Small Beneath the Sky

by Lorna Crozier

  mosquitoes

  She gives you ample warning. Singular or in a swarm, her insistent whine cannot be mistaken for anything else. She makes you slap yourself hard and fast, like an angry parent might. She shrinks your geography, limits where you walk; every patch of grass becomes a bad neighbourhood, the lights shot out, engines revving. At night, when you think you are alone, her feet land among the hairs of your arm with the lightness of an eyelash. When you feel the bite, it’s too late. Small airy thief, she has broken in, stolen what she came for. Warm inside now, she rides the updrafts, flies to open water where she’ll lay her eggs, her need assuaged, her promise fulfilled. You, great provider, who hoard what you could freely give, feel only irritation and the beginning of an itch.

  ants

  We should be lighting candles around their mounds; we should be writing psalms and offering bread and sugar.

  When the soil is frozen and the gravediggers can’t bury the dead, they are life continuing, sleepless in their deepest nests below the frost line. They tunnel under your feet, excavate chambers for their many mansions. One mind, they seem, that never stops thinking. Pulled from the dark after the thaw, pouring from the ground with particles of clay clamped between their jaws, they carry the underworld into the glare; bit by bit, without reward or glory, they recreate the Earth.

  a very

  personal thing

  ONE OF THE BEST things about the move to our new neighbourhood, according to my mother, was that Lynda and I would be out of touch. Lynda was what Mom called “boy crazy.” I knew that wasn’t fair, but there was no arguing with her. Lynda had matured fast physically, and by grade 7 had started to run with her sister’s crowd, two years older. In the summer between grades 8 and 9 I’d gone for a ride with her, her boyfriend, George, and George’s friend. It was the closest thing to a date I’d ever had. George parked at the dam south of town, and he and Lynda slid together on the front seat and started necking. In the back, the other boy kissed me, which I liked, then touched my breast. I didn’t know what to do. Lynda and I had talked about how we didn’t want to be like the girls shunned by the popular kids in town. Those girls hung around the bus depot café, and most of them had dropped out of school to be carhops at the Dog ’n’ Suds or to clean rooms at the motels along the highway.

  Even when we were kids, boys looked at Lynda differently. Their gaze would skim over my head and rest on her, and there was a look in their eyes I had no word for. Lynda had always been tall and gangly. Our parents used to call us Mutt and Jeff; she had the legs of a colt and I, the legs of an Irish potato-digger. Often in play I’d hold my arms out to her, my hands clasped together as if in prayer, and she’d grab me by the wrists and swing me around. Sometimes she dropped me to the ground without warning and gravel studded my knees.

  One afternoon soon after Lynda’s eighth birthday, as we bounced her new rubber ball back and forth on the sidewalk, she told me she knew something I didn’t. It happened only to women, she said, and it was happening to her right now. Her mother had made her promise not to tell me, and so she couldn’t say more. At the supper table that night, I brought it up. “What did she mean?” I asked. I could tell by the silence around the table that I’d stepped into dangerous territory. My brother dug into his potatoes. My father reached for another pork chop. My mother threw me a warning look and said I should mind my own beeswax.

  Four years later, when it was time for me, Mom gave me a booklet she’d ordered from Kotex called You’re a Young Lady Now. On the cover a blonde, pigtailed girl in blue jeans gazed into her bedroom mirror; a “young lady” with her hair down and wearing a mauve party dress smiled back at her. Inside the back cover was a special 1960 calendar, where a girl, every month, could make an all-important X. Girls were advised in one caption to “Stay Neat and Sweet.” That section suggested bathing once a day, something never done in my family. We’d always had renters, and there was only one bathtub to be shared among seven people. Another headline decreed, “Keep Fresh as a Daisy.” The booklet warned that even a girl’s perspiration smelled stronger during that time of the month.

  Though the Kotex company assured the reader menstruation was a natural part of growing up, it went on to chide, “It’s a very personal thing, so you won’t want to discuss it with anyone else except your mother, school nurse, or advisor.” It was obvious my mother didn’t want to discuss it. My only contact with the school nurse had been to line up with my classmates in the elementary school gym for booster shots for mysterious diseases, and I couldn’t even imagine what an “advisor” might look like. No wonder Lynda, dying to tell me, had promised her mother not to breathe a word.

