MAUREEN DIDN’T BOTHER TO GO BACK TO SCHOOL THE September after she’d had the baby. There didn’t seem much point to it; her life was over anyway. Everyone knew she’d had a baby, and you might as well just say everyone knew she was a “good-for-nothing slut” and just get it over with, and if they were going to go around treating her like a slut, Maureen thought, she might as well start acting like one. There was really no point in saying no to anyone now. So Maureen went to see a Dr. Divine on Duckworth Street. She’d heard he’d give you the pill even if you weren’t married. He asked her how old she was and then asked what she thought she was doing at her age looking for birth control. Maureen cut him off: “I already had a baby.”
It was the first time she’d said it out loud to a stranger, and she thought it would probably be the last time, too, because Dr. Divine gave her such a look—contempt? scorn?—it made her feel as low as she’d ever felt. She tried to brazen it out, answer him back, but even her voice deserted her. Her big, booming, able voice had jumped ship. It was deeply ashamed too, apparently, and so she said nothing, and in the end, he gave her the birth control pills. All he said was “Take these until you have your period.”
Maureen kept taking the small, pink pills, but she never got her period. She kept taking them for three months . . . No period. And so, she was sure she was knocked up again. She went to a brand new doctor on Freshwater Road, out near the mall. He gave her an internal, took her pee and called her back to his office after Maureen had put in a few anxious days.
“Apparently, the rabbit lived,” he said when Maureen walked into his office.
“What? What does that mean?”
“Oh, it’s an old joke about rabbits. They were supposed to die when a pregnant woman’s urine was injected into the rabbit’s ovaries, but actually, the rabbit always dies when they do that procedure.”
Maureen just looked at him. “Yea. Funny,” she said flatly. Really funny.
“But when they test the dead rabbit’s ovaries, that’s how they can tell if you are pregnant or not, and you’re not pregnant.”
“So why don’t I get my period?”
“Are you on medication?”
“Yea.” Maureen showed him the disc of birth control pills.
“Well, when you stop taking these, on the twenty-first day, then you should get your period.”
“What? . . . He said to just keep takin’ ’em till I got my period!”
“Who?”
“Dr. Divine.”
“I doubt that, my dear. No, you take these every day until the twenty-first day, at which point you stop, which brings on your period, and after day twenty-eight, you start in again and you should be as regular as clockwork.” He spoke to Maureen as if she was an idiot.
“The old bastard,” Maureen said.
“I would thank you not to use language like that in this office, my dear. This is a family practice.”
Well, imagine that old frigger, Maureen thought as she hitchhiked home. He didn’t even bother to tell me how to use them . . . He had it in for me ’cause I had the baby. She couldn’t get a ride, and she was in by the university anyway, so she stopped into the Spanish Café in the Student Union Centre. She sat down and got busy pretending she was a student at the university and in no way just a loser who didn’t even have her Grade 11 and who had a baby on top of that. She tried to sit there like she was her best self, the self she so desperately wanted to be: the quiet, languid, mysterious, enigmatic blond self with perfectly straight hair, no freckles, pale olive skin, beautiful large brown eyes, dressed all in white—not the real Maureen, not the mousy-brown-haired, freckled, brash, fat, big and loud Maureen who was always telling everyone everything whether they wanted to hear it or not. As she made every effort to sit like the Ideal Maureen in her lumpy winter coat, one of the Three Musketeers’ brothers—Sara Browne’s older brother, Trevor—came by. He sat down with Maureen.
“What are ya doing in here?”
“I’m . . .” She was going to say that she was studying biology in her second year, but then she remembered that Trevor would know she wasn’t in school and that she’d only be in Grade 12 at Mercy if she was, and oh Jesus, he probably knew all about her having the baby and everything. No point in pretending. Maureen didn’t know what to say then.
