Loose Morals

Celia liked winter more than any other season. There was something very satisfying about the way the snow covered the dirt and grass evenly. It felt very tidy and as far as Celia was concerned there was too little tidiness in the world. She sometimes said stuff like that aloud and her friends would laugh and tell her she was like an old woman. It was fine for them to laugh. They had tidy lives and tidy families: Celia only had her grandmother.

Amelia Sweeney was a classic, a grandmother-type from the movies or from a sitcom. She wore long shapeless dresses, cardigans knit from wool in the corned-beef spectrum and solid black boots. Boots that weren't even in style when she was a girl, just boots she liked. Mrs. Sweeney haggled with store clerks, even at Wal-Mart, her past failures to negotiate were not a deterrent to her current efforts. She was born and bred here in Newfoundland but she was like someone from the old country. An indeterminate old country, where they wore out of date clothing and randomly assimilated the eccentricities of other cultures. There was nothing in her past that should have produced the curmudgeon that she was today, and no apparent reason for the hodge-podge of traditional values she imposed upon Celia.

Sometimes Celia thought that her mother's wild ways must have had a grandfather clause, or more precisely a grandmother clause. According to her Grandmother, Celia's mother had had loose morals and despite her best efforts, Mrs. Sweeney had been unable to control her. So she was doubling her efforts to ensure that her granddaughter didn't slip from her grasp and plunge into a murky world of lost reputations, immoral behaviour and careless slidings off suspension bridges.

Since she was five Celia had been hearing about how her mother had gone joyriding with her new boyfriend thoughtlessly leaving poor Celia at home alone. The motorcycle had gone careening over a bridge into a chasm, leaving Celia and her grandmother alone in the world. That wasn't strictly true of course, Celia's father was out there somewhere, but no one knew where. Mrs. Sweeney claimed that she didn't even know who he was but Celia did.

The snow had been blowing through the vent into the attic the day Celia found the box of papers belonging to her mother. There were old love letters, school papers, even some junk mail and at the bottom, stuck between the flaps of the box was Celia's birth certificate. She was expecting to find a blank space or 'unknown' under 'father' on the form but that wasn't the case. Her information had been recorded in full, mother Margaret Sweeney, and father Darren Porter.

She tried his name with hers - Celia Porter. That could work. It got rid of that annoying alliteration in Celia Sweeney. Maybe she could hyphenate, Celia Sweeney-Porter, Celia Porter-Sweeney. Maybe once she moved out on her own she could use both names. That would be a very grown up thing to do. Celia hated to sound like an old woman but she did like to be grown up.

She sat in the attic for the better part of an hour imagining meeting her father when she was a famous writer, living in Toronto, attending parties with Margaret Atwood. Peggy would say

"Dear Celia, there is someone you simply must meet, Darren Porter…Celia Porter-Sweeney. Celia, Darren is the artist whose show opened last week at the Gallery."

Celia imagined her own reply "Darren Porter, hmm? Did you once go out with a girl named Maggie Sweeney?"

Her father would of course recognize her at that point and they would hug. He would be so proud of his grown -up daughter and she would be so proud of her famous artist father.

Her grandmother didn't recognize the name when Celia asked her about him. She claimed Maggie had a lot of men hanging around all the time and she, Mrs. Sweeney, couldn't tell one from the other. Celia didn't exactly believe her though. Her grandmother kept close tabs on all of Celia's friends and she seemed to know the details of their family lives. It didn't make sense that she wouldn't have done the same with her own daughter's friends.

