Notes from an Exhibition Read online

  ‘And where’s the shame in that, I’d like to know?’ Mom asked.

  And there lay the problem. Havergal was a good school. For girls it was probably the best and they were very lucky to be sent there. Through its prestige, through the friends with brothers, through sports events and carefully policed interschool dances, she was meeting the pick of the local boys, boys with old money behind them and futures all mapped out. And her family were going to let her down. Her father was only middle management in a pharmaceuticals firm. The boys she was meeting had fathers who were on company boards or they were surgeons or judges or, at the very least, political. Dad worked every hour God gave then came home and simply wanted to eat with his family and watch TV. He didn’t belong to any clubs because he didn’t see the point. He didn’t even play golf. Secretly she loved him for all this, for his lack of push, but right now it was not what she needed. Her mother was no better, since her ambitions were too naked and her clothes and background, Winnie was coming to realize, were all wrong. The only thing she did right was attend the right church, i.e. not the Catholic one. And it was through church, not Havergal contacts, that Winnie had met the boy she thought she stood some chance of marrying. Josh MacArthur was handsome, but not too clever. He was assistant captain of his school hockey team and, unless he was offered a sports scholarship to a college in the States, likely to skip university to go into sales for the MacArthur family business, which was hotels.

  He always talked to her after church, even walking her home or to their car if the weather was bad. If he saw her on the street or in a store, he came right over to talk. He liked her, she could tell he did. He paid her compliments. She even had it from one of her friends via her friend’s brother, who played on the same team, that Josh thought she was a doll. But he had never asked her on a date. The nearest she had come was when she was out with a group of girlfriends and they had met him in a group of boys. But that didn’t count as, being a good girl, she didn’t have the sort of friends who paired off under such circumstances and necked in the backs of cars. He was currently available, having been dropped for the team captain by Diana Holberton a whole year ago. Her friends said he was dumb but she didn’t care. He was polite. He was a gentleman. He would never make her feel stupid or pious. He was perfect.

  The problem, she decided, was Joanie. Since graduating from Havergal, Joanie had been running wild. She had started drinking and smoking. She had crashed her car – amazingly not hurting anyone. She had stopped coming to church. Worst of all, she had a reputation as a tramp. Joanie had never dated anyone, or not for long enough for it to be serious. She tended to treat dates as a handy means of getting out of the house and into a party, where she could then lose the date in question and have fun. Behaviour like this threatened other girls and, Winnie was certain, was where the bad reputation had arisen, not from anything more sinister.

  But this summer things had escalated. There was a huge fight with their parents one night because she was offered a place at art school but Mom was disgusted when she found this was on the basis of a portfolio containing detailed drawings of naked women in ‘graphic’ poses. (Winnie wasn’t allowed to see the originals but Dad, who had been drinking a bit, said, ‘Let’s just say their legs weren’t crossed,’ at which Mom hit the roof.) Mom had then worked on Dad and forced him to agree that Joanie could only accept the offer if she agreed to attend secretarial school for a year first, at which Joanie had called her a fucking self-righteous bitch and stormed out, stealing Mom’s car and worried everyone sick by not coming back until lunchtime the next day. Then she cut her dresses and her hair short, both badly. And then she stole money from Dad’s wallet before, the last straw, she was brought home by a policeman. He had ‘found’ her at some party where people had been arrested for smoking marijuana. Luckily he didn’t go to their church.

  Joanie swore up and down she hadn’t smoked it herself but Winnie discovered this was a lie because all the time Joanie was grounded she kept seeing her, bold as brass, leaning out of her open window so as to smoke reefers without the smell giving her away. She burned filthy incense all the time, too, which could only have come from Chinatown and which even Winnie knew was a sign.

  The atmosphere at home was terrible. Joanie was either seething in her room playing loud music or storming off slamming doors. (Grounding her had proved hard to enforce.) Mom was either haranguing her through her closed bedroom door or weeping hysterically or getting sozzled on Old Fashioneds she clumsily disguised by mixing them in coffee mugs, although they gave her breath like a flamethrower.