TREVOR WAS IN HIS THIRD YEAR OF UNIVERSITY AND WAS part of a frat. Sara’s father had given her a T-Bird as soon as she’d gotten her licence, on the condition that she give Trevor rides whenever he needed them, and sometimes the Three Musketeers and Maureen had to share the car with Trevor and sometimes pick him up down at that frat, Alpha Delta Phi. Trevor had a nickname: Bo or something. They all had nicknames at the frat, and they were overwhelming in their confidence, their cute nicknames, even their teeth, for God’s sake.
One night, Maureen had gone to the frat with Sara and the other two Musketeers to pick up Trevor, and there was a party on. Everyone at the party seemed to be pretty and grown up and like they were part of a country club or at least played tennis or something, and they were definitely Protestant with that perfect Protestant hair. Maureen was only fifteen then and desperate to look grown up, to look at least eighteen, and she was hoping one of the frat boys would offer her a drink. A short, stocky, shambolic, drunk fella with a blond buzz cut came up to her.
“Jack Dunne,” he said, putting out his hand. He then proceeded to roll up his sleeves and say, “Look at that forearm. Pretty massive, isn’t it?”
Maureen, trying to be polite and act as a college girl might act—a sorority sister, though God alone knew how they acted, since she’d never really met one, only read about them in Mary McCarthy novels—thought the best thing to do was to just agree, though really, she could give two shits about his stupid fucking arm size.
“Yes, yes, it is,” she said, smiling, polite as cat shit.
“You know how they got that big?” he said.
“Well . . . no, I don’t,” said Maureen, still smiling, thinking it was something she should know, something that only middle-class girls knew. Should she pretend to know?
“Hauling myself!” the blond flat-head said, laughing.
Maureen, her smile dropping, moved away in utter confusion. What was wrong with her? Why would people talk to her like that? Would they talk that way to Muffy Fitzpatrick or Pinky Doyle or Trevor’s girlfriend, Fluff Dawe, or any of the other girls whose very names proclaimed their class and superior position in the dating order? Oh, they had the right names, the right hair—always perfect—the right clothes. Fluff Dawe’s mother was said to have knit Fluff fifty-two angora sweaters, all in different styles and shades, in summer and winter weights, one for each Saturday afternoon skate at The Stadium—for both ice and roller skating. All those girls had the attitude too—they truly did seem to feel they were worthy. And why wouldn’t they? Their clothes always matched, their leather boots were never spongy with slush, they never had cold sores. Pimples and whiteheads were forbidden to take up residence on their perfect faces, and you’d never see them cut their own bangs. They all lived in around the back of town and couldn’t walk to their houses from the school. They had to wait to get the bus and were always accompanied by Davy, or Ronny, or Johnny, or Jerry, or some other highly desirable fella. They always had a boyfriend.
There was a time when Maureen used to wait for the bus even though she lived on Princess Street, which was just down over the hill from the school. She stood at the bus stop alone, clasping her binder with the names Grant or Keith or Joe written in pink nail polish and then marked out, replaced with some other Eric or Rob, not a member of the adorable names-ending-in-y crowd, just some non-cute dork Maureen thought she might be able to get to like her. She waited, pretending she lived in on the tree streets, until everyone had gotten on their bus and only she was left after telling everyone she wasn’t waiting for the Loop or the Number 10. Sometimes she lied herself into a corner and had to get on Route 2 and ride around until everyone she knew got off. When everyone else had got on their bus, she’d toddle on down over the hill and home to her totally not-like-TV-home home, with the Sarge ruling the roost, and her dad half afraid to say anything and Kathleen rushing to the door, her face all lit up to finally see Maureen, saying, “Mo, Mo, Mo, I’m on a diet! I’m on a diet! Mom! Mom! Ask Mom. Mom, I’m on a diet, aren’t I, Mom? Mom, Mom, Mom, I’m on a diet! . . . She put me on a diet, Mom did.”
Lost in her own thoughts at the frat party, she banged right into someone, a carbon copy of the offending hauler, except his hair was kind of long and a bit blonder.
