Going Down Swinging (13 page)

Grace Four
FEBRUARY/MARCH 1974

I
T WAS SATURDAY
and I was up in Sadie’s room with her, playing Donny Osmond records while Mum was downstairs in the kitchen with Sadie’s parents, Alice and Ray, and I was wondering how come we had nothing better to do. We’d been in Vancouver around five months and Mum was never sick any more—it seemed like we should’ve spent the day at Stanley Park or something. Instead I could hear Sadie’s dad, Ray, laughing at my mum, making fun of her all afternoon—“Jesus-Mary-and-Joseph, Eilleen! You’re a wingnut, you’d get lost in a phone booth”—while Sadie told me Donny Osmond would never even kiss me never mind marry me because I was skinny and bucktoothed and way too young. Sadie was nine. Nine and three quarters.

Then she sat down at her electric keyboard, in the spare room, and plunked out “Heart and Soul,” the only one she knew off by heart. And right in the middle of it, she said how she was going to take ballet lessons at the community centre. I sat beside her and felt the music vibrate in my ears, expecting her dad to tear up the stairs any second just to plink out the sidekick part at the other end of the keyboard. Sadie’s fingers plopping their way through “Heart and Soul” was practically a surefire way to get Ray to come play with her no matter what he was doing. He thought his kids were musical geniuses and loved to get both of them to sit and sing “Night and Day” into the microphone of this huge reel-to-reel tape recorder he had. But especially Sadie; he said lots of times how he was going to get her a voice coach—that voice of hers could take her places. I thought it might too, the way it cracked and snagged the music. In fact, I wished on the sore throats I’d been getting since the winter, that they’d give me the kind of Sadie-voice I was going to need if I wanted go places.

I sat beside her on the piano bench and watched her play, wanting like crazy to get my own lessons. Then I said how maybe I should take ballet too. Sadie laughed and brought one hand to the other side of the keys to play her own sidekick part. I followed her fingers and knew I was a feeb compared to her; Sadie was taller than I was with long thick almost-black hair and big black eyes, deep in her always-tan face. She wasn’t clumsy like me; she didn’t trip on rugs or knock stuff down. She was dead sure about everything and it made her seem tough and right all the time. Hardly anyone ever looked at Sadie and didn’t say how beautiful she was.

She kept her eyes on her fingers and laughed. “But you’re accident prone, even my mum says—yesterday she goes, ‘Gees, Eilleen picked a dandy of a name for that kid. Shoulda called her Thumper.’ And it’s true, man, you always got scabs on your knees from where you fell and you got no coordination and plus you’re too skinny; my dad says you ain’t got enough on your bones to even hold you up half the time.”

It was hearing it from Sadie that got me saying “ain’t” for a while. Until my mum made me stop by telling me that it was the ugliest thing about her: Sadie couldn’t speak proper English—that and the fact that she was going to have a hawk-nose just like her dad. It kind of bugged me when my mum said that, because anyone would want to be like Sadie and that’s why you’d do stuff to be like her so that everyone would want to be like you too—tough and pretty and getting away with stuff other kids would be in trouble for. On the other hand, though, it sounded like I could be smarter and prettier and sort of
Sadie-Plus
if I added Mum’s big words and took out the ain’ts. But in the meantime, while I waited for her to be nothing but a pile of nose and bad English, I wanted to catch up. In a few classes I’d be leaping through the air in a crispy pink skirt; ballet was going to make me into a pretty, dainty girl-girl. It would make my teeth straight and flatten my cowlick and give me leopard eyes like Sadie’s. She kept going with her sandpapery laugh, though, telling me more and more reasons why I couldn’t take ballet. I missed Pearl all the sudden. Pearl would’ve wanted to do ballet to the song “Country roads, take me home” and she would’ve thought I’d be good at it.

But Sadie and me were still best friends and the fact was, she rather’d have me there than not. It was better to get up Sunday morning and trudge through the snow with me than to have to go alone.

The first morning of class, I waited at Sadie’s back door with my boots leaking, trying not to melt on Alice’s warm kitchen floor. Sadie was upstairs screaming, “Give it! Give it back now or you’re dead! Eddayyyyy!” It was quarter to ten; class was starting in fifteen minutes. The house shook a little and Eddy thumped down the stairs with Sadie running behind, yelling, “Give it back, you friggin’ nature! I’m tellin’—give it!” When he got to the bottom, he went sliding across the kitchen floor in his socks, jumping and swan-leaping and yodelling this noise, like Ethel Merman if she was falling off a roof, while he waved Sadie’s new leotard over his head.

