Homesick (25 page)

Throughout October the weather continued remarkably mild despite the lateness of the season, although now there were under-currents
of ice in it. For days on end not a cloud curdled the soaring skies which each night’s frost seemed to dye a deeper, sterner blue. In the mornings, before the sun had gained enough strength to burn it off, Alec Monkman’s lawn was spread with a thick, white rime which exposed a stark trail of footprints when he crossed it to dig turnips left in his garden for the cold to sweeten in the ground. The old man loved this time of year, the chill baths of sunshine, the clearing away, the making ready, the long, lazy postponement of winter’s sleep.

Late one night he flung open the kitchen door and called excitedly to Vera and Daniel to come outside, quick. At the very least, Vera had expected a house fire but the street lay dim and unremarkable as ever. “Listen!” commanded her father and she saw his face tilt up to the sky under the porch light. What they heard was the last of the migrating geese high overhead, clamouring in the limitless darkness of a fall night. Daniel and Vera and Alec stood absolutely still, tracking and straining after the wild, sad calling as it faded southward and finally dissolved into space and silence. Then, just as Vera was about to speak, a last gift. A flight of stragglers came sweeping low over the roofs of Connaught, so low that the whistle and whine of surging wings could be clearly heard, startling three hearts and lifting three faces blindly to search the sky for this mysterious passage, their common breath mingling in a golden fog under the porch light. As suddenly as they had come, the birds were gone.

The people on the porch became aware of the cold. “I wanted the boy to hear,” said Alec.

“Yes,” said Vera.

With no more to say, they went to bed.

Daniel became obsessed with the Hallowe’en dance. He was pinning all his hopes on it. So far nothing at school had been as bad as he had been led to fear by his grandfather. No one had beaten
him up or even bullied him. What he had been was ignored. Daniel realized that a lot of the blame was his. His pride had held him back from making overtures to anyone in case they should snub him. The mere thought of such humiliation could stick his tongue to the roof of his mouth and his feet to the floor whenever he debated with himself the advisability of approaching any of his classmates.

So he remained aloof and ran the risk of being labelled a snob, which was exactly how everyone thought of him. They knew he came from a big city in the east and they supposed he thought himself too good for the likes of Connaught. Add to that that he was the grandson of Alec Monkman who owned the delivery, the garage, the movie theatre, and the hotel, and it was not hard for them to imagine that Daniel believed he was small-town royalty. “Big shot,” the other boys silently mouthed to one another when he went past them, carrying himself rigid and tense. The girls didn’t care for him either because he made them wonder if they didn’t seem like hicks compared to the girls he had known in the city.

At the beginning of the school year Daniel had tried to show them they were wrong about him but he only ended by making a fool of himself. It happened at the first high school football game of the season. Games were held Friday afternoons and the students of both the elementary and high schools were dismissed half an hour early so they could root for the home team, the Connaught Cougars. The football field was a raw-looking rectangle mowed out of prairie grass, lined with lime and pounded to hard pan by daily practices. Getting tackled on it was like getting tackled on a parking lot. Every September it was a school tradition to let the Grade Seven and Eight boys out of school for a day to pick the rocks off the field which the frost had popped out of the ground the previous spring, but they did a cursory job, harvesting only a portion of each year’s bountiful crop, leaving behind enough stones to make a contribution to the number and severity of injuries to players. There were no bleachers, so those who had them sat on the hoods of the cars which they had bounced over the
boulders and badger holes in the schoolyard to park around the field. The rest of the students formed into cliques and stood in clusters along the sidelines.

It seemed to Daniel that everyone had a group to attach themselves to except him. So that day he positioned himself five yards from the group he would have most liked to be invited to join and lingered hopefully. While he did, he made sure to cheer as loudly and enthusiastically for the Connaught Cougars as if he had spent his entire life in Connaught, lived or perished according to the team’s success or failure. He did this absolutely alone, in splendid isolation. Of all the people cheering he was the only one who was aware of his own voice. Still, it seemed to him that he must be making a good impression. Surely it must mean something to them to see him rooting so wildly for their heroes.

