[ 1 ]
When she was a girl, Victoria was a tomboy, and her father didn’t like that, because he had more refined plans for the girl. Those plans always remained to be seen. Her mother told her that being around boys would teach her too much before she was ready, and wouldn’t she know about that? They lived in a town in the eastern townships and Victoria supposed her mother knew all of the boys and none of them were any good. But in the summers the lake shore grew tall with rushes and the dragonflies would flit about by the water, and she would too, and her mother didn’t say anything of it then.
Her mother was tall, but where slenderness could have added elegance and grace, she had broad shoulders instead. She was known to be a woman who hesitated around men. People in the town talked but came to no conclusions about her husband, who was known to them simply as a man, and her father had already passed so this relationship could not be scrutinized. She had a daughter, of course, which was all right because a son may have been a poor match. She was young when she had the child and they expected a certain outcome from the upbringing. That also remained to be seen.
Of all the things Victoria inherited from her mother, her height and weight were the most evident. Physically she was a tall and heavy child. She had thick, dark eyebrows and shaded blue eyes that looked down at the world rather than out at it. She was a rough child, and her encounters with other children at school and in town were framed by matters of pride. Victoria took shape from this initial structure. Her pride protected her, but it was a flimsy thing, and she knew this even as she kept it close to her and so she felt a great uncertainty about her life.
Now, her father worked seasonally, and so he spent summers out west and left Victoria and her mother to their own at the house by the lake. He went out to the oilfields where the money was good and his sense of duty as a husband and father puffed up with distance. He held many false impressions and this was one of them. Victoria did not look up to him, and although she looked down at most people, he was all too often in the line of her examining eyes. In his life he held perhaps only one true impression, and this was that Victoria’s mother undermined him when he was gone.
These were facts that Victoria was beginning to understand about her parents. By now she was eighteen. It was June and she was alone with her mother at the house by the lake. There was a fine mesh of dew in the early morning that softened and cooled the earth, like a damper keeping back the heat and grit of the day. Her mother was in the sunroom on the back porch. Victoria slid the screen door open to step through and sat across from her, and for some time they sat before her mother spoke. She said, “I heard from your father.”
“What did he say?”
Her mother shuffled in her seat. “You know how he gets. He’s upset with me.”
“About me. Is that right?”
“He hears it from the rest of the town. Says I’m too loose with you.”
“I want to know what exactly he hears.”
“It’s not about that. Don’t think like that, Victoria.”
“What’s it about then?”
“It’s about how people see it,” her mother said.
Victoria scoffed. “If that’s all it was, people would only see a girl out by the lake.”
“You know it’s not that simple.”
“Well, why isn’t it? I’m not doing anything. I’m just being myself. At least you know how I’m like.”
“I do, of course I do.”
“Then why does no one else?”
Her mother grasped for her words. “This kind of thing, it’s hard to explain at your age. You want to know everything faster than it will come to you. You can’t force that. You’re young. Let it come when it’s meant to. It takes time.”
“You always say that. I’m not a child.”
“You’re not. You’re growing up. But there was a time I was like you. I thought I knew everything, only I wasn’t even close. I see a lot of myself in you. Your father acts like there’s not half of him that made you. It might be the only thing he’s ever been right about.”
“Good. I don’t want to be like him.” Victoria didn’t say that she didn’t want to be like her mother, either. Outside, the lake thumped on the underside of the dock.
“There’s one more thing I have to tell you, Victoria.” Her mother had shut her eyes.
“What is it?”
“Your father is coming home. Early. Don’t know why, he won’t tell me. He arrives tomorrow.”
Victoria straightened and set her jaw, and stood up. At that moment she looked as much like her mother as she ever had, and then the counterweight swung. She stepped outside into the morning and it was hot and the dew was dry already. Her mother slumped back into the cushions, listening to her retreating footsteps as the girl went down to the water.
Victoria’s height and weight were indeed like counterweights within her. Between the rising of the one and the grounding of the other, she was evenly balanced for many years. But by fourteen she began to lose her weight and grow taller. Her pride swelled within her just the same as it did in her father, and it cut away the heaviness she felt about the future.