  Dad began to work late and Winnie would happily have learnt shorthand if it had meant she could join him at the office.

  The sad thing in all this was that she never stopped loving Joanie. But her admiration for her died, her envious admiration, and Joanie sniffed this out and began to hate her for it. She had always pretended to hate her, calling her Little Miss Perfect or God’s Dolly but this had been only to get at Mom, because she would come into her room later on and be friendly and sweet and talk about them being united in adversity. But now if she saw Winnie she just sneered or looked right through her or barged her out of the way. Winnie had come to stand for everything she hated, which was so unfair. She couldn’t help being conformist; she did it because everything else scared her so. And she couldn’t help the way she looked. The smooth, blonde perfection that still smiled blandly back at her from the bathroom mirror was no effortless blessing but took work to achieve and tension to maintain. It took so much tension that the effort to pull herself together in the morning and get herself to Havergal for classes began to give her sick headaches and sometimes she had to excuse herself from class and lock herself in a washroom cubicle and just sit there breathing deeply.

  Her friends began to fall quiet when she rejoined them. She saw the MacArthurs, as a family, cross a street to avoid her. Word was getting around. Ronnie Fleming, the friend’s brother who had agreed to be her date for the Prom, began to look hunted and then suddenly wasn’t taking her after all because he was taking Dede MacLean and blushingly let on that his arrangement with Winnie had never actually been agreed, had it, and he had a prior promise to Dede. Like hell he did.

  Jesus was no help, although Winnie didn’t give up on him. On the contrary, she began to demand more of him and started taking herself off to weekday Communion services and even Bible Study. It was on the way home from Bible Study that she saw Joanie in another boy’s car with a whole gang of them, all boys except her, driving into the Flemings’ place.

  The Flemings lived in one of the older houses, on the edge of Etobicoke really; a place whose original land must have been carved up when the area was developed. They had money. They had a cleaning lady, twice a week, and a kind of rec room for the young people built on the side of their garage in what had once been some kind of servants’ quarters or stable block. They were just the sort of people Joanie despised, especially in her new, ultra-rebellious persona. So it was incongruous to glimpse her in their midst, all in black, with her insane Beatnik haircut and trampy lipstick while they were all dressed like only slightly updated versions of their fathers and might have been on their way to a country club dance. One of the boys, one Winnie didn’t recognize, had been swigging from a Jack Daniel’s bottle and it was perhaps this inconsistency and the crazy speed of the car that made her pause halfway to her parents’ house and turn back, Bible in hand.

  Night was falling and it was easy enough to slip into the Flemings’ drive unobserved. It wasn’t like her to be so bold and brave but they had been studying the story of Deborah and she saw how a sense of righteousness could be like a flaming torch or a sharpened steel.

  There were lights on in the main house, not many, and she saw Louisa Fleming carrying a casserole out from the kitchen. There were lights on in the rec room too, but not so brightly, and there was music. The car she had seen was parked there, not over by the main house. She heard boys whooping. It was some kind of party.


  Curious, she drew closer, sliding between the car and the hedge. The curtains were drawn but there was a gap. She peered in.

  The scene was so confusing, so unlike anything she had seen before, that it took her a second or two to make sense of it. The boys were standing, huddled together, drinking and passing a reefer between them, vaguely watching something on the television. Joanie was on a sort of day bed a few yards away. Winnie only spotted her because the light from the television was flickering across her bare legs. There was a boy on top of her. When he climbed off her, she saw Joanie’s breasts were bare and glimpsed her face. It looked blurred because her lipstick and mascara were all smeared but she seemed to be laughing. Then a second boy, unmistakably Ronnie Fleming, came over, unzipping himself as though he were about to use the bathroom. He dropped his pants and, fumbling with his underwear, took the other boy’s place and started pumping.

  Winnie only watched long enough to recognize two of her friends’ brothers then she turned and ran home.