After a bit, however, he began to suspect how foolish he must look, jumping up and down, yelling his head off like a lunatic, all utterly alone and apart. He felt exposed, ridiculous. It wouldn’t take a genius to see what he was up to, what he wanted. But having once started he couldn’t just quit. Quitting would be to admit that his display of loyalty and enthusiasm was insincere, false, downright sneaky. It was necessary to carry on, follow through, no matter how hard the ordeal. Face burning with shame, he shouted louder, hopped about on his patch of brown grass more grotesquely, waved his arms more frantically. “Crush ’em Cougars! Go team!” He was aware that people were starting to stare. A knot of Grade Seven girls were whispering and giggling. He pretended to be oblivious to all of this. There was no stopping now. Something was driving him to go on punishing and humiliating himself this way in front of everyone. Even during yardage measurements and lulls in play, his voice, which he had begun to lose, was the only one to be heard croaking and rasping encouragement to the team.

The crack of the starting pistol announcing half-time finally released him. He was free to slink off home. With every blundering step that hurried him across the schoolyard Daniel could feel
the mortification he had repeatedly swallowed wobbling like a large stone stuck behind his breastbone. All wrong, all a mistake. Tittysucker, geek, fruit, he pronounced himself in a rage. That’s what he should have written on the yellow wall which bore his Uncle Earl’s name, not Daniel Miller, because Daniel Miller was too pathetic and stupid to deserve a place anywhere.

If he could only dance. Dancing you had a person all to yourself; you could have a private conversation and prove that you weren’t really stuck-up, or a lunatic like you acted at a dumb football game. And being that it was a girl you danced with, that was in your favour, too, since girls were easier to persuade than boys. They were more understanding, more capable of overlooking past mistakes and bad first impressions than boys were. Girls had a knack of seeing what was really inside you. They were always doing it with James Dean and Montgomery Clift in the movies. Dancing was one way of getting a girl alone so you could talk to her. But he didn’t know how to dance. Was it possible to fake knowing how? Would they be able to tell? He knew he couldn’t fake jiving with all its complicated twists and turns, but waltzing didn’t look so hard, a sort of walk around the floor together. And waltzing was good for conversation the way jiving wasn’t. Daniel had noticed in the movies how often the most important things between a man and a woman got said while they were waltzing.

Daniel practised faking it. He closed the door to his bedroom and propped a chair under the knob so nobody could come busting in on his privacy. Positioning himself before his mirror he raised his left hand into the air, made a cradle of his right arm, and propelled himself with mincing, shuffling steps backwards, forwards, sideways, all about his bedroom.

“Well, Linda,” he rehearsed, “how do you like the band? Yeah, I think they’re pretty good too. Do you have a television at your house? Our reception is awfully poor, so much snow. What’s your favourite program? Mine too. Yes, I like Connaught very much – everything but the teachers. Just kidding.”

He went over all his invitations.

“Bernadette, would you like to dance with me?”

“Doris, might I have this dance?”

“Would you care to dance with me, Lynn?”

By the time he had completed all his dry runs he had sweated clean through his pants.

What was he going to do? There were no books in the library devoted to dancing, he’d checked. He joined his grandfather to watch Lawrence Welk but a lot of good that did him, the camera was always scooting from feet to faces so that it was impossible to follow what the dancers were up to.

Sometimes, when he was really desperate, Daniel braced himself to ask his mother’s help. However, the prospect of being cross-examined as to why it was necessary for him to learn to dance would set him to writhing on the spot and drain him of resolution whenever he allowed himself to imagine the scene. Besides, he wasn’t even sure his mother could dance. He had never seen her. The occasion to dance had never presented itself. His mother did not seem to be what he took to be a dancing sort of woman.