Alice, their mum, yelled, “What the hell is going on in there!” right when Sadie got hold of her leotard and yanked. Eddy’s socks slipped out from under him and he cracked his back down on the floor. So Sadie stood over him with her leotard and yelled, “Serves you right, y’lez!” in his face and stomped back up to her room. Eddy crunched shut his eyes and moaned his guts out.

Alice ran in the kitchen and went down on her knees so she could rock Eddy in her arms and holler, “Sadie! Get your smartass back down these stairs right now and apologize to him or you’re not goin’ anywhere, young lady,” over his head. The clock said almost five to ten.

I got rocks in my stomach. There was no way I was going to walk in that classroom alone.

A few seconds later Sadie skipped down the steps, all bundled up and ready to go. Ray, her dad, came in the kitchen and looked bored at Eddy. “What’s wrong with him?”

“You know damn well who’s always the instigator in these things!” Alice was looking at Sadie and still holding Eddy.

Ray grinned at Sadie, like he knew for sure that she was going to be a star if people would just get the hell out of her way. Then Ray noticed me. “Hiya Grace, here’s a nice good morning for you, huh? Geez, the two of you better get your rears in gear if you’re going to make it to this ballet class.” Sadie whipped past her mum and Eddy and pulled me with her.

We scuffed along the sidewalk, some of it shovelled, some with thick snow that got walked into being ice. We chewed gum in time to our steps and Sadie talked between chomps. “You know if you swallow your gum, it stays in your stomach for seven years.” I didn’t answer. She was probably right. She blew a bubble and said, “Is your mum still working at Eaton’s?”

“Nope. It was just till January, till after Christmas.” I looked sideways at Sadie’s coat: fake fur with ear-sized black spots on top of silver-grey. Mine looked dull next to it now. Sadie’s coat. It just bugged me—I couldn’t believe she’d picked it when we were shopping in the Girls’ Department at Eaton’s with our mums. I tried on something black and belted; I thought it looked fancy and ladyish with the skinny waist. Then Sadie threw on this fat mountain of fur and spots. She looked like a dalmatian blob; it was the dumbest-looking thing I ever saw and there she’d gone and picked it on her own free will. I was so glad.

But then something happened between the department store and the first day back at school, after Christmas vacation. Something changed that clown-thing into a movie star coat. The other kids stared at Sadie, all jealous, and touched her sleeves. Grownup ladies ran their fingers over her collar and wondered if they could find one in their own size. Sadie must’ve been praying for snow till summer.

I peeled my eyes off her coat and looked back at my feet going along the sidewalk, then asked her, even though my mum’d told me not to, “What’d you get for Christmas again, you never said.”

“Umm, I’m not supposed to tell you—my mum said not to talk about what we got for Christmas because you guys are on welfare and you don’t have a dad and your mum couldn’t afford to get you as much as us.”

My mum had told me the same thing, only she said that being an only child I was bound to get more stuff than Sadie and Eddy, and that Alice wouldn’t be able to afford as much for both her kids. So I said, “Oh. Well, I got a brooch shaped like a dog with little green glass eyes. And I got a ring. Too.” I pulled my mitten off to show her the blue stone. “It’s sapphire,” I told her, and drooped my hand to look glamorous.

Sadie glanced. “I got Spirograph.”

I pulled my mitt back on. “And I got a black Barbie with an evening gown and high heels. And Monopoly—”

“Holy crow, you just got Monopoly now? We’ve had it since we were little!”

I was trying to think of another Christmas present worth bragging about when we got to the edge of Riley Park. There was snow and sticks on the bottom of the kiddy pool and three teenagers in red lumberman jackets on the other side of it. They had their backs turned and their shoulders scrunched into each other. “Glue Sniffers,” we said together. It seemed like we had to say what they were when we saw them, to keep them away. Riley Park was full of Glue Sniffers: big kids from school and The Projects. Guys as old as my sister filled up baggies with glue, shoved in their noses and breathed until they got dizzy. Glue Sniffers were like boogeymen almost. We kept going toward the community centre.

