Liberty Street (8 page)

Ha ha. Her father is
so
good at jokes, especially blind jokes. Frances is relieved that he at least isn't blaming her for anything.

Her mother calms down and makes supper, and then they all play cribbage. Soon after, they get the
World Book Encyclopedia
, and Frances and her mother start going to the library in town for new books. Her mother begins reading to her every night before bed and not just on the weekend or rainy days. She gets up on the bed with her and stretches her legs out, puts on her glasses, and reads from
Little Women
and
Anne of Green Gables
, which Frances loves because Anne has red hair. She gets her mother to read the good parts over twice.

One night, Frances asks her mother if someone used to read stories aloud to her.

Her mother says, “I told you. They were tossers.” Then she asks Frances what she thinks of the other kids at school. Does she like anyone in particular? Would she like to invite one of the other girls to the farm to play with her someday—a Saturday, perhaps? Like Anne's friend Diana, she says. Maybe there's a girl like Diana in her class.

Frances thinks for a minute and then says no, not really.

“Not one?”

“No,” says Frances. “Not even one.”

I
T SNOWS AND
snows. All winter, as though it's never going to quit. Frances thinks about the snow piling up on Uncle Vince, and she sees how it builds, layer upon layer, on Kaw-Liga's head, the points of his feather headdress sticking up out of it. She tries playing outside after school, but there's so much snow she's restricted to the parts of the yard that have been ploughed by the blade on the tractor, and there's no fun to be had there.

“What do you think about ice-skating?” her mother asks her one day. She doesn't know how to ice-skate herself, but she saw
Rhapsody on Ice
at Covent Garden before the war. She tells Frances there's a flyer in the post office about figure-skating lessons beginning in the new year for ages five to seven, Tuesdays and Thursdays after school, and she suggests that perhaps Frances would like to be signed up. Frances barely knows what figure skating is. Dancing on ice, with costumes, her mother says. Frances gets talked into it because she likes the idea of costumes.

For Christmas, Frances's dad gives Alice a new record player console and her first LP, Patsy Cline. Along with a spinning globe of the world—inflatable, like a beach ball—Frances gets new white skates from the catalogue. She tries them on and walks around the house in them, but she has to stop because the blades make marks on the floor.

On the first day of lessons, Frances gets picked up after school by her mother and driven to the new indoor rink. She puts on her skates and her mother does them up tight, and she stumbles out onto the ice with the other kids, some of
whom (like Frances) fall all over the place because they've never had skates on before. Their coach, a girl named Melody who comes twice a week from Yellowhead, divides them into two groups—the ones who can stand up and the ones who can't—and she asks the parents of Frances's group to come onto the ice and hold their children up until they get their balance. Frances's mother tells the other mothers about seeing
Rhapsody on Ice
in London just before the war, and Frances thinks she hears one of them saying, “I don't know who she thinks she is.”

Once they can all stand without falling, Melody sends the mothers off the ice and tells the kids she is going to teach them forward, stop, turn. Then she does a demonstration, first skating backwards and then doing a jump and a spin, and she tells the beginners they too will be able to do this before long if they keep trying. “Try, try, try, and don't give up,” she says. “That's how you learn.” A girl from school—Caroline Smith, whose new front teeth are already growing in—says, “Like this, teacher?” and she skates backwards in a circle. The teacher divides them into two groups again, the ones who can skate backwards and the ones who can't. Frances hates Caroline.

After several lessons, Frances is able to make it all the way around the rink without falling, as long as no one bumps into her and knocks her over, which the boys sometimes do on purpose. (She hates them too.) Sometimes there are older girls skating—teenagers, girls who already know how to skate—and Frances watches them and has to tap, tap, tap her fingers inside her mitts because she so, so, so badly wants to skate like the big girls. She can just see herself. It's boring going around the ice, forward, stop, turn.

