The Progress of Love

scrapbook, and pasted in it were newspaper items about herself. The newspaper had invited people to enter into competitions. Who could do the most bound buttonholes in eight hours? Who could can the most raspberries in a single day? Who had crocheted the most amazing number of bedspreads, tablecloths, runners, and doilies? Callie, Callie, Callie, Callie Kernaghan, again and again. In her own estimation, she was no slavey but a prodigy pitying the slothful lives of others.
    It was only on Monday nights that they could go skating, because that was the night Miss Kernaghan played bingo at the Legion Hall. Callie kept her boy’s clothes in the woodshed. They came from a ragbag of things belonging to Mrs. Cruze, who had brought it with her from her old home, intending to make quilts, but never got around to it. All except the cap. That had belonged to Adam Delahunt, who put it in a bundle of things he gave toCallie to save for the Missionary Society, but Miss Kernaghan told Callie just to put those things down in the cellar, in case.
    Callie could have slipped off from the skating rink as soon as her job was done—she could have walked out by the main entrance and nobody would have bothered her. But she never did. She climbed over the top of the benches, walked along testing the boards for springiness, climbed partway up one of the ladders, and swung out on one hand, one foot, hanging over the partition and watching the skaters. Edgar and Sam never stopped skating till the moon was turned off and the music stopped and the other lights came on. Sometimes they raced each other, darting in and out among the sedate couples and rows of unsteady girls. Sometimes they showed off, gliding down the ice with their arms spread. (Edgar was the more gifted skater, though not so ruthless a racer—he could have done fancy skating, if boys did it then.) They never skated with girls, but that wasn’t so much because they were scared to ask as that they didn’t want to be kept to anybody else’s measure. Callie waited for them outside when the skating was over, and they walked home together, three boys. Callie didn’t do any ostentatious whistling or snowballing to show she was a boy. She had a scuffling boy’s walk, thoughtful but independent, alert for possibilities—a fight or an adventure. Her heavy, rough black hair was stuffed up under the cloth cap, and kept it from being too big for her head. Without the hair around it, her face looked less pale and scrunched up—that spitting, mocking, fierce look she sometimes had was gone and she looked sober and self-respecting. They called her Cal.
    They came into the house the back way. The boys went upstairs and Callie changed her clothes in the icy woodshed. She had ten minutes or so to get the evening lunch on the table.
    When Sam and Edgar lay in bed in the dark on Monday nights after skating, they talked more than was usual. Edgar was apt to bring up the name of Chrissie Young, his girlfriend last year, at home. Edgar claimed to be sexually experienced. He said he had done it to Chrissie last winter, when they went tobogganing after dark and ran into a snowdrift. Sam didn’t think this was possible,given the cold, their clothing, the brief time before other tobogganers caught up with them. But he wasn’t sure, and, listening, he grew restless and perhaps jealous. He mentioned other girls, girls who had been at the skating rink wearing short flared skirts and little fur-trimmed jackets. Sam and Edgar compared what they had seen when these girls twirled around or when one of them fell on the ice. What would you do to Shirley, or Doris, Sam asked Edgar, and quickly passed on, in a spirit of strangely mixed ridicule and excitement, to ask him what he would do to other girls and women, more and more unlikely, caught where they couldn’t defend themselves. Teachers at the business college—mannish-looking Miss Lewisohn, who taught accounting, and brittle Miss Parkinson, who taught typing. The fat woman in the post office, the anemic blonde in Eaton’s Order Office. Housewives who showed off their behinds in the back yard, bending over clothes baskets. The grotesque nature of certain choices excited them more than the grace and prettiness of girls who were officially admired. Alice Peel was dismissed almost perfunctorily—they tied her to her bed and ravished her on their way down to supper. Miss Verne was spread quite publicly on the stairs, having been caught exciting herself