When we got to the classroom, the clock on the wall was just hitting ten past ten. The rest of the girls sat cross-legged on the floor, all in leotards with white or pink tights. They sat super straight with their hands folded, listening to this skinny lady with a long neck that looked like a foot cuz of being all chicken-bone-stringy right down to her boobs practically. She had on a bodysuit and baggy drawstring pants. And ballet shoes. She looked up then at her watch. “Sorry we’re late,” we told her, talking all over each other.

“That’s good, I hope you’re sorry enough not to let it happen again. I’m Miss Stickney. Have you got your leotards on underneath?” We did. We yanked off our slacks and sweaters and sat down to change into our slippers. Meanwhile Miss Stickney got the other girls up and made them do stretches. Sadie watched out of the corner of her eye and got the giggles. My other slipper wouldn’t go on and I got them too. I tried not to hear the squeaks in Sadie’s throat, but then she started a mouse-voice of Eddy’s Ethel Merman opera and we both shook from holding the laughs in. Sadie coughed to cover hers up and I bit my tongue to get the most pain without blood.

Our teacher looked at us, breathing, slow in/slow out, with her arms bent all funny like my black Barbie. “Come along, ladies, giggling on the floor is not going to get you warm enough to keep you from pulling a hamstring.” We stood up, embarrassed, but then I got a picture of Sadie dragging a ham on a string and it was killing me. Sadie started stretching.

“What’s your name, Miss?” Sadie told her. “And yours?” I looked to the other girls and copied their stretches so that my name would come out of someone who was trying her best and told her. “Well,” she said, and dropped forward so her palms were down flat against the floor, “the sooner you two find out this class won’t tolerate silliness, the better off you’ll be.” Miss Stickney told us we would be more flexible than she was in no time at all, that we were young and like rubber next to her. I thought she should know that I wasn’t anything like rubber. The back of my legs were burning like crazy and my fingers didn’t even dangle to my ankles and she yelled, “Knees straight!”

Then she arranged us in a circle, put music on, and we hop-kicked our way around and round the circle in time to violins. It seemed like we were doing some kind of furry-hat Russian dance thing, not ballet. We weren’t doing anything that was going to make me more graceful, we weren’t leaping through the air, and we didn’t get tutus. We just kept kicking around the circle over and over until she clapped at us to stop and everybody fell back on their bums, panting. The class finished with more stretching.

I pulled on my clothes afterward, tired and crabby. My throat hurt and I didn’t want to go back in the cold. The bones on the bottom of my feet hurt and I was mad at myself for getting a stupid short-sleeved leotard that made me look like a baby instead of the long-sleeved kind that made Sadie all long and tall and practically grown-up.

The next two Sundays were pretty much the same: squat kicks around the room and long breathy stretches. Except after the second class, Sadie brought along this other girl on our walk home. Then the third next class, she went over to the girl’s house afterwards and I didn’t get invited. I was kind of upset, like I was going to cry on the way home. Sometimes it seemed dumb even being friends with people. They’d just go off and be friends with someone else. Even if you tried to be like them. Or else they’d move. Or else you’d move. Or else they had a whole family who did stuff together, like, had dinner at a certain time or did church stuff and you could never be in the family, even though sometimes you could be one of the place settings at dinner.

When I got home, Mum was on a cleaning binge. I hardly ever saw her like that, moving so fast, so I stood outside the kitchen in my boots and coat and watched. Country music was blaring out of the radio on the counter and Mum rubbed a J Cloth on the floor on her hands and knees. She looked up. “Hey there, ballerina. How was it today?”

“Mmm. Same.”

“No good? Hey! Goofball, you wanna take your feet off, you’re slushing up my floor. I ain’t just a-killin’ time down here, ol’ thang.”

“Sorry.” I backed up and took off my boots. “I hate these lessons. It’s not even ballet. Just this kicking stuff like—” and I squatted and tried to show her.

She looked up, still wiping around herself. “Huh. Maybe she’s trying to strengthen your legs.”

“No. She’s stupid.”

“Well, you don’t have to keep going, just do whatcha feel, shlemiel.”

“Yeah, I know.”

She kept wiping and said, “Your dad called today.”

“He did? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I’m telling you now.”

“Well, what’d he say? Did he say anything about me? Did you tell him about me doing ballet?”