Page 37 - WTP Vol. X #7

door behind her. She stays in there for a long time, hours maybe. Elinor listens with her ear pressed against the door, but their voices just sound like mud. She can hear her grandmother mostly, a deep voice and then her mother’s voice, like a long, warm whisper. In between there is silence and then it starts again.
~
Next-door lives a girl called Jane.
She sometimes comes and rings the doorbell and asks if Elinor wants to play, but Elinor doesn’t
want to play. She used to, sometimes, let her in. They would go out into the garden and Jane would chase the chickens around the lawn. She wanted
to pick them up and she kept running after them even though Elinor said they didn’t like it. And
Jane would go up the stairs and go to her mother’s bedroom door and even though Elinor whispered, “No” Jane would open the door and go into her mother’s bedroom. Then she would stand there and stare at her. Elinor stayed outside, Elinor hid in the bathroom, she felt her breath get so hot it felt like her mouth was burning.
“Hello Mrs. Reading,” Jane would say, “how are you today?” Elinor could hear her mother’s long, warm whisper, and then the silence and Jane would just keep standing there, staring at her mother.
When her grandmother is there, she opens the door if the doorbell rings and she always lets Jane in. She says it’s good for Elinor to play with other children. Her grandmother doesn’t let Jane go upstairs, but sometimes, if her grandmother is on the phone with one of her girlfriends or watching a show on the TV, she doesn’t notice and Jane sneaks upstairs. Jane
doesn’t dare to stay in there as long though, when Elinor’s grandmother is around. Then Elinor says they can go to her room.
Jane has babysitters and Elinor is quite interested in this. They come on the weekends at night when her parents are going out. Sometimes they even come on a school night. A few times, Jane has told her, they have stayed the whole weekend. Elinor doesn’t have babysitters, her father hardly ever goes out and if
he does her grandmother comes over to look after her. The babysitters are young girls and Elinor keeps asking what they do together, and Jane tells her that they watch TV together, they eat sweets, the young girls draw pictures for Jane of flowers and animals. The girls wear make-up and sometimes they show Jane how to put it on. Once, one of the babysitter’s boyfriend came over. The girl showed him through to the lounge and poured him a bourbon. He said to Jane she was a pretty, little girl, and Jane said to Elinor that he was very handsome. “Handsome,” Elinor says.
On weekend nights, Elinor sits on a tall bench in the dormer window in her room. Her room faces the street they live on and she can see cars and people coming and going. People arrive at the houses with big arrangements of flowers in cellophane. They ring the doorbells, the doors open and light shines out through the open doors and people greet each other with hugs. The sound of laughter reaches Elinor sitting in her window before the doors closes again. She sees the babysitters arrive at Jane’s house next door. They arrive on bikes with their long blond hair flowing behind them, they come walking down the street with handbags over their shoulders or cars drop them off, then they bend down and wave at the car window before they ring the doorbell and are
let into Jane’s house. Shortly after, Jane’s parents,
Mr. and Mrs. Evans, come out the door. Mr. Evans is wearing a dark suit or a tuxedo, his hair shines and doesn’t move in the wind. Jane’s mother, Mrs. Evans, is wearing a long dress in a shiny blue, violet or white fabric. In the winter, she wears a fur over her dress and in the summer a light shawl over her shoulders. Walking to the car, they turn and wave.
Mr. Evans is a doctor and once Elinor went over there with a long list of questions. She wasn’t sick so it wasn’t likely she would be going to their own doctor anytime soon, and she had questions she wanted answered.
Mr. Evans opened the door and called Jane but Elinor
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