  In our fifth year of elementary school—two years after Lynda had reached puberty—the Eagle Theatre began a special four o’clock double feature of rerun movies. Every Friday, Lynda and I ran from our classroom and down Central Avenue so we wouldn’t be late. It was okay with our mothers as long as we stuck together and didn’t stay for the second show. If they’d known some of the movies were about vampires and Frankenstein’s monster, they wouldn’t have let us go. On winter nights we’d run the five blocks home from streetlight to streetlight, stopping in the glowing circles and blowing out our breath visible in the cold, pretending we were smoking cigarettes in long ebony holders. If we didn’t reveal our fear, we thought, the pale, hungry monsters hiding between the houses wouldn’t nab us.

  During a Ma and Pa Kettle movie on a May afternoon, we waited in sweet anticipation for the pigs to get drunk on Pa’s moonshine, which had puddled in the barnyard after his still blew up. We were sunk in our seats a couple of rows from the front, our heads tilted back so we could see the screen, when two older boys we didn’t know sat down behind us. There weren’t many people in the theatre, and no one else so close to the screen. They could have sat anywhere, and when they stood up again and headed down their row to the aisle, we felt relieved. Before we could do anything, though, one pushed by Lynda and sat beside me, the other dropped into the seat next to her. We tried to get up, but the boys held us down with one hand and with the other grabbed at our chests and between our legs, laughing. I pushed my elbows into my sides so the boy leaning into me couldn’t get under my T-shirt. “You’re lucky you got that one,” he said to his friend. “This one doesn’t have any titties.”

  Lynda and I didn’t shout or fight. Like two cornered animals, we were shocked into silence. It was the boys’ laughter that brought the usher to our row with his flashlight. When he shone it on us, Lynda and I leaped up, bolted down the aisle and out the back exit. Daylight slapped our faces. We ran the block to Ham Motors, where we locked ourselves in the women’s bathroom. For half an hour, we sat on the floor by the sink, then we snuck from the garage and scurried home. We knew better than to tell our mothers. We still went to the movies every Friday after school, but now we took the seats closet to the aisle, in rows near other kids. We never saw the boys again.

  Lynda and I did drift apart when we started high school. It wasn’t something either of us planned. But there were two sections of grade 9, and we were placed in different rooms. I’d chosen Latin and she, typing; the choice separated one group from another. On top of that, Lynda hung around with a gang of older kids who had dropped out of school. I was dating boys my own age and trying hard not to be “bad.” That didn’t mean I wasn’t interested in sex. I felt terribly conflicted about what I wanted to do and what I should do in the narrow darkness of a car parked in places the streetlights didn’t reach. The common spots were the dam; the gravel pit, with its hills of crushed stone; and, in spring and summer, the big parking lot behind the curling rink. No one but the most absurd romantic would have called these places lovers’ lanes.

  Not that it mattered. The trysts themselves were not the source of my teenage delight. The fun and sexual buzz were most delicious in the hour or so of getting ready for a date—the pink of the powder puff dusting my skin, the satiny cold cream rubbed on each toe and up my calves to the top of my thi
ghs, the backcombing, the hairspray, the quick dab of Evening of Paris in the hollow of my neck, the tiny samples of lipstick tubes from Avon lined up on the dresser, their names full of promise: Ravishing Red, Candy Kiss, Peach Delight.

  The boy who came to pick me up was never the debonair figure of my dreams. In his dad’s car he’d be overly insistent and awkward, hasty and sometimes sloppily sentimental. It wasn’t his eyes or hands I had preened for. No: what saved the evening were the other boys, boys whose gazes I’d catch at the movie, the Country Club Café or one of the Teen Town Friday dances, boys I knew only distantly or not at all. Among them there must be one who was waiting for me, a stranger from another town who would change my life forever.

