Waiting For Sarah (8 page)

Becky. Always a handful, their mother often said with a sigh, even when she was a little kid of four or five, when their mother used to take them in the summer to Granville Island Market to shop and eat ice cream and sit to listen to the musicians in the square. Becky, never still, was always spilling ice cream on her T-shirt or falling and scraping her knees. He remembered the way she used to sail into
his room without knocking, throwing herself onto his bed, bugging him with questions, criticizing his taste in clothes, indulging in long monologues about her life and her problems — freckles were a major concern. He never thought he would, but he missed all that.

Now they were gone. He would never see them ever again. He wished he was with them, wherever they were.

The Lysander airplane poster blurred and swam in front of his eyes. He felt sleepy. Usually, if he rested after school, which was most days, it was never for more than twenty minutes, enough time to rest his aching body and recharge his batteries for the evening ahead. Norma would soon be warbling her usual, “I'm ho-o-o-me!” as she came through the door.

When his family had lived up on the Fairview Slopes, not far from the Leinster Co-op, Mike had known very little about his aunt. In those days she was simply a pleasant woman who had never married, who shopped and had lunch with his mother downtown a couple of times a month, who joined the family for dinner at Christmas and Thanksgiving, who had seemed to Mike quiet and undemonstrative. Now he knew Norma as a person who helped people — some of the seniors in the building, for example, picking up their prescriptions from the pharmacy, or food from the Safeway, or helping fill out their income tax forms. People came to her with their problems. As chairwoman of the co-op council, she had also put many hours into the problems of building repair and reconstruction.

He rolled over on his side and reached for his Battle of Britain book on his bedside table. It was a big book with plenty of pictures and descriptions of British, German, American and Japanese aircraft. He turned to the first page and read, for the umpteenth time, Canadian John Gillespie Magee's “High Flight,” the sonnet about the pilot slipping “the surly bonds of earth” in his airplane. Slipping the surly bonds of earth could also mean death, Mike now knew, though he hadn't figured it out before.

He read some of the aircraft technical specs for a while, but soon didn't know what he was reading. He couldn't concentrate. The words began to make no sense. He stared up at the ceiling, at the Spitfire escaping the surly bonds of earth and soaring above the clouds into blinding sunlight. He thought of his mom with birds fluttering about her head, then...

He fell asleep.

He found himself thinking of Sarah occasionally. Funny kid, he thought. Most girls would hate working in the musty, dusty archives, but she seemed eager to help him. It wasn't as if he was doing anything really interesting — reading old books and newspapers and examining old photographs and making notes on a yellow pad — most thirteen-year-olds would have been screaming to be let out of the cage a long time ago.

The first Saturday in December was fine. Robbie dropped over for brunch. Norma made pancakes with butter and blueberry syrup while the kitchen radio, now on a lower shelf where Mike could reach it, traded in tragedies:
“ ... hundreds drowned in Vietnam ... death toll for the latest earthquake in Turkey risen to over five hundred ... serial killer in Pakistan claims he killed a hundred children ... ”

Disasters of the Day. Norma's bad stuff; her ears and brain soaked it all up so she could discuss it with her friends in the co-op. GDG — Global Disaster Gossip, Mike called it. Calamities and catastrophes; tragedy
every hour of the day, every day of the week.

Sunday was dry with a smear of sun. Norma packed a picnic for three and, with Mike and Robbie in her Volkswagon, drove out to the Fraser Valley to watch the ultralight flyers taking off and landing. Robbie, though not so crazy about flying, usually went along. He called the flimsy looking aircraft “lawn chairs with wings.”

Though he had never been up in an airplane, Mike wanted to be a pilot more than anything. Meanwhile, he enjoyed watching the takeoffs and landings of the ultralights and talking to some of the flyers, a few of whom had become his friends. Some day he would fly; he knew it.

Monday morning. She was late.

“Hi, Michael.”

He had just lifted down a batch of
Clarions
from one of the lower shelves. His strength was steadily improving. “You're late. I've already got half a day's work done,” he growled.

