Leaning, Leaning Over Water (11 page)

This both shocked and freed me and I mumbled, “I’m all right.” I crossed the room quickly and walked deliberately past him, letting him know that I’d watch whomever I liked in my own house. I sat on the front steps and his wife squinted at me and patted my shoulder. “Poor motherless child,” she said, and I was furious that she felt sorry for me. She didn’t seem to notice, and called back cheerily through the screen, “Almost done, darling?”

His hands answered
bang bang
on one low key. He’d been turning his head this way and that before I left the room and
I wondered if he’d been trapping sound waves so he wouldn’t be fooled and tighten something that would leave a sour note on my piano. I squirmed on the front steps until Father, who looked as uncomfortable as I’d ever seen him, gave me his warning look.

“What a view,” said the blind man’s wife, looking out over the river, oblivious to both Father and me. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a view.”

The opening ceremony was to be held on a Friday night, the dress rehearsal on Friday afternoon before the entire student body. The school had been readied: walls had been rubbed free of fingerprints; classes of younger children could be heard chanting recitations; the school choir, newly formed, was forever practising
“À La Claire Fontaine,”
and
“O Canada! Terre de nos aïeux,”
every recess and noon.

Because I was part of the rehearsal and opening number, I did not have to file into the gym with the rest of my class, Crawfish sidling up beside me in the line. Instead, I went through the backstage entrance, three steps up from a doorway in the hall.

Grades one to eight filed conspicuously into the gym and took their places in rows of fold-up chairs. Everyone seemed awed by the cavernous space after the one-room schools; it was still that new to us. Our little dance troupe stepped forward. The stage curtains had not yet arrived, and when I took my place at the piano and glanced at the girls lined up along the front of the stage, I saw that we were exposed like gaping fish washed up on a cliff shelf. I was glad to be on the fringes, though I could still be seen by the rows of faces that
shone up like rounded buoys, from the backwaters of the darkened gym.

Each girl stood stiffly with a cane in one hand, a black top hat in the other, the hats tipped jauntily over the row of heads. Together, they were perched like thirteen Mr. Peanuts. I heard a rap on the hardwood floor, my cue from Miss Tina to play the opening bars. The sheet music was propped in front of me but when I raised my eyes all I could see were shifting lines of the same note. I felt a lightning movement inside my head. I hesitated and Miss Tina rapped again. The girls looked back over their shoulders. My hands came down on the keys,
bang bang,
and I thought,
Blind man.
I stumbled into the opening bars and made a quick decision to wing the piece by ear. I couldn’t see the page anyway; it had moved away from me, in a blur.

I was aware of twenty-six feet keeping time and a chopping movement to my right, as thirteen canes axed in my direction at forty-five degrees. I had to get through the piece twice, never playing faster than the feet could
tap tap tap
and
shuffle shuffle.
As long as I did not think about separate notes, as long as I kept the rush of memory intact, my hands moved without any assistance from me. I knew that even one thought could break the flow. As soon as I thought about thinking, the thread frayed and snapped.

My hands floundered. I chorded left. My head emptied. Mind flown, memory flown. The dancers carried on, unaccompanied. I could hear the scraping of soles against dry wood. The feet stopped. I wanted to shout the way Father did,
“Keep up the beat!”
but the dancers had lost their place and so had I. The audience was still. There was no need to look out to that dark sea when I could feel it rolling up towards me in a crushing wave. I placed my hands on the keyboard and tried
again, this time from the beginning. I was incapable of starting in the middle. The dancers did not move. I tried again. They made a collective decision to follow and their bodies jerked forward. I thought of thirteen Mr. Peanuts cracking open and then I tried not to think. My hands took on a speed of their own and rushed through “Pretty Baby,” too quickly, two more times. The black sea inside the gym swallowed. There was a long silence during which the audience seemed to wonder whether to clap. The dancers, bewildered at this, tipped forward and left the stage. Not one of the girls looked at me.

I tried to slip out through the stage door into the hall but Miss Tina caught up with me. Behind us a row of younger children had already begun to recite,
“Dame Trot came home one wintry night, A shivering, starving soul…
” Miss Tina slipped an arm around my shoulder and turned me to face her. “Trude King, this is something you can do and do very well. You know it and I know it. What you probably don’t know is that when we have problems in rehearsal, it’s a good omen for a solid performance at night.” She hugged me and I carried on, not wanting to return to the gym to join my class.