There was no point in pursuing it though. Her grandmother was irredeemably stubborn and when she felt Celia was out of line, or that she didn't need to know something a wall of silence would be erected that Celia hadn't yet found a way through. So Celia resigned herself to daydreaming about Darren Porter and his romance with her mother. He mustn't have known Maggie was pregnant or he wouldn't have left her to fend for herself against Mrs. Sweeney. They must have had some lovers' quarrel and he had left, and Maggie was too proud to demand he come back to take care of her. Maggie had soldiered on with the pregnancy despite her mother's disapproval and she had nurtured Celia until the day cruel fate had taken her off that bridge with her boyfriend. That had to be the way it happened. Men didn't just abandon their pregnant girlfriends. Mothers didn't treat their children carelessly. That didn't happen. It was all a romantic tragedy, like Romeo and Juliet, but with a baby. Celia hugged her version of events to herself at night, a warmth against her grandmother's caring but distant methods of child rearing.

All of her friends' mothers felt sorry for her, called her Poor Celia, like that was her full name. She guessed her grandmother's reputation preceded her. So her friends' mothers made her cookies and asked about her plans and generally checked up on her. Being mothered by someone else's mother wasn't like having your own though. Kind of like how hanging out with your friends and their boyfriends wasn't like having your own, either. No matter how comfortable her friends were with a fifth wheel, no matter how accommodating their boyfriends were, she was still the odd girl out. She was sick of it.

She guessed that was why she was aimlessly walking along the river that Friday, kicking at the loose snow, when she came across Eric. She had been meandering along, humming to herself when someone started singing along "we had joy we had fun we had seasons in the sun". It startled her and in her bewilderment she almost slipped down the icy bank into the water.

"Sorry about that, I just couldn't resist joining in on the corny Terry Jacks song"

"Uh, It's okay, you just threw me off."

"I'm Eric."

"Celia'

"Nice to meet you, Celia"

They spent most of the afternoon wandering together along the riverbank. It was only as she started to get cold that she noticed how dark it had gotten and it occurred to Celia that her Grandmother didn't know where she was and was probably worrying. She and Eric made plans to meet again and Celia hurried home.

She didn't know why she lied to her Grandmother when she asked where Celia had been. She normally told the truth automatically but some instinct told her that spending the afternoon with a strange boy was beyond what her grandmother would find acceptable. She decided on the spot that she would get to know Eric herself for a while before letting her Grandmother in on her secret.

She did pretty well for the first while they only met after school and at the mall. Eric would accompany her on errands for her Grandmother and they would stretch the time out as long as they could. Mrs. Sweeney was a little suspicious of Celia's long absences but she attributed it to lollygagging rather than romance, and if Celia was duly apologetic when she returned her grandmother's ruffled feathers could be quickly smoothed. Celia's relationship with Eric probably would have gone on in secret for a long time if she hadn't gotten careless with her journal.

Celia had kept a journal for five years, ever since she had decided she wanted to be a writer. Every writer she read about kept a book full of musings and ideas and she was sure that you couldn't be a real writer without one. So at a time when her friends were joking about boys and gossiping into their pink fluffy, locked books with "diary" printed across the front in sparkles, she wrote character sketches of people she knew and imagined into her black, hardcover notebook. It was only since she met Eric that she started musing about boys in there. Not even boys, just one boy, and the colour of his eyes and the way the left side of his mouth curled when he smiled. She still did character sketches and jotted down story ideas but her pen seemed much more willing to write about Eric than anything else. She thought it was pretty funny.

Her Grandmother did not. On Saturday, Celia had come skipping up the stairs to her room to discover her red-faced, sputtering Grandmother sitting at her desk reading the latest black notebook,

"Celia, who is this Eric?"

Celia's truth telling instincts failed her again. "He's a character in my book."

"Oh? And this character, he 'hangs out' with you at the mall?"

"No, I made that up."

"Celia, it is best not to lie to get out of a lie. Who is this Eric?"

"Oh, Grandma, he's just this boy I know."

"Just this boy? So you kiss all the boys you know then?

"No."

"So, Eric is special?"

"Yes, Eric is special"

When Celia thought about it later, the conversation seemed so normal. A little stilted perhaps but not really out of the ordinary. In fact, she had thought it was going quite well. Until she heard the key turn as her Grandmother marched out, journal in hand and closed the door behind her.

