Maureen said, but she didn’t really know.
“Well, me and Roger went parking—without the car. Kind of ‘grassing’ really . . . Yea, we were having a fight and he pushed me and I fell right down over Signal Hill.”
Maureen was kind of horrified at this news, but Dicey seemed almost proud and shrugged off her trench coat to show Maureen the scrapes and cuts on her arms and shoulders. On her upper arm, cutting into the generous amount of flesh she carried, there was a huge, thick copper bracelet—a slave bracelet, Dicey called it, saying an old boyfriend had gotten it for her. Dicey offered Maureen her pouch of tobacco and rolling papers, and Maureen about died of shame as she clumsily tried to roll a cigarette. Dicey rolled one up for her using just one hand. Watching her do it, Maureen’s gob was well and truly smacked. Dicey finished off by striking a Sea Dog strike-anywhere match on the back of her heel and lit up Maureen’s rollie for her. Dicey lived just over the road from Maureen on Bell’s Turn, and Maureen couldn’t believe she had never before run into this extraordinary creature. Was it because Dicey went to Presentation Convent, the other girls’ school, which most of the girls in Maureen’s neighbourhood attended? Maureen had never understood why she had to go to Mercy Convent. All her other sisters had gone to Presentation. The Sarge said that the five bucks a month they had to pay for Maureen to go to Mercy Convent meant that Maureen was getting the best quality of education, but with the same breath, the Sarge would mercilessly torment Maureen, accusing her of putting on airs and thinking herself above everybody else just because she went to Mercy Convent. The Sarge called Maureen “the five-dollar-a-month girl.” But it turned out Dicey went to Mercy too. She was a year older than Maureen, but still Maureen couldn’t believe she’d never met her.
That Sunday morning on the steps, Dicey asked Maureen if she wanted to come down to her house. Dicey, her sister, Sharon, and her mom and dad lived in an apartment on Bell’s Turn, and after that first morning, Maureen tried to spend as much time as she could there, drinking Mrs. Doyle’s tea, which was kept going in a pot at the back of the stove all day long. It was so strong, it was thick. That tea and a cigarette made Maureen sick every Sunday morning, when, for the rest of that year, she went to the Doyles’ instead of going to Sunday Mass, thus damning her immortal soul for eternity. Maureen thought it was worth it. Mrs. Doyle was so nice. She had short white hair and looked just like what you thought a mother should look like. Mr. Doyle went to sea and only came home every fortnight. Whenever Dicey had a little cough, he would give her and whoever was with her a sip of London Dock, the 140-proof rum he was so fond of. Dicey and Maureen were always coughing in the most unconvincing way, but Mr. Doyle didn’t seem to mind and always gave them a sip of rum anyway.
Sam Fleming and Sara Browne were Dicey’s friends and they called themselves the Three Musketeers. By association, they kind of became Maureen’s friends too. Sam, Sara and Dicey were the kind of girls who hitchhiked to all the grown-up dances up the shore in Kelligrews, Manuels, Long Pond and out at Power’s Court, where there were always rackets. They even hitched as far as the street dances out in Brigus. A couple of times, they hitchhiked out to Gander—two hundred miles away—where, they told Maureen, they’d done nothing except eat a plate of chips, dressing and gravy and turned right around and hitchhiked back to town the same day. Maureen thought them amazing, but she was a bit afraid of them too. They were so tough and fearless and always blazing some new trail, leaving Maureen stumbling along after them.
The day Maureen was thrown out of school, she, Dicey and Sam walked down to Water Street and started trying to hitchhike to Mount Pearl. They were headed out Waterford Bridge Road when they got a ride with an old, fat, creepy salesman type, who kept on with the “I suppose lovely young ladies like yourselves wouldn’t be interested in an old fella like me?” following on the heels of “Sometimes us old fellas fool ya. We’re all go, you know what I mean.” He actually turned his head and gave them a nod and wink when he said “full of spunk.”
“Okay,” said Dicey, who, as the biggest and fiercest-looking of the Three Musketeers, often led the charge, “that’s it. Let us out here. This is where we’re going.”
“But sure,” fat, old and baldy persisted, “I didn’t mean nudding by dat. Spunk—life, energy.”
“STOP THE CAR!” Dicey screamed at him. “Stop the fucking car and let us the fuck out!”
They’d only gotten as far as Bowring Park.
“You sick old fuck!” Dicey screamed after the car.
“Full of spunk,” Sam said, outraged.
“Spunk,” Maureen said, and she almost giggled until she remembered what she was actually full of—the consequences of spunk—and her heart fell. Spunk! Spunk! Spunk! It was an extraordinarily funny word if you said it often enough.