As Victoria developed physically she had the attention of the town boys. When she flit about by the lake, she was well seen and desired, yet she had no sexual reputation and no interest in one. She did nothing with those boys, but her careless and boyish attitude made it so that she stood out, and for someone like Victoria to stand out was extraordinary. She tanned well, she was not only a good sunbather but a good swimmer with the boys, she wore her bathing suit top when the other girls covered up inside, she smiled widely and did all those things that men notice. She smoked, too, although it never lasted long because when her father came home he would take her cigarettes when he went out. But she would pick it up again the next summer, when she was seen more by the town and less by her father.
The problem was not that Victoria did any of these things for the attention of men, but that she was seen to be doing so. Once the town saw her in a certain manner it was not so easily undone. That summer she waited tables at a local restaurant, and she drew attention like business until she came to expect it as the nature of things. Her mother was half right, she thought. She knew too much before she was ready, but this was a good thing, because she could use it to her advantage when the time came.
When her father came home that summer with burns along the left side of his body, the interruption was a significant one. He hadn’t called when it happened but simply laid seething in the hospital until it healed, and then made his way back east. The heat of it had to have been a lasting heat that enraged him. He felt he had been neglecting his women and by his absence permitted Victoria to become the town whore. The first time he hit her, it was dark on the back porch, and he was drunk, and she could not see his face. The second time he hit her, it was plain day and his face was hot like melting wax, and she did not recognize him even though his face had not been seared in the fire. As time passed that summer she could not sink low enough beneath the lake’s glittering surface, or rise high enough above her body, to get away from the person she was becoming from it.
If she had learned anything in life by then, it was that she was a strong girl made to be weak. She thought well enough of herself at this. It was only natural that of anyone, she would be the one to bear it. She built up her weakness as a strength, and one year later she left town with a boy who meant to protect her by separating her from her father. He succeeded in one, but not the other. Not long after they arrived in Montreal, she left him.
[ 2 ]
The boy had known Victoria throughout their school years together. He had always been drawn to her, not by desire like the other boys, but by inquisition, as if she was an object glinting in the corner of his eye. He envied the carelessness of her and studied its qualities. They mirrored qualities of his mother that he could not make sense of, and perhaps by examining how they developed in Victoria he would learn something about her.
His younger sister would often say that their mother was not around anymore, and this was a half truth. She would say it because she liked to imply that their mother was dead. There was an urge to inflict pain that swelled within her at times and her older brother did not understand it. But there was already too much else to make sense of and too much to do. The boy worked in roofing with his uncle and took care of the household with his younger sister. These were adult matters and they fell upon his narrow shoulders before he had the chance to fill out.
Adolescent matters were not all gone. But in the town adolescent and adult matters had started to bleed together, and Victoria was the bridge between the two. In the evenings when people gathered around the supper table, they were able to talk through a great deal of issues under the disguise of Victoria. The boy and his younger sister were no exception that summer.
“What do you suppose that girl thinks about?” his younger sister asked.
“Who? Victoria?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know, really,” the boy admitted.
“Herself, probably. That’s what I think.”
“Could be.”
“Doesn’t she remind you of our mother?”
“You think so? I don’t see it right away.”
“She’s careless,” his sister affirmed.
“Maybe. But she’s young. She can afford to be. Don’t you think that’s part of growing up?” The boy said this even though neither of them knew the parts of growing up. “She doesn’t have responsibilities. She doesn’t have us.”
“Yeah, but that’s what I’m saying,” his sister went on. “I think if you start now, it never goes away. I won’t be careless. You shouldn’t be either.”
“Come on. You’re projecting.”
“Maybe I am,” she said. “I really just don’t like that girl.”
“It’s all right.” The boy sighed in the way some understandings are shared between siblings. “I’ll give you something though. She is an interesting girl.”
So you see that these were the kinds of conversations you could have about Victoria, or really through Victoria, and they spread across the murmuring town in the evenings just the same as lamplight and drawn shades.
The boy worked on a lot of houses, and even in a small town it was not often that the houses belonged to anyone he knew. The best houses to work on were by the lake, where the wind cooled and deepened as it passed over and then came off the water. That summer he worked a lot by the lake but not a lot with anyone he recognized, except for one house. The black shingles were hot when the wind idled, and the sun beat off the finished roof in ripples that rose up into his vision. But there was no mistaking the girl he saw. Even from a distance, Victoria caught the eye.
