Gail arrived at the wheel of her mother’s Alfa Romeo with a friend of hers, Veronica McKay, whose parents owned the large Norman-style house to the east of the Egan property. They were laughing, elbowing each other in the ribs like partners in crime preparing their next heist. As if they knew something extraordinary was in the works. The clubhouse parking lot was filled with small sports cars, their motors purring; you came to the high Mass led by James Dean in your car, certainly not on foot.
My father had refused to lend me his Chevrolet Bel Air. Voices were raised at home, and I slammed the door as I left. I was heartbroken to see that the Coutus’ Rambler was gone, Jean and Paul had left already. They’d been luckier than I with their folks. All I could do was jump on my old CCM that had lost the lustre of its first summer, even if it meant getting there with rings of sweat under my arms. What humiliation.
I spent a long time in my room, anxiously contemplating my sparse wardrobe. A discouraging sight. My mother owned a clothing store, sure, but she didn’t sell jeans and leather jackets. They were for people raised in barns, and for thugs you read about in the newspaper, stories about robberies in Montreal or Quebec City.
I chose black pants and a white button-up shirt with short sleeves. The collar was heavy, stiff as cardboard, and chafed my neck. I gave up trying to do something with my too-short hair, and settled for slicking it back with a part down the middle.
The reflection in the mirror over my dresser was a sad sight: a little kid from another decade who’d aged too quickly. I looked like someone had been trying to shelter me from modernity at any cost. My uneducated parents couldn’t understand that the future belonged to the young.
Go out and have fun? Life isn’t fun and games, son! It’s made of duty and responsibilities.
Yet in that summer of 1962, I felt like a man, proud of my six-foot frame, a beard beginning to shade my cheeks, my body, better proportioned now, had begun to grow stronger from the hard hours at the sawmill. It was nothing like the previous summer, when the rest of my body had not yet caught up to my hands and feet, still growing, waking me in the night in painful spurts. I’d been in pain all summer, so much so I spent almost no time at all in Métis Beach, unless it was to honour my contracts. Once I went to the Egan house with my father, where we were supposed to repair the garage’s rotten roof. I could barely stand straight on my legs, and lacked any coordination at all, but I was bigger than my old man by a good head already — though that didn’t stop him from treating me like a child, “You’re useless, good for nothing!” I sought his affection all through my childhood without ever finding it — he was distant, icy, and when we found ourselves alone, he kept a sour look on his face at all times. His eyes, usually lively when he was with other people, became empty. The nail never properly hammered, the paint never applied well, the gutter not clean enough — always something to criticize me for. And if a few dead flies escaped my vigilance, he picked them up with his fat fingers and stuck them under my nose, “And what’s this? Are you blind?” That summer, I had lost my balance after stepping on a piece of rotten roof, and my foot had gone right through it. Instead of worrying about me, he began yelling, loud enough to attract Gail’s attention. She came over from the garden and stared at us for a moment, perplexed, and my pride had been so hurt that I avoided her for the rest of the summer.
But that summer of 1962, everything had changed. I was a man — I believed I was — and my English was getting much better thanks to two winters working for McArdle.
Inside the clubhouse, Jean and Paul were waiting for me, greased hair, satin jackets and collars popped, simultaneously embarrassed and proud of their get-up. I had a seat reserved next to them, as usual. Françoise freed herself earlier than usual, waved her hand at me when I walked in, all excited like a little fat girl in a candy store.
“Sorry, boys. I want to be closer to the screen tonight.”
Jean and Paul looked at me, offended, as I continued on my way and sat in the third row, only a few seats away from Gail and Veronica McKay, my eager eyes on Gail. A few times, she turned her head towards me, small movements, a question in her eye, as if she felt spied on. I smiled at her, and she frowned. Maybe she didn’t recognize me in the darkness. Or she was looking for someone else.
We were all distraught at Plato’s death, played brilliantly by Sal Mineo. At the end of the movie, Gail, Veronica, and the other girls were wiping their eyes with tissues, teasing each other. The boys, meanwhile, dreamt of being those rebels with tortured souls, modern heroes far more attractive than their fathers’ and uncles’ great men of the war.
Nicholas Ray’s work filled me with a powerful feeling of failure. I had lost my chance when I abandoned the seminary. Too late now, I couldn’t go on to study like the characters in the film, or the kids of Métis Beach who were already in university or would soon be.
On the dew-covered lawn in front of the clubhouse, some of us walked in a veil of our own thoughts. In the gravel parking lot, motors were being revved up, and car headlights cut our silhouettes out of the surrounding night. Gail chatted away with Veronica McKay, her head still on a swivel as if she was looking for someone who hadn’t come. She seemed nervous, overexcited. Art Tees came to offer her something, and she spoke to him brusquely. He turned back and walked to his bottle-green MGA, looking vexed. You could see it by the way he jiggled his keys around his finger. After such a night, and such a movie, a boy rejected by a girl could do nothing but feel humiliated.
And yet I was walking towards her, my heart about to beat through my chest, my knees wobbling. As I got to her, I spoke breathlessly, “How’s university?”
She seemed insulted, all of a sudden, as if I was making fun of her. “I see you haven’t heard the latest news.”
Next to her, Veronica was ignoring me with awe-inspiring expertise, “You’ll come and get me after? I’ll be over there, with Johnny.” She pointed towards a group of kids smoking around Mrs. Babcock’s Mercedes. She disappeared and Gail straightened her arms before crossing them over her breasts. She clearly was in no mood to continue the conversation. From the corner of my eye, I saw Jean and Paul’s Rambler, with Françoise in the passenger seat, staring at me with her cow eyes, boiling over with blame.
I went on, “You’re not at school anymore? Why?”
Falsely enthusiastic, she answered, “I’m engaged, didn’t you know?” I hesitated, and she laughed, indignant, full of rage. She cursed her parents for forcing marriage on her only a few weeks past her eighteenth birthday, in October, with the heir to Drysdale Insurance, a certain Donald Drysdale. Everything organized already. A large, expensive wedding at the Montreal Ritz-Carlton; everybody would be there — all the richest families in the country, a few cabinet ministers, and even Frank Sinatra himself, who had agreed, for an indecent sum of money, to sing Love and Marriage. I felt my heart tearing.
“Great.”
“Great?” she said, disgusted. “My life is going to end! Gail Egan will cease to exist! I’ll be my husband’s wife and my children’s mother, like all the rest of these interchangeable women.”
“What about being a lawyer?”
She shuddered. “They don’t give a shit! A respectable woman stays at home, takes care of dinner parties, children, and the help.”
“Don’t get married, then. Marriage and children, it’s all a trap. Simone de Beauvoir said it herself. Have you read her?”
Her eyes narrowed. Those eyes shining such a strange light that night. She barked a laugh, “Who?”
“Simone de Beauvoir. She’s a feminist.”
“A what?”
“A feminist.”
An insane laugh, wild, as if she were looking at a donkey that had learned how to add and subtract. Hurt, I was about to turn around and leave, when Veronica called out to her, “Gail! I’m here!” She was seated in the sporty Mercedes next to Johnny Picoté, who looked like a grotesque rockabilly caricature with