Crossings by Betty Lambert

on.’
    â€˜I can’t. Look at the back. It isn’t there.’
    â€˜So?’
    I took them both, signing the cheque for forty-six sixty-five in fear and trembling.
    â€˜Now shoes,’ said Edna.
    â€˜Oh I’ve got to have tea first. No, I’ve got to. I’m sweating like mad. I can’t do anything else until I have some tea.’
    But after the tea I bought high-heeled sandals, beige, with clear plastic inserts between the straps. Sixteen ninety-five. ‘Plastic,’ I said. ‘My god, I’ve gone utterly vulgar.’
    â€˜Nothing that costs that much can be vulgar,’ said Edna.
    â€˜I can’t wear them in front of Grace,’ I said.
    I look back and I remember, in all those nine years of my marriage, exactly what I bought and how much I paid for it. The black winter coat, forty-eight dollars; the two yards of tweed for the jumper, two dollars and ninety-eight cents; the red perforated shoes with crepe soles, nine ninety-eight. Yes. I’d had to ask Ben for the money. I was broke and I had to have shoes to go to the scholarship committee. I had to ask him for ten dollars. He paid my room and board but not my clothes or books or fees. That was agreed. I hated asking him. I bought the most sensible shoes I could find. I figured they’d last me through my last year. They did, and I hated them.
    The Mexican blouse and skirt: forty-eight pesos. The wicker handbag: forty. The navy blue suit when I started teaching: forty-eight dollars; the paisley dress: eighteen ninety-five in Bellingham. The black pumps: three dollars and ninety-five cents.
    I had clothes when I married of course. And they lasted me all those years. A red shorty coat, a brown tartan skirt, the useless white linen two-piece I bought for the wedding, the two-piece blue suit Aunt Forbes got for me at the rummage sale. My mother went berserk over the tartan skirt. It cost eighteen ninety-five, and that was a lot of money then. A Nat Gordon.
    â€˜You’re selfish!’ she said. ‘Through and through.’
    But I was right about that skirt. It lasted. I gave it to the Salvation Army only three years ago.
    The night before I was married, she said, ‘If you aren’t good to him …’ not finishing.
    â€˜What?’ I said. ‘If I’m not good to Ben, what?’
    â€˜I’ll never forgive you,’ she said, her mouth tight.
    We were up in the attic room. The self-contained room with the stove and the sink. I paid forty dollars a month. For board too. But I could make my own meals if I wanted. She had come upstairs to ask if there was anything I wanted to know.
    â€˜I probably know more than you do,’ I said.
    â€˜You probably do,’ she said.
    â€˜From books,’ I amended. She sniffed. My mother began to accuse me of losing my virginity quite early. She would see a bruise on my arm or a red spot on my breast and she would say, ‘You’re no virgin!’ And so I was determined, out of spite, to be a virgin on my wedding day. Ben and I were getting married two months early because a week before, as we fooled around upstairs on my bed, It had slipped in for a second. Very limp, very scared It was. And just for a second. But now I considered myself no longer a virgin. Not even technically. My practice was to pet madly until I had an orgasm, and then to retire from the field, Virtue Triumphant. It was lucky I wasn’t killed.
    â€˜Everybody thinks you’re getting married because you have to,’ Momma said.
    â€˜Well, Everybody can wait for nine months and see,’ I said loftily.
    But I had a twinge of doubt. Was it possible? Surely not. But I went around those first weeks in agony, thinking maybe it was possible after all.
    It was my mother’s belief that I was born rotten and that losing my virginity would prove it once and for all. ‘You wouldn’t even suck!’ she would say.
    And, ‘You’re not in love