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He talked about himself. He said he wished he had gone to Teachers’ College himself instead of choosing music, which did not make for a very settled life.
I was too absorbed in my own situation even to ask him what kind of musician he was. My father had bought me a return ticket, saying, “You never know how things are going to sit with him and her.” I had thought of that ticket at the moment I watched Queenie tucking Andrew’s letter under the waistband of her underpants. Even though I didn’t yet know that it was Andrew’s letter.
I hadn’t just come to Toronto, or come to Toronto to get a summer job. I had come to be part of Queenie’s life. Or if necessary, part of Queenie’s and Mr. Vorguilla’s life. Even when I had the fantasy about Queenie living with me, the fantasy had something to do with Mr. Vorguilla and how she would be serving him right.
And when I’d thought of the return ticket I was taking something else for granted. That I could go back and live with Bet and my father and be part of their life.
My father and Bet. Mr. and Mrs. Vorguilla. Queenie and Mr. Vorguilla. Even Queenie and Andrew. These were couples and each of them, however disjointed, had now or in memory a private burrow with its own heat and disturbance, from which I was cut off. And I had to be, I wished to be, cut off, for there was nothing I could see in their lives to instruct me or encourage me.
Leslie too was a person cut off. Yet he talked to me about various people he was co
I would have seen flaws in this, later in my life. I would have felt the impatience, even suspicion a woman can feel towards a man who lacks a motive. Who has only friendship to offer and offers that so easily that even if it is rejected he can move along as cheerfully as ever. Here was no solitary fellow hoping to hook up with a girl. Even I could see that. Just a person who took comfort in the moment and in a sort of reasonable facade of life.
His company was just what I needed, though I hardly realized it. Probably he was being deliberately kind to me. As I had thought of myself as being kind to Mr. Vorguilla, or at least protecting him, so unexpectedly, a little while before.
I was at Teachers’ College when Queenie ran away again. I got the news in a letter from my father. He said that he did not know just how or when it happened. Mr. Vorguilla hadn’t let him know for a while, and then he had, in case Queenie had come back home. My father had told Mr. Vorguilla he didn’t think there was much chance of that. In the letter to me he said that at least it wasn’t the kind of thing we could say now that Queenie wouldn’t do.
For years, even after I was married, I would get a Christmas card from Mr. Vorguilla. Sleighs laden with bright parcels; a happy family in a decorated doorway, welcoming friends. Perhaps he thought these were the sorts of scenes that would appeal to me in my present way of life. Or perhaps he picked them blindly off the rack. He always included a return address-reminding me of his existence and letting me know where he was, in case of any news.
I had given up expecting that kind of news, myself. I never even found out if it was Andrew that Queenie went away with, or somebody else. Or whether she stayed with Andrew, if he was the one. When my father died there was some money left, and a serious attempt was made to trace her, but without success.
But now something has happened. Now in the years when my children are grown up and my husband has retired, and he and I are travelling a lot, I have a notion that sometimes I see Queenie. It’s not through any particular wish or effort that I see her, and it’s not as if I believe it is really her, either.
Once it was in a crowded airport, and she was wearing a sarong and a flower-trimmed straw hat. Ta
The last and the strangest time was in a supermarket in Twin Falls, Idaho. I came around a corner carrying the few things I had collected for a picnic lunch, and there was an old woman leaning on her shopping cart, as if waiting for me. A little wrinkled woman with a crooked mouth and unhealthy-looking brownish skin. Hair in yellow-brown bristles, purple pants hitched up over the small mound of her stomach-she was one of those thin women who have nevertheless, with age, lost the convenience of a waistline. The pants could have come from some thrift shop and so could the gaily colored but matted and shrunken sweater buttoned over a chest no bigger than a ten-year-old’s.
The shopping cart was empty. She was not even carrying a purse.
And unlike those other women, this one seemed to know that she was Queenie. She smiled at me with such a merry recognition, and such a yearning to be recognized in return, that you would have thought that this was a great boon-a moment granted to her when she was let out of the shadows for one day in a thousand.
And all I did was stretch my mouth pleasantly and impersonally, as at a loony stranger, and keep on going towards the checkout.
Then in the parking lot I made an excuse to my husband, said I’d forgotten something, and hurried back into the store. I went up and down the aisles, looking. But in just that little time the old woman seemed to have gone. She might have gone out right after I did; she might be making her way now along the streets of Twin Falls. On foot, or in a car driven by some kind relative or neighbor. Or even in a car she drove herself. There was the bare chance, though, that she was still in the store and that we kept going up and down the aisles, just missing each other. I found myself going in one direction and then in another, shivering in the icy climate of the summer store, looking straight into people’s faces, and probably frightening them, because I was silently beseeching them to tell me where I could find Queenie.
Until I came to my senses and convinced myself that it wasn’t possible, and that whoever was or was not Queenie had left me behind.