  The house was empty when she came in. Her parents were at some boring drugs company party to mark a retirement or something. She turned on lights. She felt an urgent need for lots of light. She went directly to Joanie’s room and started to go through her things. She felt sure all the answers she needed would be there.

  It was a mess, of course, unlike her room. Clothes and makeup were everywhere but also records and books and art things. For a few minutes it felt as though all Winnie’s life, all her good-girl years, had been leading up to this so that at this crucial juncture where her sister needed her to be strong, she could act with absolute, unquestioning authority. She felt as if she was a force of light dispelling a darkness that had been allowed to gather too thickly in one place. She found a tin with pot in it and cigarette papers. And pills with no proper box or wrapping on them … She found a school folder full of photographs of people of all ages exposing themselves. Some were of tribespeople, torn from Dad’s National Geographic collection, some were of white women, presumably torn from Playboy, which she had seen in his briefcase occasionally, and some were of men and women in the underwear sections of mail-order catalogues. The juxtapositions disturbed and puzzled her. Then she found a stash of drawings.

  Most of Joanie’s art was in a couple of portfolios at the foot of her bed and was familiar. The naked women drawings had been torn up by Mom. But now she found another stash, hidden under Joanie’s mattress. These were of naked men. Boys. Boys they both knew, some of them. Boys from the Flemings’ rec room. And they were touching themselves or … offering themselves.

  If only her parents had been at a dinner instead of a cocktail party, things would have turned out differently. She would have had time to calm down or maybe even taken herself off to bed and seen the situation more clearly in the morning. Instead, they came home while she was still weeping in a huddle on the stairs and she had no sooner seen their worried faces looking up at her than she felt a child again, not remotely a teenager, and everything had come spilling out in a confused tumble. If Mom wasn’t sober when she came in, she sobered up in seconds and within half an hour had packed a bag full of Winnie’s things and driven her to her grandmother’s farm an hour outside the city.

  Winnie liked it there and was relieved to escape the tensions at home, the need to be an adult, and even to have the perfect excuse for avoiding the humiliation of a Prom night with no date. Missing graduation was no big deal either, since she graduated but with predictably mediocre results. Her grandmother was all kindness and simplicity, feeding her, setting her to collecting eggs and gathering kindling, asking no awkward questions.

  When Mom fetched her back a week later she explained very carefully that Joanie was ill, in her head, and had obliged them to place her in the Clarke. She wouldn’t go into details, she was too ashamed, but she had evidently decided to blame the whole affair on drugs and made Winnie promise that if ever some boy tried to get her to smoke marijuana she would run straight to the police.

  Dad was only slightly more forthcoming. Driving Winnie into town one day he admitted that Joanie had lost control and started to see things that weren’t there.

  Nobody said anything about the pornography or the drawings, which presumably were all burnt. Winnie wasn’t about to confess that she had kept one of the drawings, the one of Josh MacArthur, for herself, having stuffed it under her sweater as they came through the door that night. She had uncreased it by pressing it between books beneath the spare room mattress at her grandmother’s. Now that she had got used to its startling contents, she had to admit it was beautiful, even though it was beauty of a dangerous sort she could never share with anyone.

  She visited Joanie in the Clarke a few times but hated going there. The staff members were so kind and clearly cared for her sister and it was nothing like the asylums in horror films but she blamed herself for putting her there and for the things they were doing to her; the drugs and the electric shocks.

  This guilt only intensified when Josh MacArthur suddenly asked her on a date after coming up to commiserate most politely after church one Sunday. It turned out he had been keen on her for months but was shy because he thought she disapproved of him.

  ‘I always found I could talk to Joanie,’ he said. ‘Seeing as she talked to me first. But I never wanted to ask her out. Only you.’

  She sat with his sisters now to watch him play hockey. Actually the violence of the sport was so unbearable she tended to spend a lot of the game watching through her fingers or playing with her gloves and listening to the terrifying, slick sound of the boys’ blades on the ice and the bloodthirsty yelling of the crowds. She became a regular guest at Mr MacArthur’s table and she had let Josh go beyond kissing her face to kissing her breasts, one and then the other. He was scrupulously fair in dividing up his attentions but she doubted she would ever have the nerve to ask him about Joanie’s drawing of him.