He passed her a drink and said, “Smile. That’s my brother, Jack. He’s not all that bad, not once you get to know him.”
“I’ll take a pass on that,” muttered Maureen, but she gratefully took the drink and tossed it back. It burned all the way down, but when it hit, it immediately made her feel a little bit better, a little more relaxed. But it didn’t completely take away the feeling Maureen had that everyone could see her—the real her, not the her she was trying to pretend she was. Everyone seemed to know that she was no good, that she didn’t fit in, and that must be why they always managed to find her.
When Maureen was eight, an old man named Mr. Kearsey befriended her. He lived by himself up the road from their shack in Tors Cove. A lot of men who worked Longshore, like Maureen’s father, had fishing shacks up around Tors Cove or Mobile and they’d go there for part of the summer, but Mr. Kearsey was from Tors Cove and he lived there all year round. He was really, really old and really nice. He had been part of the 1914 Great Newfoundland Sealing Disaster, when all hands were trapped in a storm on the ice and seventy-seven men perished. Mr. Kearsey wasn’t even supposed to be aboard the Newfoundland, but he had missed his own ship and ended up on the ice without proper clothing. He had had even less to keep him alive than most of the other men there but, somehow or other, managed to live against all odds.
Mr. Kearsey was Maureen’s friend. They’d walk up to the pond to go fishing just after supper; you’d see them any evening, walking up the road hand in hand. Then one night, they were watching TV in Mr. Kearsey’s front room—Maureen and them didn’t have television in the shack—and he touched her under her underpants. Maureen knew it was a very, very, very bad thing, but at the same time, it felt good, and Maureen knew somehow that that was the worst thing, that it felt good. She knew she was a very, very bad girl doing a very, very bad thing, and yet that very, very bad thing made her feel good. She stumbled home that night and never spent any time alone with Mr. Kearsey again. But she could remember how sick with shame that good feeling made her, and so Maureen made a vow that she would never, if she could help it, let herself feel that good feeling again. And though she constantly broke pretty well all the promises she’d ever made to herself, for some reason or other, she kept that vow.
JUST REMEMBERING ALL THAT, MAUREEN BLUSHED TO THE roots of her hair there at the Student Union Centre.
“What’s wrong?” Trevor, or Bo, asked her. “You’re as red as a beet.”
“Hot flashes,” Maureen said, not thinking. Bo laughed and then Maureen laughed with him, relieved that he thought she was funny. A lot of times when people laughed at what she said, she was actually being deadly serious, but if people laughed, she’d just go along with them and pretend she’d meant to be funny all along.
“Sara’s picking me up in a couple of minutes. We’ll give you a ride home if you like,” Bo said.
“Sure, great.”
Then Maureen didn’t know what else to say. It was like she was struck dumb. She just sat there in the blood sweats for what felt like hours, trying to think of something to say, something smart or interesting or engaging. He didn’t speak either. He just kept staring at her, so she started looking around the room, but there wasn’t much to look at. There were breeze blocks on the wall, garbage on the floor, a drug deal going on at the next table—oops, she shouldn’t be staring at that, so back to the breeze blocks. Finally, she couldn’t take it anymore, couldn’t take the pressure of sitting there with nothing to say.
“Look, I’ve got to go. I’ve got to—”
“Sara’ll be here in a minute. Sit down, sure.”
She knew that if she sat there for one more second . . . Well, she didn’t even bother to think what might happen if she sat there. She just couldn’t, and so she bolted.
Oh great, now he knows you’re a retard, Maureen’s mind said.
I don’t care. I’m not interested in Bo, Maureen said back to her mind. Fuck Bo. That’s what I say. Fuck Bo and the tiny T-Bird he rode in on.
But what if Bo likes you? He seemed interested.
What? Really? Do you think?
Why do you care? You don’t even like him.
Well, what difference does it make how I feel? He might like me!