  Lynda’s life changed forever much faster than mine did. In grade 10 she suddenly disappeared from school. It was generally agreed the worst thing that could happen to a girl and her family was an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. If her parents could afford it, the girl was sent to a home, though everyone pretended she was visiting an aunt in the city. When there was no extra money for room and board in Regina, Moose Jaw or Saskatoon, the girl’s shame grew with her belly, if she dared to show herself in the streets.

  On a cold morning in March, I saw Lynda at the drugstore, dabbing perfume on the inside of her wrist. She wore a long, baggy jacket, and she looked sad. “You’ve probably heard,” Lynda said. “I’m not going away. I’m going to keep the baby.”

  No one her age in Swift Current had done that before. “Are you going to live at home?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “Murray and I are going to get married next month and find our own place. My parents will help us out till he can get a better job.”

  You can’t do that, I wanted to shout. We’re only fifteen. But I said nothing. She and I were still the Mutt and Jeff of our childhood, and I couldn’t believe how markedly she had left me behind.

  In June, Lynda was forbidden to take her exams with the rest of us. When all the other students had gone, the principal sat her in a desk in the cavernous gymnasium, and she wrote the tests, one after the other. She was in her second trimester by then and had been married for two months to the big, sloppily handsome boy who was the father. The September their daughter was born, he found a job in the oil fields.

  My mother felt bad for Lynda, but her fear for me pushed aside her sympathy. In the kitchen she turned from the sink and, suddenly stern, said, “You know we couldn’t help you out, don’t you?” Lynda’s parents were lending a hand not only with the rent but with buying the baby a crib and a supply of diapers. “If you get pregnant,” Mom said, “you’re on your own.”

  Some nights after cheerleading practice, I’d walk downtown from the gym to visit Lynda at an apartment in the Christopherson Block, the same building my Grandma and Grandpa Ford now moved to in the winters, the cold and isolation of the farm finally too much for them. The red-brick, one-storey building dated from the early 1900s, and it sat across from a small mall with a drugstore, a realtor and a big SAAN that sold the cheapest clothing in town. In the hallway, I breathed in the smell of human bodies, boiled vegetables and felt-lined rubber boots warmed by radiators. Overriding everything was the sense of time turned stale, souring on the hands of the tenants and rising wearily like indoor heat to settle under the apartments’ low ceilings. Lynda, her husband and the baby were the only young ones who lived in the building. Murray was rarely there, and whenever I saw him on the street, he looked cagey and sullen, even though he grinned in his old happy-go-lucky way. You knew that in a few years he’d turn to fat.

  While Lynda ironed diapers in front of the TV to dry them, I bubbled with stories about the latest boy I had a crush on or the basketball tournament and its stars. I held Dani Lee, a round-faced, dark-eyed doll who rarely cried. Lynda propped the iron on its end and looked right at me. “It isn’t worth it,” she said. “Trust me, don’t go all the way.”

  I didn’t. No matter how much I loved the sucks and licks of pleasure or how often my body arced like a pale fish to the lure of a boy’s mouth and hands, at the last minute I pulled away. Instead of my boyfriend’s complaints and vows of love, I heard my friend—not what she’d told me in that shabby apartment but her voice from another time, the two of us calling to each other from the bottom of the swimming pool. When we couldn’t understand what the other had said, we’d rise to the surface, take a breath and sink again, our words turning to water. How like sex it was, that going under, though we didn’t know it then. In the game we played, how innocent our wet, almost naked bodies, bloodless and beyond harm.

  perfect time

  MOM POSED DAD and me for a photograph the night of my grade 12 graduation. I stood stiffly in my first long dress, a sleeveless, aqua peau de soie with small covered buttons spilling down the right side. For the first time in my life, I had a hairdo. Ginnie at the local shop had shaped my curls into a bundle of sausage rolls on top of my head. Later, I would groan every time I looked at my hair in this photo. Then I thought it was as sophisticated as anything I’d seen in a Movietone magazine.

  Dad was wearing his only suit. It was the kind most prairie men of his background and generation saved for weddings and funerals, ignoring the shifts in fashion or their body shape. His arm was draped across my shoulders, and as he turned away from me towards the camera, his sloppy grin looked as if it was about to slide off his face. Before Mom snapped the picture, he said, “You’re my little girl.”

