Homesick

“Imagine what you could hear!” Phyllis would squeal, imagining herself taking down evidence.

“On the other hand, Creighton’s are supposed to be strong on bookkeeping and Dad says bookkeeping is the backbone of any business. If a girl is strong on the books he says she can rise to manage an office.”

“I could never give orders!” Phyllis would sprightly confess. “Imagine me giving orders!”

Vera certainly couldn’t imagine it.

Phyllis and Mabel spent all their time scheming about graduation, seeking to get their way as they always had done for as long as Vera had known them. As winter yielded to spring Vera watched them go back and forth to school in the snow and mud, their heads tilted together in excited discussion. Plotting, intriguing, endeavouring to pull wires. Vera knew one of their goals. They wanted to ensure that Bryce McConacher was made class valedictorian. “Sure,” Mabel had said to Vera, “the teachers have always made the best student valedictorian. But Bryce could give an inspiring and humorous speech. Not some dry as dust and mopey old talk which you can bet on getting from poor old Donald Freeman. It’s time for a change. We live in a democracy, don’t we?”

Lying on her bed with her arms folded crushingly across her breasts, Vera had to support the knowledge that loathsome Bryce McConacher was going to usurp a place that would have been hers if her father had let her continue in school. From the day she had gripped a pencil in Grade One, Vera had waged a see-saw battle with Donald Freeman for the place of honour at the head of the class, one year Donald savouring victory by the margin of a few decimal points in the calculation of their averages, the next year Vera.

However, Vera had to agree with Mabel when she claimed that Donald was no great shakes as a public speaker. Vera had always been the speechmaker. There were four oratory medals nestled in her mother’s jewellery box to prove it, emblems of consecutive victories in Grades Seven, Eight, Nine, and Ten. Vera had triumphed with the aid of her mother’s coaching. “If you have stage fright don’t look at the audience. Look over the tops of their heads at the back wall. Don’t rush your speech, it’s not a foot race with the prize going to the fastest. And remember, gesture!” Her mother, who was a postmaster’s daughter, and who had had the advantage of music lessons, even beat time with a wooden spoon as her daughter orated in the kitchen.

Stretched out on her bed, Vera found she could still mumble to herself vast tracts of those speeches she had delivered in the Community Hall to a smiling, docile audience of parents, teachers, fellow students, and various other well-wishers. Oratory Night was an event, and its prizes hotly contested. All participants understood that what was required to win was to exploit the theme of greatness, make plain the ways of success. For several months before the big night the lives of the famous were pored over in the pages of the school’s Encyclopedia Britannica.

Vera’s first medal came when she was thirteen. Standing before a large crowd, the eyes of which she was self-consciously convinced were rivetted on her developing breasts, she was momentarily bereft of words. Then she turned her eyes to where her mother sat and caught an index finger discreetly marking tempo against a purse. That launched her. In a confident, ringing voice Vera cried: “Who was Julius Caesar? A man who always followed his star. When great Caesar crossed the Rubicon boldly in front of the legions of Gaul, he was staking everything on Rome and himself.”

Vera tasted glory then, but what a pale, poor, cheating glory it was compared to the glory of graduation night, the anticipation of which could light your days for months. It was a night which had the power to transform, to raise Cinderellas out of ash pits. Vera had kept her eyes open, she had seen it happen in the past. All her old friends would be changed, none of them would be quite the same afterward. The boys would wear suits, some bought especially for the occasion, others borrowed from uncles, or brothers, or friends of the family. But all would look older, more serious.

The girls would be as no one had ever seen them before. It was rumoured that even Mary Epp would defy her parents, wear lipstick for the first time in her life and dance, if anyone asked her. Phyllis reported that Mary had already bought a tube of Heart’s Scarlet and hidden it in the toe of those sensible grey stockings she wore.

