Memories of the Beach. Lorraine O'Donnell Williams

crate with an old lace-edged tablecloth my mother willingly handed over for such a spiritual use. A tiny vigil lamp with a white candle and a bud vase filled with lilacs or forget-me-nots or pansies completed my bedroom shrine. I’d open my mother-of-pearl-covered First Communion prayer book, and concentrate on the mother-of-pearl crucifix inset into the inside front cover. As the breeze from the lake would came wafting in through the den to my bedroom, I spent truly holy moments contemplating the mysteries of blue Virgins and lily-clasping Josephs.

      Although my piety grew, Diane’s interest and mine in handling orange crates loaded with slivers declined. We abandoned homemaking for fashion. Just as we’d created furniture, we graduated into fashion design. Now we made clothes for near-life-size baby dolls yanked from the bottom of old toy boxes. We ignored the round hole in their mouths and its imagined pleading for the tiny nursing bottle and transformed the dolls into children who wore clothes for seven-year-olds.

      In our first attempts we wasted a lot of choice fabrics from our mothers’ scrap piles, either cutting patterns too small or sewing everything with the seams on the outside. Barred from the sewing machines, we hand-sewed everything. Stitches were crude — long, running ones of double thread. But they held the outfit together. Fortunately, we never had to make long pants since they weren’t that common for girls. To avoid pajama bottoms, we chose nighties. We mastered sewing proper armholes, necks, and side or back openings using an assortment of flannelettes, with pieces of torn white cotton sheets as the only relief. Our worst moments came when we had to use material that had once been someone’s pajamas or nightgown. It seemed icky to dress a rosebud-mouth baby doll in an evening gown made from Mr. Hillier’s pajama pants. The only exotic material we fought over — and Diane won, because it had belonged to her big sister Mayo — was a discarded leopard-print rayon blouse. Diane used up all the material so there was none left over for me. Although I thought her baby doll looked silly in her matching dress, cape, hat, and muff of leopard spots, I envied its “chic” contrast to the stripes or flowers of my doll’s heavy flannelette wardrobe.

      Once we’d mastered the basic wardrobe, we indulged in an orgy of accessories. Our mothers’ button boxes were a storehouse of gems — if one considers rhinestone buttons gems. Searching through hundreds of items and pairing a navy blouse with five buttons decorated with painted sailboats or attaching one large mother-of-pearl button at the neck of a satin evening gown made the labour worthwhile. We also rifled through the old candy tin containing “trimmings.” We’d claim odd bits of coloured lace, binding tape, net, and organdy. Soon every outfit had trimming. We used anything we could find to add a stronger fashion statement. Sometimes it was a soft grey-white seagull feather. Sometimes it was an extra earring from Auntie Flo. I even found a miniature rosary — it belonged to that nun doll I once had — and draped it as a necklace around the doll’s neck.

      Even when Diane was not around, I would sit for hours on the front veranda, the willow tree rustling in the breeze, the waves lapping on the beach, contentedly sewing away on what were essentially duplicates of every other outfit I’d made.

      “Want some lemonade?” Mom would come out and ask.

      “Yes, please.”

      I never recall any comment about what I was doing or how it looked. But compliments were not the style in our house, and my sense of worth in this — or any other endeavour — came from my own satisfaction doing it.

      Where did all those grown-up outfits go? I fear that the constant strain of putting on and taking off was too much even for those double threaded seams. And the time was coming when Diane and I would be separated for two years and that would mark the end of our first venture into couture design.

Chapter 8

       Nuns and Ravines

      Spring is in full flower this May, and I walk along Queen Street East, envying those lolling around at outdoor patios, drinking coffee amid the brilliant display of red and white geraniums flowing from hanging baskets. At Glen Manor Drive I pass Glen Stewart Park, a manicured array of gravelled walking paths, a stream whose course has been deftly altered to fit the city landscapers’ notion of a proper city park. There are warning signs all over the place — “Don’t pick the flowers,” “Wading in the stream prohibited,” “Motorized vehicles may not use these pathways.” No signs are needed warning parents not to allow children to go on their own into the upper ravine area. No parent today would allow that in this era of rapes, abductions, and murders. I reach my daughter’s townhouse and my part-time office, built on the site of where my parents’ friends, the Gunthers, used to live and about two hundred yards from where I was born. I catch the 10:00 a.m. news before I get working on my computer on the third floor. “Several students dead, many injured as two gunmen open fire in a school in the Midwest United States.”

      I loved grade school, because there I learned much about the mysteries of human nature. Our stern school building matched perfectly the stance of our parish church, St. John’s. The Gospel text surely applied to our buildings. “The gates of hell will not prevail against us!” was the message. At the entrance to each room was an opening off to one side, referred to as the cloakroom — although none of us wore cloaks. Girls hung their coats on pegs on one side, boys on the other. In winter the cloakroom had that burned smell of wet mitts and galoshes. There were no school busses to save school children from slogging through rain or snow at this time. The rest of the year the distinctive odour from the purple jelly in the hectograph copying machine overpowered anything else.