The two beginner groups eventually get joined into one again, and they begin to gear up for the spring recital. The beginners are to wear animal costumes—squirrels and rabbits and racoons—and get pretend-chased around the ice by one of the older boys in a wolf costume, to
Peter and the Wolf
music. Then the more experienced skaters will do their routines. Frances can't believe it when the coach selects her and Jimmy Gulka to do a duet. Jimmy Gulka immediately launches a protest, as does Caroline—“Teacher, teacher,” with her hand in the air—but Melody says, “Shhhh, you don't argue with your coach, and Frances is right for the part. You'll see why.”

“But her teeth,” Jimmy Gulka says.

“Jimmy,” Melody says sharply. “That's rude.”

They are called a pair. The routine Frances and Jimmy Gulka are to do is really the opening part of a routine an older boy and girl are doing. Frances has been selected for her hair, which is like the older girl's hair, red and curly, and Jimmy has been selected because he is the right height for Frances. The routine begins with a simple waltz, and Frances and Jimmy are to skate once around the rink to the music, holding arms in a criss-crossed, old-fashioned way, and then they leave the ice and the bigger girl and boy come on in the exact same costumes as Frances and Jimmy and do more fancy skating.

“You two will be so adorable,” the coach says. Frances believes they will be. She decides she has a crush on Jimmy Gulka. The two of them get to practise their routine at the rink with the older pair, without the other beginners there. Once they know what they're supposed to do, they begin to practise with the music. They learn to listen for their cue and step onto the ice when they hear it. After they've done their waltz around the rink, the two older skaters take over. Frances
watches closely from the boards as they skate in circles, together and apart and together again, and the red-haired girl spins like a ballerina and skates backwards with one leg lifted behind her while the boy holds her arms. Frances can see herself in a few years' time.

Then she sees herself right now. She can just
see
herself doing this, with Jimmy Gulka holding her arms so she doesn't fall. At home in the living room (without her skates because her mother won't let her wear them in the house), she holds the wagon-wheel arm of the couch for balance and practises lifting her leg the way the older girl does. She practises until she can do it perfectly. On the day of the recital, once they're in their makeup and costumes and waiting to go onto the ice, she whispers to Jimmy what she's going to do and what he's supposed to do (just hold her arms for balance), and says they will impress everyone.

Jimmy doesn't want to. He says no, they'll get in trouble with the coach. Frances tells him she's going to do it, and he should hold her arms when she says or they'll both fall. He looks around for someone to tell, but the coach is talking to the older pair, giving them last-minute instructions.

“Are you two ready?” Melody says to Frances and Jimmy, and Frances can see that he is about to tell, but then their music starts and they hear their cue, and they have to step out onto the ice.

Jimmy Gulka looks terrified. When they're most of the way around the ice, Frances says, “Now,” and he says, “No,” and holds on tight to her arms, and she tries to turn around and face him so she can lift her leg and go backwards, and of course she falls and pulls Jimmy over on top of her, and his skate gets caught in her fancy sequinned skirt (painstakingly
sewn by her mother) and rips it. Melody comes running on the outside of the boards to where they lie in a heap and hisses, “What the hell was that? Get up. Finish your circle.” Frances and Jimmy get to their feet and Frances thinks they should waltz the rest of the way around, but Jimmy skates for the boards and the gate without her, so she follows him. By this time everyone is laughing—they think it's so cute, and maybe even part of the routine. The older boy and girl step onto the ice, both of them trying not to laugh, and Frances heads for her parents instead of following Jimmy to the dressing rooms, because now she knows he's mad at her. When Frances does find her parents she starts to cry, but she doesn't tell them she was responsible for the fiasco and just says, “I fell.”

Jimmy Gulka's parents hear what really happened, though, and they complain to the coach. Melody searches out Frances, and she takes her aside and tells her she can't just do things like that on her own, especially when she's a beginner and can barely skate a circle around the rink. “I trusted you, Frances,” she says, “even though Caroline is a better skater.”

What
? Now she hates Caroline even more.

“It's Jimmy Gulka's fault,” she says. If he'd held her arms like he was supposed to, they wouldn't have fallen. She says this even though she knows it isn't true.

“You can't blame your mistakes on someone else, Frances,” the coach says.