Mabel and Phyllis had purchased new gowns in the city and Mabel had been promised she could wear a family heirloom graduation night, her grandmother’s moonstone ring. How different they would all be! Vera knew how they would behave. After obtaining their diplomas Mabel and Phyllis would cry and hug and kiss one another and then graciously extend these favours to girls like Mary Epp (whom they had always despised), hoping to eradicate any unfavourable or harsh impressions that had rooted in such a person’s mind. And perhaps they would succeed and years later Mary would remember them beautiful and generous in their dresses, think warmly of them and wonder what had ever become of her old classmates.

Vera could not change herself so simply. She saw that. If Mary ever remembered her, it would be with her long white legs poking out of a crinkled dress, giving some false, silly speech about Wellington or Caesar. Vera didn’t want to be remembered that way. The idea was killing. How she wanted to be remembered was as a girl different and remarkable. And she made it happen, she seized her chance.

Vera Monkman became the first girl from Connaught to enlist in the Canadian Women’s Army Corps. By acting decisively she was safely settled in barracks two weeks before graduation day. Her friends were left feeling a trifle breathless and disappointingly upstaged. Vera Monkman a soldier, even before the boys! So while Phyllis Knouch and Mabel Tierney completed the grand march around the Community Hall on the arms of their escorts, Vera was being drilled in a grander march, up and down a dusty parade ground. Instead of a graduation frock she wore a sober coat whose brass buttons were embossed with the profile of helmeted Pallas Athene. Vera was officially at war. If she had been asked to explain what had led her to this she likely would have said patriotism, doing her bit to defeat Hitler, all the while knowing this wasn’t true, knowing it was really her instinct for self-preservation which was responsible.

Vera had come to the end of her tether. She couldn’t have listened to another moment’s chatter about secretarial school, corsages, and gown lengths. She couldn’t have borne seeing, one more time, her father chew with deliberate, dumb satisfaction a boiled potato and be able to stop herself from crying out accusingly, “So where’s your famous grief now? Forgotten when you come face to face with a goddamn boiled potato!” She couldn’t any longer stand to watch Earl waiting each night to learn if his father was off drinking supper, or would be joining them at the table. Once, when her father was twenty minutes late, and she found Earl standing tensely by the front door, listening for the sound of his truck, Vera had said, “You know, sometimes I wish he’d run that truck of his into a telephone pole and end the suspense.” And Earl had flung himself at her, sobbing and flailing her with his palms. She hadn’t really meant anything by it. It was queer how her brother behaved.

Vera couldn’t tarry any longer. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. So she bummed a ride to Regina and enlisted. The recruiting officer gave her orders to report back in two weeks. For thirteen days she didn’t breathe a word to a soul of what she had done, fearing steps could be put in motion to prevent her leaving. On the last day, with her dresser cleared and her bag packed, she put her father’s dinner in front of him and announced she was leaving.

“Army?” he said in a bewildered voice. Then not another word as he slowly cut his meat and mashed his parsnips with a fork.

“Well?” said Vera.

He looked up from his plate. “You’d do this to him?” He meant Earl.

“I’m not doing this to anybody. I’m doing it for somebody. There’s a difference.”

“Who’ll look after Earl?” he asked obstinately.

“He’s not exactly a baby anymore. He’s twelve and if he needs looking after I suppose you’re the one who’ll have to do it.” Vera shrugged. “It’s up to you.”

Monkman got up from the table, walked heavily to the stove, and poured himself a cup of coffee. With his back still to her, he said, “Such a hard girl. Nothing like your mother.”

Vera could read nothing of how afraid he was to be left alone to care for Earl from the rigid set of his shoulders. “Maybe,” she said quickly to forestall tears that were threatening to break.

Her father went slowly back to the table, set down his coffee, took out his wallet. He counted four bills down on the table, side by side. A five and three ones. “There,” he said, “it’s all I have on me. This was kind of short notice.”

Vera gathered it up. Money for the trip. He had placed it on the table as he had always done for her mother when she went away for a visit. Bills in a row, counted out, no mistake as to what you got.

He tried one last time. “You know what your mother would want you to do, don’t you?”

“Don’t you know it’s my mother’s dead and not me?” Vera answered quietly.

“Get out then,” he said. “Get out. You know where the door is. You’ve been looking at it long enough.”