“What a liar! Show me what you've done.”

He looked at her. Something different? It was her hair again, but this time piled up on her head, making her look older. There was also a new smell. Phew! The stuff these kids sprayed on themselves! Pretty putrid.

“I don't know what kind of perfume you're using,” he grumbled, “but you smell like a bubble gum factory.”

“Yuck!” She shivered in mock horror. “And I don't know what kind of deodorant you're using, but you smell like ...” She thought hard, rolling her eyes to the ceiling for inspiration. “Pepperoni pizza!” She laughed, delighted with her clever invention. “Come on, Michael, show me this half-day's work you claim
to have done already.”

He gave up; she hardly ever got mad, no matter how much he insulted her. He pointed. “This school history is starting to get to me; it's so repetitious. Every year there was a big drama or musical production, like
Our Town or Oklahoma
. There were dances called sock hops in the fifties, and field trips up Howe Sound or the Fraser Valley. There were special events days, like kids coming to school in their pajamas or in Halloween costumes. Fifty years ago kids used to dress up as Ed Norton or Sadie Hawkins — I had to ask Robbie who these guys were. Then there are sports. Carleton must have had a team for every known sport in existence. They even had a cricket squad when some exchange teacher showed up one year. I know I took on this project initially to get away from my history class, but I also hoped I would find something here in the archives of importance. I mean, what was life like for the average kid? Do these newspapers and yearbooks tell us anything about what it was like to come to Carleton High in those days? I'm not so sure they do. Looking through this stuff I get the impression that each year is the same: the same sports, same dances, same kids. Only the slang words — I plan to supply a list — and the hairstyles are different. I want to include the important changes in the school, if there were any, and in the neighborhood — Fair­view Slopes, False Creek. Know what I mean?” He had to stop for breath.

She nodded.

“It makes my job ... it makes writing a history of
Carleton High more of a challenge.” He showed her pictures of False Creek taken in the forties and fifties. “I got these from the downtown library. Take a look. Floating shacks on the south shore. Most of them leaked like today's condos. Squatters lived in them all year round.”

“What are squatters?”

“Homeless people. Some of their kids came to this school. One of them was a boy named Charlie Johnson. His school record for the high jump still stands; his name is still on the athletics honor roll, and he was also on the academic honor roll. Look, here's his picture.”

Sarah examined the picture of a thin, smiling boy with cropped hair, wearing a white undershirt and dark shorts that covered his knees. “Will you put him in your history?”

“You bet I will.”

“What about the squatters?”

“I'll put them in too. Charlie was a squatter. They're an important part of the history of the Creek and of Carleton High. Also, I might put in about a candidate for mayor in the 1950 civic election who called False Creek ‘a filthy ditch in the center of the city.' He promised to clean it up and run a highway through it.”

“What happened?”

“No highway. A guy named Hume got elected and cleaned it up instead. He poured landfill into the space between the shore and Granville Island so it wasn't an island any more — the way it is today. The shacks were all cleared away by 1959.”

Sarah crinkled her nose. “I like the bit about Charlie Johnson and the squatters, but the election stuff is boring.”

She went around to the other side of the desk and sat on the chair and began painting with her water colors as they talked.

After a while, after they had finished talking about the squatters, he joked, “Sometimes you seem quite sensible, Sarah, not like a girl at all really.”

“That is a typical boy remark. Not funny. Anyway, everyone knows girls are more mature than boys.”

“No, they're not. That's a popular myth put out by girls.”

“Girls are more mature.”

“Not.”

“Are.”

“Then how do you explain the fact that they spend so much time looking at themselves in mirrors, reading magazine articles on how to lose weight and how to look like a film star, and shopping for clothes and jewelry in the mall every weekend, instead of playing soccer or reading good adventure and sci-fi books and watching interesting stuff like “National Geographic” on TV?”

“Girls play soccer as much and as well as boys. And they read everything and do it more quickly than boys, which is why they have time to shop in the mall and read magazine articles.”

