Claire always had a flair for fantasy. It had not gone unnoticed. It began with a pair of shoes. In 1955 in Preston Mills, ladies’ shoes were available in black, brown, and — in the summertime — white. The only way to get shoes of any other colour was to go downtown to Mackenzie’s Dry Cleaners and order a pair of cloth bridesmaid’s shoes. Plain white satin pumps that could be dyed any colour to match any dress. When she was sixteen, the year she met Darren, Claire had saved up enough money, cut a tiny piece of cotton from the hem of her favourite dress so she could match the colour precisely, and ordered her shoes. Size 7, narrow. Candy-floss pink. Then she waited six weeks for them to arrive.
She had also gone down to Jameson’s Pharmacy and purchased a half-dozen packets of Dylon Intense Rose fabric dye and spent her evenings during that spring dying all of her white blouses and sweaters, white socks, white brassieres and underpants a bright, vivid, rosy pink. She dyed her brown hair Miss Clairol Shade Number 129: Butter Cream Blonde. And when she walked down the street, it was as though she left a trail of fairy dust behind her. Or sugar. Men couldn’t take their eyes off her. Her figure like the number eight, her fluffy blond hair, her flushed cheeks and black lashes, her pink sweater, pink dress, pink shoes. Her pink chiffon scarf knotted at her throat. She was like sexy, walking candy.
Being sexy candy, Claire made enemies of most of the girls in Preston Mills. They shook their heads, fake-coughed into their hands, saying, Whore! as she walked by. They spread outrageous rumours about her. That she had sex in the bathroom of the gas station or behind the bar at the legion hall. That she had a third nipple, a second vagina. Or no vagina at all. Herpes. Scabies. Warts. They would say anything to taint the fantasies their boyfriends were surely having about her.
Not that those girls had ever liked her anyway, had ever trusted her. It seemed to Claire that not even her parents had ever really liked her. Yeah? Well, fuck them! That’s what Claire’s only friend, Nancy Meyers, said. Fuck’em if they can’t take a joke. At eighteen, Nancy had seemed so much older than Claire, so much more at ease in the world. They had made friends on a smoke break outside the mill one day. Nancy had moved to Preston Mills from Brockville to get a job and to be closer to Jason MacNeill, the fuck-up. The dick-weed. A short-lived romance, Nancy would call it. The bloom was off that rose in short order. But who cared? Nancy Meyers said that it was raining men in Cornwall. Just a half-hour drive away, there were tens of thousands of new men, working men, from across Canada. Even from the States.
Those men were going to dig canals, build new roads, dam the river, and flood almost every shitty little town along Highway 2, including Preston Mills.
Good riddance!
They didn’t call that highway “The Number Two” for nothing. That cowpat-spotted, pothole-covered, thistle-lined highway. Bring it on, giggled Nancy and Claire. Buh-bye, Preston Mills!