I knew now that no matter how hard I tried to lie low, I was always going to end up being a spectacle. My lungs were dry and I stepped into my room so I could be in my seat when my classmates returned. There was nowhere else to go.

But Crawfish was there before me. He was behind the door and when I opened it he moved quickly, forcing me to bump directly into his flabby chest. There were tears rolling down both blubbery cheeks.

“We’ve been humiliated,” he said, and I felt his thick fingers groping at my bare arms. I forced myself to squint into his face.

“Oh, Trude,” he said. “Of all those girls, why did it have to be you?”

I yanked away and ran for the washroom. I stayed there until I heard the school bus and then I went back for my coat and ran for it, again.

Lyd did not mention the rehearsal. Nor did Eddie, who seemed to have forgotten by the time we got home. Lyd and I were used to sharing our misery in public, now, and knew there was nothing to say. If I failed at the evening performance, the failure would be hers, too. Worse still, it would be in front of Father, whom we were forced to drag along.

I went into the clothes closet and stood between the blouses. “The hell with Crawfish,” I told Mother. “I don’t want him bawling on my shoulder. He won’t leave me alone.” My hands and arms and shoulders were knotted and tense as I went through, not every note, but every finger movement of “Pretty Baby” in my head.

We returned after supper and approached our new school, which was lit like a horizontal beacon in the dark. We had not yet had our first snowfall but I could smell its promise in the air. We’d arrived on the school bus that had been sent to St. Pierre to fetch the Protestant families for the grand opening. Parents, too, had come on the bus, riding with a grown-up air of levity that was easy to see through. I spoke to no one, but lines of one of Father’s poems streamed through my head:
Into the jaws of Death, Into the mouth of Hell, Into the jaws of Death, Into the mouth of Hell.
I refused to look at Father, who was standing with the other parents, packed into the aisle. He was wearing his one brown suit and both Lyd and I
tried not to acknowledge him in case he would say or do something outrageous.

We entered the school through the front door, the teachers’ entrance, and I noticed that, already, the P had fallen off the wall outside, leaving ROTESTANT in its wake. A program was thrust into my hands. I’d never been to the school at night and was surprised by the artificial light illuminating the halls. Voices were not harsh the way they were during the day. The ceilings seemed low and there was a silken echo from one end of the school to the other, an atmosphere of high reverence. The teachers were dressed in fancy clothes—pleated skirts and sheer blouses—and their manners were more formal and less punitive in intent. I did not go to my room because of Crawfish. I took off my coat and handed it to Lyd. She looked as if it were she and not I who was headed for slaughter. She crushed my coat to her chest and her mouth made a kind of grimace that was meant to give me support.

The stairs inside the stage door were high and slippery with new wood. The piano looked like a piece of heavy machinery; the stool in front of it wobbled lopsidedly, something I’d never noticed before. The thirteen girls were pressed amoeba-like into the wall at one end of the stage, waiting in terror for the gym lights to go down. I did not feel my feet as I walked forward and took my place on the uneven stool. Miss Tina was calm and composed and was wearing, not her skimpy leotard, but real clothes. It was her last night in the school and she did not seem at all disturbed by the vast audience below.

But it was only
after
the performance that I remembered all of these details, not before. My pre-performance self existed in some other, closed space of its own. I played “Pretty Baby” with my eyes closed, or so I told myself at home that night,
after Lyd and I had gone to bed. I had made up my mind to play well and I did. Not too quickly, no notes missed. The way I played had nothing to do with Miss Tina’s kindness and nothing to do with Father’s anticipatory pirouette, executed at the entrance of the school after we’d climbed down from the bus in the dark. The way I played had come out of my will. The dancers followed every beat and I knew it would be safe to face them the rest of the school year.

But when I returned home, and before I fell into bed, I walked into the empty living room and pulled the lid over the keyboard of my piano. I raised the cover of the bench and dropped in the
Play Piano
folder I’d last worked on, and on top of that, “The Whiffenpoof” and “The Midnight Fire Alarm.” I could feel the weight of Father’s hands on my shoulders as I closed the lid of the bench. I would not tell him my decision. Sooner or later, from my triangle of space behind the piano, I would hear what he had to say.