She was crouching on the dock as it bobbed in the lake, staring down into the dark water that even the full sun could not penetrate. By crouching she appeared very still, not in a manner of relaxing or lounging, and for someone who was known to flit about this was unusual. It seemed as if she was trying to collapse in on herself, and for perhaps the first time her body could not have been seen as an object of desire; in fact it was almost grotesque. It struck the boy suddenly that he was watching her in a private moment. He pulled away and went back to work and his face was red, but it could have been from the sun.
When he went to leave that afternoon, she was pulling a canoe out to the boat shed. Her eyes flicked up to him and they settled deeply under her eyebrows.
“Need a hand?”
“No.”
The boy took the other end of the canoe anyway and they carried it up off the shore. “I saw you out on the dock earlier,” he said.
“I didn’t know it was you up there.” Victoria straightened. “You were watching me?”
“You didn’t look so good.”
She pointed to the sunburn on his neck and said flatly, “You don’t look so good yourself.”
The boy laughed. “Yeah, right. Well, I was just thinking that maybe something was the matter.”
“No. Nothing was. And don’t think about me. Everyone else already does, and it’s no good.”
“Right.” He tried to keep his face steady.
“I can see you thinking still. Just quit it.”
“How’s your father? I heard what happened,” said the boy. He rubbed the sunburn on his neck as if testing the sensation for himself.
“Bad. Go tell everyone it’s bad and maybe they’ll talk about him instead of me.”
“Bad for him or bad for you?”
“Excuse me?”
The boy glanced off to the side. His face became red and this time it was not from the sun. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to ask. It just came out. People have been talking—”
Victoria cut him off. “That’s all they ever do. And all you’ve done is ask me questions. And how many have I answered?”
“Forget it then,” he said shortly, and the sunburn felt hotter on his neck now, “but don’t blame me for wondering if maybe something was wrong. I just care.”
“Why? I hardly know you. I didn’t ask you to care.”
The boy looked up quickly at her, and said, more to himself than her, “No, you did. That’s it. You did, even if you don’t know it.” He had a satisfaction on his face that she couldn’t read, and then he left.
Victoria hated to be studied. She went back into the house and closed the door to her room. She studied herself in the mirror on the back. What did her body look like, anyway? Was she heavy, or did she only feel it? Something else crept into her mind. The boy cared about her. Her pride had never let that in before.
[ 3 ]
Like Victoria, the boy’s younger sister felt victimized by the world, which had acted and made its will known through her mother. She disliked Victoria because when she looked at her it reflected back the ugliness in herself. The only difference between them was opportunity. Victoria could get away from the antagonizing of the world, the presence of her father. The younger sister could not escape the absence of her mother. It was just there.
Over the winter her brother and Victoria had become close. With the roofing work buried under the snow, the boy had got a job in the kitchen of the restaurant where Victoria continued to wait tables now that she was done school. The work was hot and hard on the body but he was used to this. He talked to Victoria on breaks and after their shifts at the back of the restaurant. An affection grew between them, even after their encounter over the summer, and this he was not used to.
The younger sister saw this affection as a certain betrayal on her brother’s part. But how could it be, if the two girls were indeed so similar? Did her brother not have an affection for her as well? She was tormented by this line of reasoning. It was better in the back of her mind, unexamined. But with Victoria flitting around her so much, especially when she started dating her brother, it was all too easy to examine it anyway.
But the fact was Victoria was not flitting about anymore. Around this time it became known through talking in the town that there was something wrong in Victoria’s household. The younger sister suspected that her brother had known about this all along. Of course Victoria herself would say nothing on the matter; she was strong enough on her own. But it was coming to a point one way or another and the counterweight was set for another swinging arc.
Perhaps you could say their relationship was one of opportunity. In truth, both of them had hidden intentions. There was Victoria, who needed a way out of a broken home, and found a boy who cared for her in a way she had not experienced before; and there was the boy, who studied her and meant to test her and see what she was made of, if she was indeed no different from his own mother.
It was the boy who eventually introduced the idea—which was Victoria’s idea—of leaving. That evening, and it was March then, they sat outside by the back of the restaurant in the biting cold. The boy said, “We could get away, you know.”
“You really think so?” Victoria replied.