When they finally got to Mount Pearl and piled out of the car they’d hitched a ride in, they ran into Spider O’Rourke and Spook Wakeham. The boys had just bought a car up in Holyrood for fifty bucks, a real shitbox with the floor in the front passenger side gone and no seat in the back. Dicey and Sam got in the back and Maureen ended up in the front seat. She had to keep her feet up on the dashboard and was scared to death to look down through the hole in the floor at the road that was careening by underneath. Spider drove them to the dump where everybody from Mount Pearl went parking at night. But it was early afternoon, so they had the place to themselves. Just as they got there, the junk-heap car sputtered out and nothing that Spider or Spook could do would make it sputter back in again. Maureen, without being fully conscious of how she got there, ended up on the hood of the stalled and useless car with a ball-peen hammer she’d found in the trunk and was beating in the front windshield while Dicey and Sam were smashing out the back window, and Spider and Spook were banging up the doors. It was glorious. The whole time they were at it, Maureen forgot all about her predicament. She had never felt so alive and so a part of something—all of them working together, lifted up and out of themselves by their united act of destruction.
When they’d finished smashing the car to bits, they hardly knew what to do. They were suddenly uncomfortable and shy; they were having a difficult time looking at each other. Something made them want to get away from each other—it was like they’d been too intimate, too close, too open to each other or something. And so, not talking at all, they walked out of the dump, across the Experimental Farm and back down to Park Avenue, and the girls left.
WHEN MAUREEN WALKED IN THE DOOR, A SHOE HIT HER over the head—not a stunning blow, but it hurt.
“What, Mom! What?”
“Dicey’s mother called me. The principal called her. Ye weren’t in school today. Out curb-crawling, were ya . . .,” she went on, but Maureen just zoned out. She was still safe; the Sarge hadn’t got the call yet from the Prefect of Discipline. Sister Virginia was giving Maureen a chance to tell her parents. Just as she had that thought, the fucking phone rang. Maureen knew right away it was Sister Virginia. Now the shit was really going to hit the fan.
Maureen’s mother stopped the “we’re not running a whorehouse” attack just long enough to answer the phone. Maureen stood there, trapped like a rabbit in the headlights. There was nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. It was all coming down, and coming down fast. She started up over the stairs but thought better of it. What was the point? They’d come up too. So she just gave up and sat on the stairs, waiting for the inevitable shitstorm. It came. All her father said was “Well, there’s not much point in locking the barn door after the horse is out”—this after her mother had called her all the big whores in the book and swore that Maureen would never step outside the door again.
That night, Maureen went to bed and dreamed and dreamed and dreamed, first of smashing cars and then of bulldozing St. John’s, driving everything before her into the sea. In her dream, she was full of rage, nothing stopped her and the more she destroyed, the more joy she felt, and so she rose up in her dream, full of beauty and destruction and swollen up with life, but when she woke in the morning and looked around the crummy room in her crummy house on the crummy street on the edge of the crummy world, Maureen just wanted to go back to sleep and keep dreaming her dreams of destruction. She heard her mother’s footsteps and pulled the covers over her head and pretended she was still asleep.
“Don’t think, my dear, just because you got yourself knocked up and thrown out of school that you’re just gonna lay there in the bunk all day, doin’ nothin’. Get up outta that bed and get down over them stairs.” She hauled the covers off Maureen.
“Jesus, Mom, what are ya doin’?” You old bag, you big bitch, you ugly, syphilitic old whore . . . All those names, all those bitternesses were going through Maureen’s head, but she dare not, of course, breathe a word because the Sarge would kill her. That was a certainty. She would actually kill her, not just beat her within an inch of her life, but totally beat the life right out of her. The fact that Maureen was carrying a new life would do nothing to stop her.
“Go down to Water Street and don’t come back to this house till you got a job of work.”
Well, at least she’d be out for the day and not home listening to the name-calling and the screeching and the bawling and the tears and the recriminations and the hatred. If Maureen’s life were a TV show, Maureen’s TV mother would blame herself, go all weak in the knees wondering where she’d gone wrong, say if only she’d loved Maureen more. Then she’d tearfully embrace Maureen and say she’d always love her no matter what, and everything would work out for the best in the end. Unfortunately, they didn’t make any TV shows in St. John’s in 1967 except, of course, for the news; and no stories of knocked-up sixteen-year-olds whose lives were totally fucked, never to be unfucked again, ever found their way onto NTV or CBC News. Oh, if Maureen didn’t feel so mad, she might lie down and weep and never, ever get up again.