  When Joanie suddenly hissed at her, during a visit, to bring in her driver’s licence for her, it seemed like a chance of making amends. Not least because it involved doing something behind her parents’ backs. She didn’t think she would use it for one moment but she had seen enough of Joanie’s life on the ward now to understand how such a small symbol of independence could be precious there. It would help remind her of who she was.

  Then the bleak midwinter Sunday arrived when a police car pulled up outside the house while they were entertaining the MacArthurs to lunch and they had heard, just like that, that Joanie was dead, pushed in front of a train by some crazy Irish girl with whom she had escaped.

  ‘But I don’t understand,’ Mom kept wailing until finally her father asked her what. ‘How she got her driver’s licence.’

  ‘She took it with her everywhere,’ Winnie told her, briefly catching Josh’s eye. He was standing there, still holding her by the arm as if he felt the tragedy would sweep her out of the house like a hurricane if he didn’t. ‘She liked to say that way she could just take off if somebody asked her.’

  The crazy Irish girl was never traced and had either melted into the crowds at Niagara or crossed the border and joined all the psychos and druggies drifting around New York. Her mother came to the funeral; a tiny woman, apparently so shocked and ashamed she had lost all power of speech. Winnie coped, probably because she had Josh to support her now. He had asked her to marry him and she had said yes. They were keeping it a secret until after a decent interval but it helped her stand apart from her parents and not feel implicated in the whole sad mess of them any longer. She also liked to think that, in dying, Joanie had somehow given her a bit of her strength of character. She wasn’t so scared any more or so pious. Her faith in Jesus had gone under the train wheels with Joanie, though she was saving that bombshell for after a decent interval too.

  Then, out of the blue, she received a postcard of the Empire State Building. It was unsigned and had taken months to reach her because rain or snow had blurred the number and it had been delivered to an empty house far along h
er parents’ street which had only just been sold to a young family. All that was written, apart from the address, was Boo!

  It was probably a silly joke from some girl from Havergal she never saw any more, one of those girls with the dirty-minded brothers but, although all the evidence was to the contrary, she liked to think it was from Joanie. Joanie, she liked to pretend, had escaped them all and gone to live out her rebellious destiny somewhere wives didn’t enthuse about Betty Crocker and husbands had more to talk about than life insurance and sports. She kept the postcard in the attic, in the same cardboard box as her wedding veil and the drawing of Josh with nothing on but a boner.

  She liked to think it was Joanie’s way of saying she forgave her.

  BETTY JACKSON DRESS (1985). Linen and silk.

  Kelly purchased this in Bloomingdale’s New York branch on the morning of the opening of her one-woman show at the Mamoulian-Koralek Gallery. Typifying Jackson’s trademark of elegant simplicity, it is made from chocolate-brown linen with black silk facings and trim and had formed part of the previous year’s Fall/Winter collection. The price tag is still attached to a buttonhole. The show’s catalogue, including the groundbreaking essay by Madeleine Merluza and images of several paintings unavailable for this retrospective, may be viewed on the computer terminals to your right.

  It was one of those perfect Manhattan spring days she realized were familiar to her entirely from their Hollywood facsimiles and they were finishing a long and delicious lunch in a little bistro. The leafy square behind them bore all the hallmarks of recent gentrification: clean pavements, fresh paint, an organic bakery and a civilized coffee bar with red leather club chairs and the day’s newspapers. They had paid for their own flights but the gallery had put them up in the tiny apartment Thalia Koralek maintained for guests in a new condo development in what had been a derelict school. Thalia had explained that the district, derelict school and all, had been a no-go area only a year or so ago, a network of crack dens and sordid squats, a fiefdom of some drug gang on which the new mayor had waged a protracted war. The new colonizers of the district had retained just enough touches of the square’s bleak past – and what Thalia called street – to lend a teensy trace of danger to flatter the incomer’s liberal heart.