The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [41]
“Let’s sing,” Lily said. “What’ll we sing?”
“‘We Three Kings’?” said Marjorie. “‘We Three Turkey Gutters’?” “‘I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas.’”
“Why dream? You got it!”
So we sang.
Accident
Frances is loitering by a second-floor window of the high school in Hanratty, on an afternoon in early December. It is 1943. Frances’ outfit is fashionable for that year: a dark plaid skirt and fringed, triangular shawl of the same material, worn over the shoulders with the ends tucked in at the waist; a creamy satin blouse—real satin, a material soon to disappear—with many little pearl buttons down the front and up the sleeves. She never used to wear such clothes when she came to teach music at the high school; any old sweater and skirt was good enough. This change has not gone unnoticed.
She has no business on the second floor. Her glee club is singing downstairs. She has been working them hard, getting them ready for the Christmas concert. “He Shall Feed His Flock” is their hard piece. Then “The Huron Carol” (one complaint from a parent who said he understood it was written by a priest), “Hearts of Oak” because there had to be something patriotic, times being what they were, and “The Desert Song,” their choice. Now they are singing “The Holy City.” A great favorite, that one, especially with big-breasted moony girls and choir ladies. High-school girls could irritate the life out of Frances. They wanted the windows closed, they wanted the windows opened. They felt drafts, they were faint from the heat. They were tender toward their bodies, moving in a trance of gloomy self-love, listening for heart flutters, talking of twinges. The start of being women. Then what happened to them? The big fronts and rears, the bland importance, milkiness, dopiness, stubbornness. Smell of corsets, sickening revelations. Sacrificial looks they would get in the choir. It was all a dreary sort of sex. He walks with me and he talks with me and he tells me I am his own.
She has left them on their own, pretended she is going to the teachers’ washroom. All she does there is turn on the light and look with relief at her own unrapt, unswollen face, her long bright face, with its rather large nose, clear brown eyes and short bush of dark-reddish hair, uncontrollably curly. Frances likes her own looks, is usually cheered by her own face in the mirror. Most women, at least in books, seem to have a problem about their looks, thinking themselves less pretty than they really are. Frances has to admit she may have an opposite problem. Not that she thinks herself pretty; just that her face seems lucky to her, and encouraging. She remembers sometimes a girl at the conservatory, Natalie somebody, who played the violin. Frances was amazed to learn that people sometimes confused her with this Natalie, who was pale, frizzy-haired, bony-faced; she was even more amazed to learn, through a network of friends and confidantes, that it bothered Natalie as much as it did her. And when she broke her engagement to Paul, another student at the conserva-tory, he said to her in a harsh, matter-of-fact voice without any of the courtliness or sentimentality he had previously felt obliged to use toward her, “Well, do you really think you can do that much better? You’re not the greatest beauty, you know.”
She turns out the light and instead of going back to the glee club she goes upstairs. In the winter mornings the school is dreary; not enough heat yet, everybody yawning and shivering, country children who have left home before light rubbing crusty bits of sleep from the corners of their eyes. But by this time of day, by midafternoon, Frances feels a comforting hum about the place, a more agreeable drowsiness, with the dark wainscoting soaking up the light, and the silent cloakrooms stuffed with drying woolen coats and scarves and boots and skates and hockey sticks. Through the open transoms flow some orderly instructions; French dictation; confident facts. And along with all this order and acquiescence there is a familiar pressure, of longing or foreboding,