That day, she got a part-time job at The Agora, a discount place downtown, locally owned, full of stuff that had been bought at various fire sales in Montreal. That’s what she felt like too, like she was the victim of a Montreal fire; she would fit right in. But, of course, she didn’t. All the girls who worked there were that hard crowd who could—magically, it seemed to Maureen—see right through her tough act and see that she liked books and thought way too much of herself. They could see that even though she felt she was worth nothing, she still thought she was better than all of them, and she could tell right off the bat that they were going to set her straight on that little misapprehension. She pretended to the owner, Mr. White, whom she’d convinced to give her the job, that she was still at school and could only work Thursday and Friday night and all day Saturday. She would have gone for a full-time job, but Mr. White had assumed from the start that she was looking for part-time work and that’s what they needed, part-timers, so she went along with him. Will that old cunt—oh God, she couldn’t believe she’d even thought that word, the ugliest word in the entire English language; she would never, ever think that word again—will the Sarge want me to get another part-time job or is one enough to shut her up for the time being?
The Agora—a pretentious name for a dump. Maureen started off on the floor of the ladies’ department, tidying and folding bins of cotton bras by size and colour, black, white and beige. God, how mortifying Maureen found it to be out in public, touching over-the-shoulder-boulder-holders. And even more humiliating to have the actual boulders stuck on your very own chest, poking out at the world, always just a B-cup step ahead of you. Folding up those bins of bras was kind of like the myth of Sisyphus: no sooner would Maureen have one bin tidied and in good order when a flock of Portuguese sailors—“the Gees,” that’s what the girls on the floor called them—would descend on it and, in a flurry of looking for bras to fit their wives and girlfriends back home in Portugal, would totally obliterate all of Maureen’s careful folding work. The Gees were generally not popular at The Agora. Maximum mess for minimum spending—and they smelled on top of that, you know, exotic, like different kinds of cigarettes, Maureen thought, and different food and, of course, fish. Good God, the dreaded smell of fish. The entire island was up to its neck in the stink of fish, and everyone worked overtime trying to get away from it and at the same time pretend it wasn’t there.
“The wife. This one,” said one of the older Gees, holding a white cotton bra to his chest, the bra with the butterfly inset under the breast. Just being in bras made Maureen want to break out in boils, let alone having to watch some guy pretend to wear one. Breasts, boobs, boobies, knockers, gazoombas, jugs, hoohas, tits, titties—good God, even the words were like some big advertisement of shame.
Mrs. Lee, the head of the department, spoke loud and slow, as she did to all the foreign sailors, like they were deaf as well as stunned. “How big is she, your wife? Is she a big woman like me, or small, like you are?” After a few more bawls at him, the Gee held his hands out in front of him, way out in front, making the universal sign for big tits.
“Oh my,” said Mrs. Lee, “that’s big! You’ll probably have to find somethin’ up in Yard Goods, in the fabric department, to fit her!”
Every Thursday and Friday night, and all day Saturday, Maureen worked at The Agora. Nobody said anything about her getting bigger. Everybody who worked at The Agora got fat eventually anyway—blown up from sadness, Maureen figured.
Three months after she started working there, the management took the doors off the toilets, and that meant that when the staff, who were 99 per cent girls, were sitting in their lunchroom, having their bite to eat, they had a full view of other girls going to the toilet. Management said it was to cut down on the girls stealing pantyhose and underwear and whatnot.
Though the morning sickness had passed, just the thought of having to gawk at someone else going to the toilet made Maureen too queasy to even go into the staff lunchroom. So, on her break, Maureen had to sit at the public lunch counter, where, through some weird alignment of the stars or something, there happened to be another Maureen Brennan, working in the snack bar. This one was from Torbay, big-boned and raw and graceless. Three times a day, people thought Maureen was her. Maureen was shattered. Okay, so she had always been “a big girl for twelve,” granted, but she had a certain . . . Oh, I don’t know, Maureen thought. Even though she was ashamed to think it, she still thought, I don’t look . . . poor, not like this other Maureen, with that raw look and her big hands and feet and her big, strong, thick upper back and neck, almost like she was built especially to haul a plough through the fields. I’ve got long legs, and my ankles are quite delicate. I do have little, sort of meanish eyes and a thin mouth, but overall I have a good bone structure, big cheekbones and a strong-but-not-too-strong chin. I definitely do not look like that other Maureen Brennan. No, not one bit. I look destined for better things. Yea, destined for better things, like bringing another little bastard into a world already rotted out with poor little bastards and straightening out bins of bras that have been flung about by poor, stinking sailors—poor Portuguese sailors lost in a foreign land, where no one remembered anymore that the Portuguese led the Age of Discovery and that their great explorers had opened up the world. But now the world has left them far behind. They’re no longer the Kings of the Sea, but just the butt of some shopgirl’s contempt.
