Nobody mentions anything about this missing time, except my mother. Once in a while she says, “That bad time you had,” and I am puzzled. What is she talking about? I find these references to bad times vaguely threatening, vaguely insulting: I am not the sort of girl who has bad times, I have good times only. There I am, in the Grade Six class picture, smiling broadly.
My parents labor away at our house. Rooms are being constructed in the cellar, gradually and with a lot of hammering and sawing, in my father’s spare time: a darkroom, a storeroom for jars and jellies and jams. The lawn is a lawn now. In the garden they’ve planted a peach tree, a pear tree, an asparagus bed, rows and rows of vegetables. The borders are lush with flowers: tulips and daffodils, irises, peonies, pinks, chrysanthemums, something for every season. Occasionally I have to help, but mostly I watch with detachment as they upend themselves in the mud, digging and weeding, clay stains on the knees of their pants. They’re like kids in a sandpile. I like the flowers, but know I would not go to such lengths, make such efforts, get myself so dirty to produce them.
The wooden footbridge over the ravine is torn down. Everyone says it’s about time, it was getting so unsafe. They’re going to replace it with a bridge made of concrete. I go one day and stand at the top of the hill on our side of the ravine, watching the bridge come down. There’s a pile of rotten boards down by the creek. The vertical piles are still standing, like the trunks of dead trees, and part of the cross-planking is attached to them, but the railings are gone. I have an uneasy feeling, as if something’s buried down there, a nameless, crucial thing, or as if there’s someone still on the bridge, left by mistake, up in the air, unable to get to the land. But it’s obvious there’s no one. Cordelia and Grace graduate and go elsewhere; Cordelia, it’s rumored, to St. Sebastian’s, a private school for girls, Grace to a high school farther north which emphasizes math. She’s good at adding things up in neat little rows. She still has her long braids when she graduates. Carol hangs around near the boys at recess, and is often chased by two or three of them. They like to throw her into snowbanks and rub snow into her face, or, when snow is lacking, to tie her up with skipping ropes. When she runs away from them she flings her arms around a lot. She runs in a funny wiggling way, slow enough to be caught, and screams loudly when she is. She wears a training bra. She isn’t much liked by the other girls. For Social Studies I do a project on Tibet, where there are prayer wheels and reincarnation and women have two husbands, and for Science I do different kinds of seeds. I have a boyfriend, as is the fashion. Occasionally he sends me a note across the aisle, written in very black pencil. Sometimes there are parties, with awkward dancing and clumsy guffaws and horseplay by the boys, and wet, inexpert, toothy kisses. My boyfriend carves my initials into the top of his new school desk and gets the strap for it. He gets the strap for other things too. This is admired. I see my first television set, which is like a small black-and-white puppet show of no great interest.
Carol Campbell moves away and I hardly notice. I skip Grade Seven and go straight into Grade Eight, missing the Kings of England in chronological order, missing the circulatory system, leaving my boyfriend behind. I get my hair cut. I want to do this. I’m tired of having long wavy hair that has to be held back by barrettes or hairbands, I’m tired of being a child. I watch with satisfaction as my hair falls away from me like fog and my head emerges, sharper-featured, more clearly defined. I’m ready for high school, I want to go there right away.
I reorganize my room in preparation. I clear old toys out of my cupboard, I empty out all the drawers in my bureau. I find a solitary cat’s eye marble rolling around at the back of the drawer, and some old dried-up chestnuts. Also a red plastic purse, which I remember getting for Christmas once. It’s a babyish purse. It rattles when I pick it up; inside there’s a nickel. I take the nickel out to spend, and put the marble inside the purse. I throw out the chestnuts.