It was Crawfish I was going to have to deal with now. I began to steel myself for the things I would have to do to stay out of his way.

I hung my clothes in the closet and shoved aside Mother’s blouses. I stood there, eyes wide open, “Pretty Baby” still rippling through my fingers and wrists. I listened to the silence of the house and thought of the thirteen dancers that evening. How they’d straightened their torsos and slid back a row of right feet in their last dying “Pretty Baby” shuffle.

1957

I
knew Father was worried about our future when I found him at the desk in the living room altering tax receipts. On the desk were a bottle of ink remover, a dropper and a fountain pen. He was working under the glare of the gooseneck lamp and I leaned over his shoulder to watch. He placed the edge of the blotter beneath the line and changed
five
to
fifty.
The receipt had been signed, T. S. Donnell, Treasurer. Father moved the decimal, squeezed in an extra zero and blew on the paper, to dry. It was a very professional job.

“Isn’t that cheating?” I said. “Dad?”

“Louis St. Laurent is still eating rare roast beef and mushrooms on my taxes,” he said. “Duplessis isn’t showing any signs of quitting, either.” He was not in a good mood.

I went out to the kitchen and found Lyd dyeing her shoes. One arm and both hands were blotched with canary yellow shoe dye. She held the dauber upside down.

“Leo wants me to go to the dance tonight,” I said. “He has a date for you.”

“No,” she said. “Definitely not.”

“His friend is tall.”

“No.”

“Well then, give me a reason.”

“I can give you more than one,” she said. “I’ll give you two. I hate blind dates, and you’d be lying. Father would kill us both if he knew you were lying.”

“It’s not a blind date. Leo knows him. He isn’t going to bring someone you’ll hate. And I’ll tell Father I’ll be with you. The truth.”

“Partial truth.”

“It’s a stupid rule, Lyd. If I’m with you or a bunch of girls from school, I can go. If a guy asks me out, I’m not allowed.”

“Not my rule,” said Lyd.

“I’m not staying home. Anyway, I need you to do something with my hair.”

From the way she looked up I knew she sympathized. During the week, I’d chopped my own hair trying to make myself look older, and had made a real mess of it. I’d never done that before.

I thought of Leo then, how he and I danced together, and I added, “You can wear your canary yellow shoes.”

With this, we both snorted with laughter. The day before, we’d taken the bus to Hull and crossed the river to Ottawa to shop in the only store that sold women’s shoes, size ten and up. Although it was a store we hated, it was not without interest.
It was a small narrow shop with displays lining the side walls, nothing longer than a size nine in sight. Everything else was hidden away. The all-male sales staff greeted women as they slipped in and out of the Sparks Street entrance. A bell tinkled overhead every time an oversized foot pressed the welcome mat at the door.

Lyd and I were ignored but we’d braced ourselves; we’d been there the summer before and we’d been ignored then, too. We walked around the edges of the shop, keeping an eye on women in matching suits, purses and gloves. We did not know who they were but, clearly,
they
were rich and we were not. We were there only because of the size of Lyd’s feet, and because she’d saved enough babysitting money for one pair of shoes.

The oversize shoes were discreetly stacked in towers of boxes behind what Lyd and I called the
Curtain of Dread.
Eventually, an older man came over, took a look at the two of us, took a look at Lyd’s feet and pointed to a chair. “Kick up the pumps, kid,” he said, and held out his hand for her foot. That really set us off.

The reason I was with Lyd in the first place was because it was unthinkable for her to be in this store alone. If humiliation was going to fall her way, we would share it. Over the past year and a half we had devised a repertoire of foot-andheight rituals that we carried out every time we were in town. It was my responsibility to walk on the inside because sidewalks slanted downward towards the curb and Lyd felt shorter on the outside. If I forgot, she hissed and rushed around behind me. We knew we would have to keep up this behaviour until her feet and the rest of her body stopped growing but we had no way of knowing when that would be.

“Don’t work on me, Trude,” she said now. “You know I
hate the dances on Skinner’s Road. I always end up with the one guy who comes up to my armpits. Tell me why the shortest guys ask the tallest girls to dance. Tell me that.”

“Maybe they never had Mommies,” I said. But the remark had flown out of me before I could stop it.

