Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

“You get over to Vorguillas’,” she said to me. “She might’ve thought of something she was supposed to do over there.”

This was a week or so after Mrs. Vorguilla’s funeral, but Queenie had kept on working there, helping to box up dishes and linens so that Mr. Vorguilla could move into an apartment. He had the Christmas concerts at school to get ready for and could not do all the packing himself. Bet wanted Queenie to just quit, so that she could get taken on for Christmas help at one of the stores.

I put on my father’s rubber boots that were by the door, instead of going upstairs for my shoes. I stumbled across the yard to the Vorguillas’ porch and rang the bell. It was a chime, which seemed to proclaim the musicality of the household. I hugged Buffalo Bill tight around me and prayed. Oh, Queenie, Queenie, turn the lights on. I forgot that if Queenie was working in there, the lights would be on already.

No answer. I pounded on the wood. Mr. Vorguilla was going to be in a bad temper when I finally woke him. I pressed my head to the door, listening for stirrings.

“Mr. Vorguilla. Mr. Vorguilla. I’m sorry to wake you, Mr. Vorguilla. Is anybody home?”

A window was heaved up in the house on the other side of the Vorguillas’. Mr. Hovey, an old bachelor, lived there with his sister.

“Use your eyes,” Mr. Hovey called down. “Look in the driveway.”

Mr. Vorguilla’s car was gone.

Mr. Hovey slammed down the window.

When I opened our kitchen door I saw my father and Bet sitting at the table with cups of tea in front of them. For a minute I thought that order had been restored. There had been a phone call, perhaps, with some pacifying news.

“Mr. Vorguilla isn’t there,” I said. “His car’s gone.”

“Oh, we know that,” Bet said. “We know all about that.”

My father said, “Look at here,” and pushed a piece of paper across the table.

I am going to marry Mr. Vorguilla, it said. Yours truly, Queenie.

“Underneath the sugar bowl,” said my father.

Bet dropped her spoon.

“I want him prosecuted,” she shouted. “I want her in Reform School. I want the police.”

My father said, “She’s eighteen years old and she can get married if she wants to. The police aren’t going to set up a roadblock.”

“Who says they’re on the road? They’re shacked up in some motel. That fool of a girl and that bug-eyed pickle-ass Vorguilla.”

“Talk like that isn’t going to bring her back.”

“I don’t want her back. Not if she comes crawling. She’s made her bed and she can lie in it with her bug-eyed bugger. He can screw her in the ear for all I care.”

My father said, “That’s enough.”

Queenie brought me a couple of 222’s to take with my Coke.

“It’s amazing how your cramps clear up, once you get married. So-your dad went and told you about us?”

When I had let my father know that I wanted to get a summer job before entering Teachers’ College in the fall, he had said that maybe I should go to Toronto and look up Queenie. He said that she had written to him in care of his trucking business, asking if he could let them have some money to tide them over the winter.

“I would’ve never had to write to him,” Queenie said, “if Stan hadn’t got sick last year with pneumonia.”

I said, “It was the first I knew where you were.” Tears came into my eyes, I didn’t know why. Because I’d felt so happy when I found out, so lonely before I found out, because I wished right now that she would say, “Of course, I always meant to get in touch with you,” and she didn’t say it.

“Bet doesn’t know,” I said. “She thinks I’m on my own.”

“I hope not,” Queenie said calmly. “I mean I hope she doesn’t know.”

I had a lot of things to tell her, about home. I told her that the trucking firm had gone from three vehicles to a dozen, and that Bet had bought a muskrat coat and expanded her business, holding Beauty Clinics now in our house. For these purposes she had fixed up the room where my father used to sleep, and he had moved his cot and the National Geographies to his office-an Air Force billet he had towed to the trucking yard. Sitting at the kitchen table studying for my Senior Matric I had listened to Bet say, “A skin this delicate, you should never go near it with a washcloth,” prior to loading up some raw-faced woman with lotions and creams. And sometimes in a no less intense, but less hopeful tone, “I’m telling you I had Evil, I had Evil living right next door to me and I never suspected it, because you don’t, do you? I always think the best of people. Right up till they kick me in the teeth.”

“That’s right,” the customer would say. “I’m the same.”

Or, “You think you know what sorrow is, but you don’t know half.”

Then Bet would come back from seeing the woman to the door and groan and say, “Touch her face in the dark and you’d never know the difference from sandpaper.”

Queenie didn’t seem interested in hearing about these things. And there was not much time, anyway. Before we had finished our Cokes there were quick hard steps on the gravel and Mr. Vorguilla came into the kitchen.

“So look who’s here,” cried Queenie. She half got up, as if to touch him, but he veered towards the sink.

Her voice was full of such laughing surprise that I wondered if he had been told anything about my letter or the fact that I was on my way.

“It’s Chrissy,” she said.

“So I see,” said Mr. Vorguilla. “You must like hot weather, Chrissy, if you come to Toronto in the summer.”

“She’s going to look for a job,” said Queenie.

“And do you have some qualifications?” Mr. Vorguilla asked. “Do you have qualifications for finding a job in Toronto?”

Queenie said, “She’s got her Senior Matric.”

“Well, let’s hope that’s good enough,” said Mr. Vorguilla. He ran a glass of water and drank it all down, standing with his back to us. Exactly as he used to do when Mrs. Vorguilla and Queenie and I were sitting at the kitchen table in that other house, the Vorguillas’ house next door. Mr. Vorguilla would come in from a practice somewhere, or he would be taking a break from teaching a piano lesson in the front room. At the sound of his steps Mrs. Vorguilla would have given us a warning smile. And we all looked down at our Scrabble letters, giving him the option of noticing us or not. Sometimes he didn’t. The opening of the cupboard, the turning of the tap, the setting of the glass down on the counter were like a series of little explosions. As if he dared anybody to breathe while he was there.

When he taught us music at school he was just the same. He came into the classroom with the step of a man who had not a minute to lose and he rapped the pointer once and it was time to start. Up and down the aisles he strutted with his ears cocked, his bulgy blue eyes alert, his expression tense and quarrelsome. At any moment he might stop by your desk to listen to your singing, to see if you were faking or out of tune. Then he’d bring his head slowly down, his eyes bulging into yours and his hands working to shush the other voices, to bring you to your shame. And the word was that he was just as much a dictator with his various choirs and glee clubs. Yet he was a favorite with his singers, particularly with ladies. They knit him things at Christmas. Socks and mufflers and mitts to keep him warm on his trips between school and school and choir and choir.

When Queenie had the run of the house, after Mrs. Vorguilla got too sick to manage, she fished out of a drawer a knitted object that she flapped in front of my face. It had arrived without the name of its donor.

I couldn’t tell what it was.

“It’s a peter-heater,” Queenie said. “Mrs. Vorguilla said don’t show it to him, he would just get mad. Don’t you know what a peter-heater is?”

I said, “Ugh.”

“It’s just a joke.”