“I do. I was thinking. I’ve got a cousin in Montreal. We could get a place. I could get a job. It would be all right. It would be better than this.”
“What if it’s just the same as it is here?”
“I don’t think it will be. You have it bad here. See how you feel when you get away.”
“I’ve never left anything behind before,” Victoria said.
“It’s part of life, I suppose. You can’t let it stop you.”
“What about your sister?” she asked.
The boy smiled. “I’m not worried about her. I think she’ll be better on her own for a bit. Away from me. Not in a bad way. But you know I kind of turned into a father figure for her. At some point, everyone has to get away from their parents.”
“Your mother took care of that for you,” Victoria said, and it came out kind of harshly.
“Yeah. It doesn’t bother me, though,” the boy lied. “What am I supposed to do, wait around for her? Better to just leave it in the past.” He paused. “How do you feel about leaving your mother?”
Victoria sighed. “I don’t know. I know what she’d say, though. Running away with a boy, kind of. I feel like she knows it’s coming, the way things have been going lately. She has to, right?”
“You know her better than I do. If you think so, you’re probably right.”
“Yeah. I know her better because we’re basically the same. I’m following right in her footsteps, and I don’t want to.”
She sat with the boy and the weight of the decision they were making together blanketed over them for a few moments. The boy did not ask her how she felt about leaving her father, and then they went back inside.
In May, when Victoria and the boy left for Montreal, the boy’s younger sister moved in to stay with their uncle, at least until she could move out on her own, and she was content. The great swell of Victoria that had battered the town passed, and the town murmured a little when she moved away and after that only sometimes.
The same contentment could not be said for Victoria. In Montreal, weakness followed her and it sapped whatever strength she had built up for it. It was as if she had used it all up leaving her father and then once she arrived in Montreal she left the boy too, because she believed he only loved her when he could pity her. Separated from her father, she was no longer pitiful.
It’s true that the boy had wanted to protect Victoria after what had happened with her father. But it was Victoria’s pride that had always protected her before, and she would let it again, except this time it was all spent and left her exposed to the world. The girl felt heavier than ever, and the feeling did not pass. It was in her body, in her gut, like a nausea inside her. She was sinking, her weight was dragging her down, down beneath the surface of her life where even the full sun could not penetrate, and her height was no longer enough to keep her head above the water.
[ 4 ]
Everywhere in the boy’s life there were holes made by the people who were supposed to fill them. His mother and now Victoria were gone and they had left behind absences in their place. His younger sister filled up the rest, and it was good that she did.
“I’ve been better,” he told her over the phone about life in Montreal, which had really become life without Victoria. “I don’t really know where it came from. You were right, though. She turned out to be just like our mother—took off just as things were starting to look all right. I can’t believe it.”
“To be honest with you, I don’t know if I believe that anymore,” his sister replied.
“What, about them being similar?”
“Yeah. Maybe we’ve all grown up a little, or something.”
“Right now, I’m not sure I can see any difference,” the boy said.
“I get it. Well, it must have been a shock for her to leave. Her whole life was in that town. And I’m not sure it was good for her.”
“Why choose to be alone then, why now, with so much going on? I don’t understand her.”
“Do you need to understand her?”
“I don’t know. I thought so,” he replied. “I was always looking for something in her. Maybe that wasn’t fair of me.”
“I think it’s going to come back around,” the younger sister said. “And maybe this time, you won’t be looking for something in her, and it will be all right.” She paused, and then continued, “I was thinking. What if I came up to Montreal? Take your mind off things for a while.”
“I’d like that,” her brother answered. “Really, I would, although I probably don’t sound the most enthusiastic now. Miss me?”
“Something like that,” she said.
And anyway, the younger sister was tethered to nowhere. The eastern townships had never done her much good. Her mother was gone, her brother too now, but in a different sense. Her uncle was kind, but hardly family like her brother. She wanted to see Montreal for herself.
Victoria was too proud usually to be surprised by much. But the past months had been hard on her, so she was taken aback when the boy’s sister asked to meet her for a drink. Coffee would be fine, she had replied. They met in the morning and it was cool like it used to be at the house by the lake.
There were the expected pleasantries for a little while. Awkward, because they had never talked much, the two of them, and didn’t they know they didn’t get along? Once there was nothing ordinary left to talk about, Victoria got to it. “I didn’t think you cared much for me,” she said.
