He was mad at her all the time. He acted as if he hated her. There was nothing she could do right; there was nothing she could say. Living with him was driving her crazy. Sometimes she thought she already was crazy.
“Has he hurt you, Carla?”
No. He hadn’t hurt her physically. But he hated her. He despised her. He could not stand it when she cried and she could not help crying because he was so mad. She did not know what to do.
“Perhaps you do know what to do,” Sylvia said.
“Get away? I would if I could,” Carla began to wail again. “I’d give anything to get away. I can’t. I haven’t any money. I haven’t anywhere in this world to go.”
“Well. Think. Is that altogether true?” Sylvia said in her best counselling manner. “Don’t you have parents? Didn’t you tell me you grew up in Kingston? Don’t you have a family there?”
Her parents had moved to British Columbia. They hated Clark. When she ran away and got married, they didn’t care if she lived or died.
Brothers or sisters?
One brother, nine years older. He was married and in Toronto. He didn’t care, either. He didn’t like Clark. His wife was a sickening snob.
“Have you ever thought of the women’s shelter?”
“They don’t want you there unless you’ve been beaten up. And everybody would find out and it would be bad for our business.”
Sylvia smiled gently. “Is this a time to think about that?”Then Carla actually laughed. “I know,” she said. “I’m insane.”
“Listen,” Sylvia said. “Listen to me. If you had the money to go, where would you go? What would you do?”
“I would go to Toronto,” Carla said, readily enough. “But I wouldn’t go near my brother. I’d stay in a motel or something and I’d get a job at a riding stable.”
“You think you could do that?”
“I was working at a riding stable the summer I met Clark. I’m more experienced now than I was then. A lot more.”
“And all that’s stopping you is lack of money?”
Carla took a deep breath. “All that’s stopping me,” she said.
“All right,” Sylvia said. “Now, listen to what I propose. I don’t think you should go to a motel. I think you should take the bus to Toronto and go to stay with a friend of mine. Her name is Ruth Stiles. She has a big house and she lives alone and she won’t mind having somebody to stay. You can stay there till you find a job. I’ll help you with some money. There must be lots of riding stables around Toronto.”
“There are.”
“So what do you think? Do you want me to phone and find out what time the bus goes?”
Carla said yes. She was shivering. She ran her hands up and down her thighs and shook her head roughly from side to side.
“I can’t believe it,” she said. “I’ll pay you back. I mean, thank you. I’ll pay you back. I don’t know what to say.”
Sylvia was already at the phone, dialing the bus depot.
“Sh-h-h, I’m getting the times,” she said. She listened and hung up. “I know you will. You agree about Ruth’s? I’ll let her know. There’s one problem, though.” She looked critically at Carla’s shorts and T-shirt. “You can’t very well go in those clothes.”
“I can’t go home to get anything,” Carla said in a panic. “I’ll be all right.”
“The bus will be air-conditioned. You’ll freeze. There must be something of mine you could wear. Aren’t we about the same height?”
“You’re ten times skinnier,” Carla said.“I didn’t use to be.”
In the end, they decided on a brown linen jacket, hardly worn—Sylvia had considered it to be a mistake for herself, the style too brusque—and a pair of tailored tan pants and a cream-colored silk shirt. Carla’s sneakers would have to do, because her feet were two sizes larger then Sylvia’s.
Carla went to take a shower—something she had not bothered with, in her state of mind that morning—and Sylvia phoned Ruth. Ruth was going to be out at a meeting that evening, but she would leave the key with her upstairs tenants and all Carla would have to do was ring their bell.
“She’ll have to take a cab from the bus depot, though. I assume she’s O.K. to manage that?” Ruth said.
Sylvia laughed. “She’s not a lame duck, don’t worry. She is just a person in a bad situation, the way it happens.”
“Well, good. I mean, good she’s getting out.”
“Not a lame duck at all,” Sylvia said, thinking of Carla trying on the tailored pants and linen jacket. How quickly the young recover from a fit of despair and how handsome the girl had looked in the fresh clothes.
The bus would stop in town at twenty past two. Sylvia decided to make omelettes for lunch, to set the table with the dark-blue cloth, and to get down the crystal glasses and open a bottle of wine.
“I hope you can eat something,” she said, when Carla came out clean and shining in her borrowed clothes. Her softly freckled skin was flushed from the shower and her hair was damp and darkened, out of its braid, the sweet frizz now flat against her head. She said that she was hungry, but when she tried to get a forkful of the omelette to her mouth her trembling hands made it impossible.
“I don’t know why I’m shaking like this,” she said. “I must be excited. I never knew it would be this easy.”
“It’s very sudden,” Sylvia said judiciously. “Probably it doesn’t seem quite real.”
“It does, though. Everything now seems really real. It’s like the time before—that’s when I was in a daze.”
“Maybe when you make up your mind to something, when you really make up your mind, that’s how it is. Or that’s how it should be. Easy.”
“If you’ve got a friend,” Carla said with a self-conscious smile and a flush spreading over her forehead. “If you’ve got a true friend. I mean, like you.” She laid down the knife and fork and raised her wineglass with both hands. “Drinking to a true friend,” she said, uncomfortably. “I probably shouldn’t even take a sip, but I will.”
“Me, too,” Sylvia said with a pretense of gaiety, but she spoiled the moment by saying, “Are you going to phone him? Or what? He’ll have to know. At least he’ll have to know where you are by the time he’d be expecting you home.”
“Not the phone,” Carla said, alarmed. “I can’t do it. Maybe if you—”
“No,” Sylvia said. “No.”
“No, that’s stupid of me. I shouldn’t have said that. It’s just hard to think straight. What I maybe should do is put a note in the mailbox. But I don’t want him to get it too soon. I don’t want us to even drive past there when we’re going into town. I want to go the back way. So if I write it—if I write it, could you, could you maybe slip it in the box when you come back?”