  My satin high heels were dyed the same colour as my dress. Dad was in his good “oxfords,” as they were called. Mel Caswell’s wife had given them to him when Mel died. They were both small men with small feet, but every time Dad wore the shoes he complained they pinched. That night he’d forgotten to tie his shoelaces. After taking the picture, my mother, in a snit, sat him on the couch, yanked the laces into place and knotted a bow. He leaned on her as we walked to the door.

  We were close to being late for the banquet in the school gym. We had to be on time; I was the valedictorian, and my family was supposed to sit with the principal at the head table, where I’d give my speech after everyone had consumed the ham, scalloped potatoes and jellied salads. Over coffee and apple pie, my fellow grads and their parents would listen to my optimistic, conservative lines about the values our elders had taught us and how these would guide us through the years to come. There was no hint of teenaged angst, no disrespect or rebellion in my speech, no true words about what I’d learned from my father. Though it was 1966, it was small-town Saskatchewan, and the sixties were happening somewhere else.

  Dad hadn’t come home the night before. He didn’t stay away overnight all that often, but when he did we knew he’d fallen into a poker game or a heavy drinking party that didn’t know how to end. “It’s always when something important is happening that he acts like this,” my mother said.

  The last big public event in the family had been my brother’s wedding two years before. The three of us had caught the night train to Winnipeg, where Barry was stationed in the air force, Dad with a bottle in his suit jacket, shouting and singing, keeping everyone awake until the porter threatened to throw him off. Shame was an everyday part of living with him, but that was the first time I willed myself to grow small, so small that no one could see me. Later, I was startled when I caught the reflection of my face in the window of the train. I thought I had made myself disappear.

  The afternoon of my graduation, my mother had made me walk to the school to tell Mr. Whiteman, the teacher in charge, that my father wouldn’t be at the banquet. He’d been called out of town for work, I was to say. The story was implausible, because my father’s job was in the oil patch, just a few miles away. I prayed that Mr. Whiteman didn’t know what Dad did for a living, and I squirmed at the thought of lying to him. He was my English teacher, I’d just gotten 97 per cent on my Easter exam, and I wanted to keep his respect. My last year of high school, I’d given up on avoiding high marks in order to fit in. I wanted to go to university, and I’d need scholarship
s to pay my way.

  Mr. Whiteman nodded his head and said nothing as I apologized for my father’s absence, but I saw something in his gaze that I’d never seen before. It wasn’t disappointment or anger. Would I have known then to call it pity? Whatever it was, it made me mad, not at my parents or myself, but at my teacher. Despite the shame he caused me, the love I felt for my father was fierce. It would have been easier if I could have simply hated him.

  A few hours after my meeting with Mr. Whiteman, I walked ahead of my parents to the school to relay the good news that my father was able to make it after all. The head table would need to be rearranged, my father’s place card set beside mine. Trying to get to the gym before the other grads and their parents were seated, I walked as fast as I could, pounding my new thin heels so hard on the sidewalk that the rubber tip broke off my right shoe. Mr. Whiteman was standing by the stage I’d helped decorate the day before with crêpe-paper streamers, pink and aqua Kleenex roses and balloons. When I moved between the long tables across the floor towards him, one shoe made a clicking noise; the other landed without a sound. I wished anything would happen but what was about to. I wished I were any other place on Earth.

  IN OUR CROWDED living room a few weeks before graduation, my father and I danced. He was good on his feet, gliding me through an old-time waltz, a two-step, a quicker foxtrot. My toes stubbed into his. No matter how many times he told me to relax, my body stiffened. At the Friday night Teen Town dances, I had no trouble with grace and daring. I twisted and jived with the best of them, and I mastered my generation’s kind of waltz: my partner and I would stand almost still, swaying, arms wrapped tightly around sweaty backs as if we were keeping each other afloat. Heads bobbing in the dark, we swooned to music we barely heard above the warm rush of blood and heartbeat. But my parents’ kind of dancing—the two slow, backwards steps followed by two fast ones forwards; the smooth slide through circles, the quick crossing of the floor, avoiding the couch, the chair, the big console radio–record player combination—required more coordination than I’d been born with.