We never talked about the
details
of Mother, the reminders of the
life
of her. We’d never given away the special dresses, the hand-sewn ones that still hung in the long closet in plastic wardrobes. Or the brush-and-mirror set that had been cleared off the top of her vanity and crammed into a bottom drawer. We didn’t speak of the way she’d never gone out without first putting on a pair of earrings or a pair of white gloves, even to take the bus to town to get groceries at the A&P. Or the time she hauled the Queen Anne chairs and the Tiffany lamps and the kitchen set down to the riverbank, chopped them up and burned them because she wanted something new, of her own.

“Do you think we don’t have enough money?” I asked Lyd.

“We don’t have two cents,” she said. She sounded like our mother when she said that. She even looked like our mother.

“Not us. I mean the family, Father. He’s cheating on next year’s tax receipts in the other room.”

“I don’t want to hear it,” she said. “I absolutely do not want to hear it.” She stood up and dangled two brilliant yellow shoes from her index fingers. “Done,” she said, and held them out for me to see. These were the shoes we’d come away with the day before, the one and only pair the salesman had carried out from behind the
Curtain of Dread.
They were flats, straw flats. Yesterday, they’d been mauve. Lyd had not expected them to fit and they hadn’t. She’d paid up and we’d run out the door and kept on running for two blocks until we
reached the corner of O’Connor. We’d stood in front of Zellers, gasping for breath until we calmed down.

“We’re cursed,” Lyd said. “The females in this family are doomed to have big feet.” I didn’t agree because I was pretty sure mine had stopped growing, but I didn’t say anything. Then we went inside, and Lyd picked out the canary yellow shoe dye.

I began to work on her again. With or without permission, I was going to the dance. It would be a lot easier to get past Father if Lyd and I were to leave the house together. But Lyd liked to stay home.

Father and I—I wasn’t sure how this had come about—had begun to set up resistance to each other. No matter how small the issue, our wills collided. He didn’t seem to be able to deal with the fact that Lyd and I were turning ourselves into women—though she and I never talked about or even spoke the word. It was like being on an unstoppable journey, heading into future unknown without parental approval. If Father had noticed that we were growing up, he wasn’t letting on. Lyd and he were okay, and Eddie managed to stay out of his way, but sometimes he and I would look each other in the eye and anger would erupt. He was trying to keep me back, I thought; he was trying to hold me down in childhood forever.

I remembered a prediction Mother had made on my tenth birthday. “You,” she said. “Just wait till you’re in your headstrong years. Your fighting spirit will rear up from its hiding place and come rushing out, just like your father’s. I never saw a child so strong-willed.” But even as she’d warned, I’d felt her yield to the complicitous weave of genes. Wills. One will rising to meet another. Nothing could prevent that.

Lyd surprised me suddenly and gave in. It was an unexpected collapse of
her
will. She pushed a foot into one yellow shoe and stood in the middle of the kitchen and took the shoe off again.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll go. But this is the last time I’ll be your cover. Get the scissors and I’ll start working on your hair.”

Though Leo and I liked to dance together, most of our conversation was about his car. He had quit school two years earlier and bought an old green Pontiac. It needed so much work I knew there would never be an end to it. Already, he’d done fender repairs, paint job, had added secondhand tires and a furry beige cover that stretched across the front seat. Leo was five years older than I, the reason I had to keep him away from Father. He was also teaching me to drive. When we were in the car together on country roads, I slid over beside him and shifted gears while he took care of the clutch. Twice, when there’d been no traffic, I’d climbed across and taken over the wheel completely. I couldn’t get my licence for another year and a half, but by then I planned to be an expert driver.

Lyd did not approve of Leo. Too old, she said. Watch out for him. And dumb sideburns. Temperamental about his car, too. What I hadn’t told her was that he’d begun to collect glasses and saucers and cups at the drive-in movies, and that these were stored in a cardboard box in the trunk of his car. He’d talked to me about wanting four little red-haired children but it had never occurred to me that he had me in mind as their future mother. I didn’t have so much as a streak of red in my hair and neither did he. There was simply no connection.

One afternoon when he picked me up at my high school he
let me have a glimpse of a photo he held in one palm and quickly covered over with the other. It was a photo of a pyramid of adult bodies, all naked. Each naked body was doing something to the one on top and the one below. I was shocked by the photo but my reaction only made Leo laugh. He had taken the photo from his father’s collection at home, he said, and would have to put it back. I was too young to have a second look, he told me. He pressed his hands against my hips. “What the girls in the picture know is how to wiggle these,” he said.

