Annabel - Kathleen Winter [129]
He felt exposed and had to tell himself it was not like it had been when she was his principal. He had left grade seven long ago. She had faded out of his life, and in senior high there was a new principal. But he felt now that if he did not control his feelings, he would turn into thirteen-year-old Wayne Blake here in front of her, and she would have a principal’s authority over him.
He told himself silently that he had grown up and had left school, had in fact left Croydon Harbour behind, and did not need to feel ashamed that he now sat before Victoria Huskins looking like a young woman instead of a young man. Did he even look feminine? The lights in the food court were not bright. And even if they were, did he look like Annabel or did he look like Wayne? The only people who had given him any idea had been the man he saw earlier in the washroom, who had looked at him strangely, but had Wayne imagined that look? That man, and the makeup artist who looked like Robin Williams, and he had been so kind, so non-judgemental that Wayne still did not know how he appeared, at this moment, to someone like Victoria Huskins. And even if he did look more like Annabel than like Wayne, why should he feel ashamed in front of Victoria Huskins? He wished at that moment that his whole life had not been a secret, that lots of people were like him, instead of his being alone in a world where everyone was secure in their place as either woman or man. His aloneness was what made him feel ashamed, and he did not know why it had to be so. Now he looked at Victoria Huskins as she collected the last of her caramel sauce on the end of a plastic spoon, and he knew she was not what he had thought. There was nothing in her face that matched the idea he had of her when he was younger. She appeared to him to be much more human.
“I’m all right,” Wayne said. “How about you?”
“Retirement is wonderful. I spent most of June in the vegetable garden, and I come down here to see my sisters and my old friends from university and we cackle a lot and talk about living wills and planning for when we get old and feeble, and between that and some painting I’ve always wanted to do, there’s hardly any time left for belly dancing or getting on my stationary bike. In fact I think I might have to sell the bike and just concentrate on the dancing.”
Wayne remembered that Joanne, the waitress in Shelley’s All-Day Breakfast, had told him that women all over the world danced. They danced by themselves, in ways no one knew about. He wanted to ask Victoria Huskins now, Where was the belly dancing when you were the principal of grades kindergarten through seven in Croydon Harbour? But he did not. He could see in her face that she had found a freedom he did not have. Somehow this inflexible woman had become flexible, and she was beautiful in a way that he could not attain, though she was old. He wondered if he was imagining her new flexibility. He wondered if she was the same hard person she had appeared to be in his childhood, and if he was the one who had frozen or petrified, so that even Victoria Huskins was now softer and more human than he was. He did not know who he had become, and now here was Victoria Huskins asking him to tell her what he was doing in St. John’s.
“Are you in university, Wayne? Are you up at Memorial? Tell me what you’re studying. You were always so good at math and science, and art too. I remember when we put the class diagrams of ocean life up on the walls, you had the best drawing in the school. Some kind of anemone, wasn’t it?”
“It was a Tealia anemone.” Wayne was surprised Victoria Huskins remembered his drawing. He had spent a lot of time working out the symmetry of it.
“I always loved the grade six science projects. Are you studying any science now?”
“No.”
“Really? I thought for sure you would do something in science or engineering. But you were good at art too. Are you doing some kind of