“I didn’t,” the younger sister said frankly.
“Does he know you’re here—with me?”
“No. But he’d be a fool if he thought I wouldn’t do what I wanted.”
Victoria shifted in her seat. She didn’t know what the girl wanted and it made her nervous. But she had come anyway, so better to find out. “Why are you here, then?”
“It’s better, isn’t it?” the younger sister continued.
“What is?”
“Getting out of that town. For you, I mean.”
“I haven’t had the easiest time adjusting,” Victoria said.
“I didn’t know. Why not? You were always capable the way I saw it.”
“What do you care? You just said yourself you never liked me.”
“It’s not true anymore. Well, I don’t know you that well, still, I admit. But I didn’t give you a chance before. I thought maybe I could ask about you and my brother. You know,” the younger sister said, searching for some common ground, “girl to girl.”
“We split up,” Victoria replied. “I don’t know. It was my fault, I just couldn’t do it. Is that what you want me to say? We can’t come back from it. It’s done.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“It’s true.”
The younger sister shifted in her seat and Victoria saw that she was also uncomfortable, for some unknown reason. “It was never about you, you know. Why I didn’t like you, I mean,” she said. “I used to think you were just like my mother. You probably know all about her by now. Then I thought that we’re kind of similar, too, even if you won’t say it. So really I saw myself in my mother, and that scared me. I hated her, but she’s not around anymore, so I hated you. I thought that would make me feel better. And I want to say I’m sorry. I put all that on you. It wasn’t fair.”
Victoria studied the girl. Maybe she didn’t have it in her to fight anymore, or maybe it was something new, but she said at last, “Well all right. I’m not going to hold it against you now. It’s in the past. And anyway I get it. I don’t want to be like my mother, either. That does make us similar.”
The younger sister smiled. “I think we are more similar than we let on. I guess that’s not so bad after all.”
The two girls drank their coffee and it was nice as the morning unfolded. These were the mornings at the house by the lake that Victoria cherished, when the day was delayed so much that she thought maybe it would never come.
“All right,” the younger sister continued. “I put myself out there. Now you—why did you break up? I mean, what really happened?”
“Do you think we’re just like our parents?” Victoria asked.
“No. Well, I was afraid of it, from what I just said. But I don’t think it’s true.”
“I’m turning out to be just like my mother. She got with my father young and they ran away and had me. I’ve already started down that path with your brother. That’s why I left. I had to. I couldn’t end up doing the same thing. Because now—” Victoria tried to keep going but her throat closed up. The pride she had stored up for years was coming out. Whatever strength, whatever weakness it may have been started pouring out of her and she couldn’t control it.
“Now...?” The younger sister was noticing the change in her intently and with the kind of concern the boy once showed her.
“Now,” Victoria managed to get out, “I’m pregnant.”
The boy’s younger sister said redundantly, “Are you serious?”
“I don’t know what to do. How can I tell him, after everything that’s happened?”
“You have to. It has to be all right.” The younger sister reached across the table to hold Victoria’s shaking hands.
“I’m just like my mother. And I hate that that’s a bad thing. I care for her a lot, you know. But I couldn’t be her.”
“You’re not just like her. I mean, maybe you are in some ways. That doesn’t have to be bad. We all have to get some of our mothers.”
“And our fathers?”
“None of them.” The younger sister laughed. She wasn’t sure if Victoria was ready to laugh about something like that but she felt it was right. “Yeah, that’s right. Some of our mothers, and none of our fathers. And the rest we fill up with our own selves.”
“How can I tell him?” Victoria asked again. “How can I tell my mother? And that damn town. Imagine the scandal.”
“Don’t think about any of that. You told me. We’ll take care of it. Just us. The two of us who are only like some of our mothers.”
“Okay,” Victoria said. “Okay.”
The endless morning was still cool and soft when they parted ways, and watching her, you might have said that Victoria began to flit about again.
It was in February the following year that Victoria had the baby. As expected, the counterweight swung again, but this time it did not swing all the way to the other end of its arc. It fell back idly and it began to settle somewhere in the middle. Victoria felt a balance within herself for the first time since she had been a child. And why? Looking into her baby’s tight shut eyes, she only hoped that it was not because she had passed on her height and weight to the girl.