It was on October 23, with scarcely more than a week left before the Hallowe’en Dance, that Vera came face to face in the Rexall with her obligations. She really ought to volunteer to teach the boy to dance. What she faced was a rack of those record albums that old-time dance bands paid to have pressed in vanity sound studios in Winnipeg or St. Paul, Minnesota, and then peddled at the weddings they played, or twisted the arms of small-town merchants – druggists, grocers, hardware dealers – into carrying on consignment. This album was called
The Fedorovsky Family Plays For You Your All Time Favorites
, and on the jacket there was a black and white photograph of three fat middle-aged women, two of whom were seated at drums and an upright piano, the third with an accordion slung over her shoulders. The remaining two
orchestra members were slightly older and more enormous men, one armed with a guitar, the other with a fiddle. Vera purchased the record, knowing for a certainty that every variety of dance Daniel would ever be called upon to dance in Connaught would be represented in the Fedorovsky Family album: waltz, polka, foxtrot, butterfly, schottische.

Vera returned home with the record at two-thirty. Her father was out so she was free to set up the phonograph, push the living-room furniture to one side, and stow away the throw rugs. That done, she sat down to wait for Daniel to come home from school. She sat with an impatient look on her face for five or ten minutes, then she got up and fetched the blazer and trousers she had hidden on the top shelf of her bedroom closet. She had ordered them from the Eaton’s catalogue when Daniel first mentioned the upcoming dance. Vera laid these clothes on the chesterfield, in plain view, and smoothed them pensively with her hand.

Shortly after three-thirty she heard Daniel come into the house and called him into the living room. “You washing floors
again?”
he said, when he saw the disarranged furniture.

“I bought you some dress clothes,” announced Vera. “They’re there on the chesterfield. Take them upstairs and try them on and then come back down here so I can see if they fit. Wear a white shirt and tie,” she added, as an afterthought.

A few minutes later Daniel presented himself as ordered. The black and white runners he had worn to school were still on his feet.

“Go and put your good shoes on, lame brain,” his mother said when she saw him.

“Why?”

“Because you can’t expect to learn to dance in rubber-soled shoes. They stick to the floor.”

Daniel wondered if the woman really could read his mind. It was eerie.

When he was finally properly shod, Vera judged that her son was a looker in his new outfit. Of course, a navy blue blazer was
a classic and never went out of style and the colour of the jacket suited his complexion and rusty hair. “My, my, what have I wrought?” teased Vera. “Could it be a genuine heartbreaker? Wait until the girls set eyes on you. You’ll have to carry a big stick to beat them off, you ask me.”

“Funny, funny, it is to laugh.”

“Now don’t get all huffy,” cautioned Vera. “I was just having a little fun. Seriously, you look very nice. Very grown-up.”

That he looked grown-up was not necessarily what he wanted to hear. Being told you were grown-up somehow suggested you weren’t.

Vera placed the record on the turntable. The first selection was an instrumental rendering of “The Tennessee Waltz.” “Now watch me,” said Vera, “as I do the steps. You’ll pick it up in no time. Just remember whatever I do backwards you’ll do forwards and whatever I do forwards you’ll do backwards. Got that?”

Daniel was uncertain but he said he thought so. As his mother sailed over the linoleum he studied her movements with fixed concentration. His feet twitched while he tried to commit the steps to memory. The tune ended and his mother reset the needle at the beginning of the waltz. “Now together,” she said, offering herself to be held. They began to edge their way around the floor. “Don’t stick your bum out like that. You look like you’re afraid somebody is trying to burn a hole in the front of your pants. Stand normal. Relax.” Daniel found that her criticisms seized him up even more; his joints started to lock like burned-out bearings. “Don’t jerk your arm up and down that way. You’re not pumping water. Hold it steady. Loosen up. Glide, don’t clump. You’re not walking on railway ties.” She started to count time in a loud emphatic voice, even more emphatic than the pounding of the piano. It threw him off more.