Another day, he told me that once the work on his car was finished, he was going to save to buy an old farm. When he had enough money, he would start to fix
that
up.

I knew there were people like Leo and my childhood friend, Mimi, who seemed to know what their future would be and then shaped themselves to fit the plan. But when I looked into my own future I could see nothing ahead but space. I didn’t know what Lyd would do, but
my
plan was to get out of St. Pierre as soon as I finished school. I had no idea what would happen after that. The plan, if there was one, was simply to leave.

I didn’t see Mimi often any more but Lyd and I had met her on the bus when we were coming home late from school one Friday afternoon, at the beginning of May. We had boarded the bus on Taché Boulevard near the Standish; we’d moved to the long seat across the back, and there she was.

Mimi was only a year older than I but already she looked older than Lyd. She’d quit school in the village after Christmas and now worked as a filing clerk for the government, in Ottawa. She’d had to lie about her age, she said; she and her mother had fixed her birth certificate.

She was wearing a shiny green dress that was sheath tight,
and three-inch black patent heels. She wore large earrings and long beads that made me think of the rosary I’d once painted and that we’d buried beside the river. We’d never gone back to dig it up. Seven or eight bracelets clattered up and down her arms and as they slid over her bones I caught a glimpse of tiny wrists. She was wearing eggshell make-up and I could see the line where it ended, along the side of her neck. Lyd and I were allowed to wear lipstick, that was all.

When we got off at the same stop in the village, she invited me to come over. “We hardly ever see each other now that you go to school in Hull,” she said. “Grand-mere misses you. My mother, too. She can’t get a divorce, you know, and that’s sad. We don’t even know where Bee-Bee lives. My mother’s appendix nearly burst last year because we couldn’t find him to sign the consent. Well, never mind, he put in a bathroom before he left.
Mes tantes
stood around the bowl and took turns flushing.” A sharp laugh came out of her and for a moment she seemed on the verge of hysteria. “Anyway,” she said, “come over some weekend and I’ll show you what I’ve collected for my hope chest. Every pay, I buy one new thing. Last pay it was a cigarette box from Tunisia. With a lid. Next month I’m buying a pair of baby dolls at Murphy’s—they’re black, mostly black lace.”

I thought of Lyd and me and our shared dresser and how we swapped clothes for school—Kitten sweater sets, mostly Orion. And cinch belts, hair bands and short-sleeved blouses. The thought of either of us having a hope chest, or black baby-doll pyjamas from Murphy Gamble on Sparks Street, was preposterous.

Lyd and I spent most of the afternoon sitting on the edge of the bed, playing “I Almost Lost My Mind,” over and over on the record player, wailing along with Pat Boone while we did things to ourselves. Lyd evened out the sides of my chopped hair but couldn’t get the back the way she wanted. “I give up,” she said. “I can’t fix it.” She dug into her top drawer and held up the fake ponytail she’d bought at the Metropolitan in Hull at the beginning of June. The match was perfect for my own dark hair but when she pinned it on I felt as if something free-floating and unnatural had been attached to my skull. I didn’t want to wear it but I didn’t have much choice.

“Leo will never know it isn’t yours,” said Lyd. “Nobody will. You can’t even see the pins.”

I moved to the right and the hair shifted side to side. I moved forward and back and reached up to check that it was still attached.

“Don’t touch,” she said. “If you do, you’ll loosen it. It’ll be perfectly okay if you keep your hands
off.
”

We took a blanket to the backyard and stretched out to tan our legs in the last rays of the afternoon sun.

Ten minutes later, I sat up in disbelief. I’d heard the unmistakable nasal voice of Kitty Wells singing “Searching.” Leo was driving right up to the front of the house, windows down, radio full blast.

“For God’s sake,” I said, “Leo must be crazy. He’s driving up to the front door. Run around the side of the house, quick, Lyd, find out what’s going on. For God’s sake, does he think Father’s going to want to
meet
him?” I tore down to the end
of the yard as if that would distance me from Leo’s behaviour. Lyd disappeared around the corner of the house.

Not a minute later I watched the Pontiac turn away from the river and head back towards the village. Lyd returned, her face white, her lips set like the grim messenger she was.