After the recital, figure-skating lessons are over. Frances says she's never taking skating lessons again. She says she's never going back to school either, but her mother says she has to. She expects Jimmy Gulka to call her stupid Looney-Moony at school on Monday, but he does something worse: he ignores
her completely. He hates her so much that he won't even look at her. Frances taps her fingers under her desk so fast she can't keep track of the patterns.

That weekend, Frances's father clears the snow off the shallow slough just behind the barn. The slough is still frozen over. He puts a bench on the edge of the ice, and he hauls Kaw-Liga down the hill and props him in the snow so she'll have company. She can practise by herself, her father says, whenever she wants.

“By next year, you'll take the biscuit at skating,” he says.

She practises her circles, but that's all she knows how to do. Every time she tries a fancy move, even a little turn, she falls, so she quits going down to the slough. Her father says if she isn't going to use the ice, he isn't going to waste his time clearing it off for her, and not long after that, the snow gets soft and freezes into slushy ridges. Her father forgets to move Kaw-Liga and the bench back to the barn, and when spring finally comes and the ice melts, they both fall into the slough. Frances's dad fishes the bench out, but he leaves Kaw-Liga there because he's falling apart anyway.

“Poor old Kaw-Liga,” Frances says at the supper table that night.

“Kaw-Liga nothing,” her mother says. “Poor Patsy Cline.” She says this because Patsy Cline died in a plane crash a month ago.

“Are you still going on about that?” says her father.

Alice puts her Patsy Cline album on the record player that evening, and plays it over and over.

One good thing: not long after that, Frances's new teeth start to come in.

J
IMMY
G
ULKA AND
Caroline Smith and the other kids at school are ignoring Frances. She experiments to see if she can get anyone to pay attention to her. She turns around in her seat and asks the boy behind her if she can borrow his eraser. He quickly tucks it into his desk. “Why can't I borrow it?” she says to him, and the teacher tells her to turn back around and quit talking. She waits five minutes and taps the shoulder of the girl in front of her—a girl she doesn't even like named Daphne Rose—but she shrugs Frances's hand away and whispers, “Can't you see I'm busy?” When Frances does it again, Daphne puts up her hand and tells the teacher that Frances is bothering her, and the teacher tells Frances to stop annoying the other students and do her work. Frances looks down at her math workbook, but she can't concentrate. She wishes she really were invisible. She waits another five minutes and puts up her hand to ask if she can go to the bathroom. The teacher looks as though she is about to say no, but then she nods and Frances leaves the classroom and walks slowly down the hall toward the door that says Girls in tarnished brass letters.

Inside the bathroom, there's a window wide open. Frances goes to the window and looks down at the empty playground. The snow is gone now, and the grass is starting to turn green. She imagines her invisible self on a swing, pumping with her legs and going higher and higher, the swing going back and forth, all on its own to anyone watching. Then Frances hears a sound above her, and when she looks up she sees a boy's legs hanging out of a window. He must be sitting in the open window, she thinks, a big boy, grade eight, because that's the class right above the bathroom. He's wearing jeans and black canvas running shoes, but that's all she can see. Then all of
a sudden he's coming right at her, out the window and falling, and as he passes her on his way down, she sees that it's Dooley Sullivan, a boy whose name she knows—everyone knows—because he's older than the other grade eights and always doing funny things and getting hauled out of assemblies by the ear. Their eyes meet as he goes by the window, his face just a few feet from hers, and he looks surprised to see her there. She instinctively holds her hand out to him, but he's gone—he's passed her—and then he hits the ground right beneath her. He tries to roll when he lands, but mostly he lands on his ankle. He makes an attempt at getting up to run but he can't, and she hears a yelp and he flops down on the ground again, and then he puts on a clown's pantomime of
ow, ow, ow, I'm dying.
He looks up and grins. At first she thinks he's looking at her, but then she hears cheering above her, and she cranes her neck and sees that all the second-storey windows are full of students, who begin to yell things like “He did it! Hey, Dooley. Ha ha, crazy Dooley, did you see what he did?” That's when Frances realizes he didn't fall—he jumped, on purpose. Then teachers' faces begin popping out of the windows to see what's going on, and bang, bang, bang comes the sound of windows closing.