Kathleen Winter - Annabel

But he was sitting in the food court with a hot chocolate in a paper cup, thinking about whether to get noodles from China Hut or some teriyaki chicken from Koya Japan, when he saw someone he knew. At first he hoped it was not the person he thought it was. He did not want that person to see him in the clothes he had bought from Fairweather. Several times now he had thought he saw people he knew from Labrador. It was a thing that happened when you went to a new place. People from your old home seemed to appear, but it was an illusion of place, and when you got close to them, you realized they were not that person at all. This had happened to Wayne a few times. Once he even thought he saw his father, but of course he had not. But this woman looked more and more, the closer she got to Wayne, like his old school principal, Victoria Huskins, the woman who had berated a child in kindergarten for having an accident in the school washroom. The woman responsible for suspending Thomasina Baikie the time she took Wayne to the hospital when he was in grade seven. She had come out of the drugstore where he had just had his face made up by Robin Williams, and she had entered the food court and was now looking around at the different stalls as he had done, trying to decide what she was going to eat, and he was still waiting for the moment when he could tell himself it was certainly not Victoria Huskins, but a stranger, when she recognized him.

WHAT HAPPENED, WAYNE WONDERED, to make a person like Victoria Huskins appear younger after her retirement? Without saying anything about his appearance, she greeted him with what felt like genuine warmth, asked if he was free to chat with her while she had her lunch, and left her bags at his table while she went to get herself a Dairy Queen cheeseburger and a caramel sundae. When she came back to the table, she did not unwrap the burger but began eating the sundae.

“I’m having dessert first.” Her hair was straight instead of being held in a controlled helmet style as it had been when she was his principal, and she had grown it so that it framed her face in a way that was pretty. “How are you, Wayne?”

He felt exposed and had to tell himself it was not like it had been when she was his principal. He had left grade seven long ago. She had faded out of his life, and in senior high there was a new principal. But he felt now that if he did not control his feelings, he would turn into thirteen-year-old Wayne Blake here in front of her, and she would have a principal’s authority over him.

He told himself silently that he had grown up and had left school, had in fact left Croydon Harbour behind, and did not need to feel ashamed that he now sat before Victoria Huskins looking like a young woman instead of a young man. Did he even look feminine? The lights in the food court were not bright. And even if they were, did he look like Annabel or did he look like Wayne? The only people who had given him any idea had been the man he saw earlier in the washroom, who had looked at him strangely, but had Wayne imagined that look? That man, and the makeup artist who looked like Robin Williams, and he had been so kind, so non-judgemental that Wayne still did not know how he appeared, at this moment, to someone like Victoria Huskins. And even if he did look more like Annabel than like Wayne, why should he feel ashamed in front of Victoria Huskins? He wished at that moment that his whole life had not been a secret, that lots of people were like him, instead of his being alone in a world where everyone was secure in their place as either woman or man. His aloneness was what made him feel ashamed, and he did not know why it had to be so. Now he looked at Victoria Huskins as she collected the last of her caramel sauce on the end of a plastic spoon, and he knew she was not what he had thought. There was nothing in her face that matched the idea he had of her when he was younger. She appeared to him to be much more human.

“I’m all right,” Wayne said. “How about you?”

“Retirement is wonderful. I spent most of June in the vegetable garden, and I come down here to see my sisters and my old friends from university and we cackle a lot and talk about living wills and planning for when we get old and feeble, and between that and some painting I’ve always wanted to do, there’s hardly any time left for belly dancing or getting on my stationary bike. In fact I think I might have to sell the bike and just concentrate on the dancing.”

Wayne remembered that Joanne, the waitress in Shelley’s All-Day Breakfast, had told him that women all over the world danced. They danced by themselves, in ways no one knew about. He wanted to ask Victoria Huskins now, Where was the belly dancing when you were the principal of grades kindergarten through seven in Croydon Harbour? But he did not. He could see in her face that she had found a freedom he did not have. Somehow this inflexible woman had become flexible, and she was beautiful in a way that he could not attain, though she was old. He wondered if he was imagining her new flexibility. He wondered if she was the same hard person she had appeared to be in his childhood, and if he was the one who had frozen or petrified, so that even Victoria Huskins was now softer and more human than he was. He did not know who he had become, and now here was Victoria Huskins asking him to tell her what he was doing in St. John’s.

“Are you in university, Wayne? Are you up at Memorial? Tell me what you’re studying. You were always so good at math and science, and art too. I remember when we put the class diagrams of ocean life up on the walls, you had the best drawing in the school. Some kind of anemone, wasn’t it?”

“It was a Tealia anemone.” Wayne was surprised Victoria Huskins remembered his drawing. He had spent a lot of time working out the symmetry of it.

“I always loved the grade six science projects. Are you studying any science now?”

“No.”

“Really? I thought for sure you would do something in science or engineering. But you were good at art too. Are you doing some kind of design or drafting?”

“I’m not at Memorial.”

“Are you at one of the technical colleges?”

“I’m not at any kind of college. I’m working.”

Victoria Huskins had unwrapped her burger but now she looked at it, wrapped it again, and put it in her purse. “People don’t know this,” she said, “but you can reheat a burger and it is every bit as good as it was fresh. What kind of work, Wayne?”

“I’m working for one of the wholesalers on Thorburn Road.”

“What kind of wholesaler?”

“Food. I have my own refrigerated van. I make deliveries all over St. John’s and part of Mount Pearl.”

“What do you deliver, Wayne?”

“Meat. Fish. Different kinds of sausages.”

Victoria Huskins looked him in the eye. She did not linger on his hair or his clothing or his makeup. “So you are selling meat from a van.”

She had not asked him about his appearance. They were a thousand miles from Croydon Harbour. She waited for him to tell her more but did not appear to be curious about his maleness or femaleness.

“I never thought of going to Memorial,” he said. “I’m working on figuring out a lot of other things.”

Now her face changed. “What kind of things?”

Wayne felt his own story amass as a cloud. He could not be coherent about it. He wanted to talk to someone but he did not know how, because somehow the facts, with their tidy labels and medical terms, reduced his whole being to something that he did not want it to be. How could he sit here and tell Victoria Huskins what the doctors had labelled him without reducing himself to the status of a diagram like the one she had mentioned: his grade six diagram of the North Atlantic Tealia anemone? He could not begin to explain, so he sat without words. He did not know if he could trust her, and even if he could have trusted her he could not explain his whole being with words. The cloud rose in him and reached his throat, where it amassed as a blockage that felt leaden and sorrowful. He felt it as a lump that threatened to silence him.