After she recovered from the shock of being locked into her own room, in her own house, she started pounding on the door, calling out to her captor. It didn't work though. She could hear her Grandmother downstairs, closing the curtains, getting the pots out to make supper, running the water to fill the kettle. As if locking your granddaughter in her room for the evening was the most ordinary thing you could do.

Telephones and computers were unnecessary in a young girl's room, according to her grandmother, and Celia had read all of her books before, so she just lay there, daydreaming about Eric, constructing elaborate apologies to her grandmother and finally, counting the bumps in the stucco ceiling. She heard steps outside her door at 9:30, and jumped up, straightening her clothes, but her grandmother went right on by and Celia heard the bath water running and her Grandmother humming as she undressed. It was unnerving, Celia was locked in her room but Mrs. Sweeney just sailed on through her Saturday, as if Celia wasn't there.

She had finally finished crying when her grandmother came in at 3am.

"Get dressed."

"Grandma, I'm really sorry for lying to you. I didn't plan on lying, it just sort of happened."

"Wonderful, so my Granddaughter is not just a tart, she's a natural liar."

"No, it wasn't like that. Wait a minute, why am I a tart?"

"You're just like your mother, sneaking around with boys behind my back."

"What? There's only one boy. And I wasn't really sneaking around."

"Oh, what would you call it, missy? Get dressed."

Celia threw on the rumpled clothes she had worn that day and followed her Grandmother down the stairs, catching her foot in the worn spot on the third stair in the dark.

"Where are we going?"

"Not far."

"Grandma, it's the middle of the night."

"I am fully aware of the time, young lady."

Just following silently seemed like the best idea, but Celia couldn't figure out why they were tramping along the dirt road behind their house in the dark, without even a flashlight, instead of talking things out like normal people. Not that her Grandmother counted as a normal person in the best of circumstances and this was the worst circumstance Celia could remember. If only her friends' mothers could see this, Poor Celia indeed.

When they arrived at the bridge over the river, Mrs. Sweeney stopped.

"Climb up on the rail, Celia." Celia just stared at her.

"I said, climb up on the rail."

"Why?"

"I'm saving you, Celia." Briefly, Celia wondered if her Grandmother had joined some new cult but that thought was cut short by her Grandmother's explanation. "I couldn't save your mother in time, she lost her reputation and never even tried to get it back. Now climb up on the rail."

"You expect me to jump?"

"Yes. Or I'll have to push you. I can't have everyone think I raised two women with loose morals."

"Grandma, I don't have loose morals, I just have a boyfriend."

"A secret boyfriend. That's the first step. I went through this with your mother, and after I saved her from herself, I thought I could do a better job raising you but I guess you got all her badness."

Celia took a minute to process this. "Grandma, are you saying you killed my mother?"

"No, I saved her. She didn't want to go off the bridge, but she had to, to make amends and to protect you."

"What about her boyfriend? And the motorcycle?"

"I made that up. She and I walked to the bridge, it was sort of like this one only higher, and she agreed to jump and then I walked back to your house, packed up your things and brought you back here to Overton with me. Now, show me you're sorry. Get up on the rail."

"No. I didn't do anything wrong."

"That's just what your mother said. How did I raise two such misguided girls?" Her Grandmother grabbed her by the upper arms and began dragging Celia across the slippery bridge towards the waist high railing. Celia could feel her grandmother's fingers digging into her biceps as they struggled. There was no way she was going over the bridge, no matter what her grandmother said. The old woman may have been able to overpower Celia's mother but Celia was a lot younger and her grandmother had aged since tossing her own daughter off a bridge.

Celia began to shiver on the walk home. She didn't know it was the enormity of the situation, or just the cold night air but by the time the rescue crews arrived she could barely give them directions through her chattering teeth.

© Christine C. Hennebury 2003

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