Well, you screwed that anyway, running away like a baby, like a little youngster. You’re an idiot. You’re so stupid. How can you be so stupid? How can you always be so wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, so stupid, stupid, stupid, such an idiot, idiot, idiot?
Maureen flagged down a huge Chrysler LeBaron with some old guy in a suit at the wheel. He dropped her off right at her door after the usual leering and lecherous remarks. “You don’t mind thumbing a ride, young one like you? You don’t know who’ll pick you up . . .,” leer, leer, ogle, ogle, “. . . Wouldn’t give your phone number”—hand moving across the seat—“to an old fella like me . . . blah blah, woof woof.”
Maureen flung open the door when they got to Princess Street and looked buddy right in the eye. “You’re right, I’m not going to give a dirty old ram like you my phone number. You can’t have my phone number, but you know, I might have given you a blow job if you asked me.”
She laughed at the look of shock and hurt on his wrinkly old face. Old fellas like him went around like horny old goats, but if a woman, especially a young woman, said anything about sex, well, it’d leave them breathless. Horny old hypocrites. Finally, the voice in Maureen’s head shut up for at least a minute.
WHEN MAUREEN RAN INTO BO AGAIN, HE WAS LIVING IN A bedsit on Gower Street with a whole bunch of guys and one girl, an extraordinary girl, Freda. Freda was from Montreal, had short hair and big eyes, drove a motorcycle and wore a motorcycle jacket. She looked like a beautiful lizzie and, most astonishingly to Maureen, didn’t, for some unfathomable reason, care that she looked like a lizzie. How Maureen longed to look more like Freda and not like the pasty-faced Princess Street brat that she was. Bo used to go out with this motorcycle-riding, rebellious beauty. She was from some prominent Quebec family; her name was the name of some legendary French noble family like the Bourbons or Huguenots. She was in all ways extraordinary, and Maureen quietly grew to hate her. She would actively look right past Freda every time they met. Not that Miss Big-eyed Beautiful Motorcycle Rich Bitch ever noticed. She was cold and haughty and always held herself aloof. Maureen hated those qualities in a person, especially in a woman. But, oh, how she longed to have those qualities herself and embrace them on a daily basis. Outwardly, Maureen tried as best she could to be polite, friendly, chatty and girlishly full of cheer—full of shit, really, because Maureen hated everyone. She’d just as soon get aboard a bulldozer like in her dream, start in back on the tree streets and drive everything ahead of her right into the harbour, knock everything down, demolish the whole works, lay the whole fucking thing to waste, all the time smiling that phony smile and saying with that high, bright voice, “Hiii, Freda, love your boots! . . .”
That day, Maureen was walking past the house Bo lived in, when he leaned out a window and called down to her, and then there he was, standing on the street in front of her, and before she knew what was going on, he had wordlessly swept her up in his arms and was carrying her up over the stairs as Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks blared out of someone’s stereo on the ground floor.
He threw her onto the bed . . . and then . . . But, as usual, “it” was awful. Of course, everything around “it” was fabulous. It was so extraordinarily romantic to be swept off her feet and carried up over the stairs. How wonderful that the decision was out of her hands. How delightful it was to be just ravished. But then, ultimately, “it” was so unsatisfactory and disappointing—dispiriting in a way. She didn’t let him touch her, which didn’t really seem to bother him, and in his defence, neither had it seemed to bother any of the other young fellas she’d let fuck her. Bo seemed to be quite carried away by the excitement of it all and came quite loudly. Maureen just copied what he did, and tried to breathe like him. At one point, he said, “You’re breathing heavy—you are a hot little girl, aren’t you?” Maureen was embarrassed and wanted to explain, “No, I’m just breathing along with you,” but then she thought she’d just keep her mouth shut and go along for the somewhat painful ride. She made what she thought were the appropriate noises, and he seemed well satisfied. He rolled off her, lit up a smoke and looked the very picture of smug contentment. They started living together soon after that.