“Hmmmph!”

“Hmmmph to you, too!” she said happily.

He remembered Robbie's questions. “Where do you live? Are you close to the school?”

“Look,” she said, “I'm painting a picture for you to keep.”

He craned his neck, but couldn't see much of the picture, only blobs of color.

“Where do I live? Not far. Ash and Seventh. The address is 2230 Ash. Come by anytime and try my mother's shortbread. It's awful. She gives some to everyone who calls. It's crumbly and dry, but she thinks it's wonderful because that's what everyone tells her. It's a very old house, crumbly and dry and awful too, but we like it really. You can't miss it. It's big and white, with green shutters and a deep front porch. My father converted the upstairs into a separate suite, did all the electrical and plumbing himself. The Feinbergs live there. They're nice. They have two kids, Alice and Joel. Alice is eight and Joel is eleven. Do you need anything off a shelf?”

He shook his head. She was funny the way she burbled on, one thought following another in rapid succession. He had finished flipping through the 1975 yearbook and reached for the 1976 — really, there was so little of any historical interest in them.

He glanced at her occasionally as she painted, intent on her work, a tiny frown between her eye­brows, lips pursed in concentration. He thought of Becky.

She must have read his thoughts. “Does your little sister like painting?” She looked up and saw the stricken look on his face. “I'm sorry, Michael. I didn't mean — ”

“That's okay. It's just that you made it sound like she's still ... ”

She got up and came around to his side of the table and put her hands on his shoulders. “Do you have a picture of her?”

He took out his wallet and showed her Becky's picture.

“She's cute,” said Sarah. She studied the picture for a while and then handed it back and returned to her painting.

They talked. She told him about how hard she had to practice piano every day and how much she loved playing, especially loud and fast passages like the ones in the Mozart C Major Sonata. What about pop music? Did she like rock? Of course she did. She burbled on about a band he'd never heard of. Then, as he flipped through yearbooks, he told her about his driving lessons and about the ultralights and how much he wanted to fly. “Most people build them from kits, though you can buy factory-made ones.”

“Do they go fast?”

“Fast enough; 120 miles an hour, or faster, depending on the model.”

“I love flying. We flew to New York once, to visit my mother's publisher — they paid her expenses. My parents had always wanted to go to New York. Don't you think it's just amazing, Michael, to be flying miles up in the sky with a couple hundred other people, sitting and eating and drinking and reading and going to the bathroom, while the people on the ground don't even know you're there! Will you take me with you in your little airplane, swooping and soaring high above the world, the two of us together. It will be so-o-o-o
great!” She laughed, putting the paintbrush down and she clapped her hands together with excitement. “I've
always
wanted to fly in a small plane. Sitting beside you would be so wonderful ...”

He shrugged. Why did girls have to get so mushy? Change the subject. “Tell me more about your parents.”

She thought for a few seconds, coming down from her high. “Dad drives a delivery van. One Sunday morning I got up early and wore his uniform to bring them coffee in bed, just to make them laugh, and they did; Dad thinks I should be on the stage.” Sarah rolled her eyes. “And to listen to my mother you'd think education was more important than a billion dollars. I told you her name is Frances Francis, right? She teaches piano and writes children's music and she talks so fast sometimes I can't keep up with what she's saying and she laughs a lot; excitable, I think, is the word to describe her. She hopes I'll choose a career in medicine, or law, because music doesn't pay very well — unless you get lucky and become a big-name rock star. ‘It helps to have money, Sarah,' she always says. I don't care about money, do you, Michael? Music is so much more exciting. Do you play an instrument?”

He shook his head, confused at her rapid questions and subject changes.

“I love the piano. Music is so ... ” She hunched her shoulders. “Wonderful. I forget myself, forget everything. Someday I will be a famous concert pianist, I know it, and I'll travel round the world giving concerts. Look, see how long my fingers are.” She
held up her hands. “I can span a full octave already and I am only — ” She stopped, her eyes anxious. “You won't forget to wait for me, Michael, you promised, remember?”