Daddy Lenin and Other Stories

by Guy Vanderhaeghe

  What surprised me was how quickly I began to look forward to Sabrina’s visits. And she began to make them earlier and earlier in the day, sometimes she showed up by one o’clock. For several weeks that summer the local TV station showed matinees that alternated Abbot and Costello movies one day, Dick Powell films the next, and we fell into the habit of watching them together. Abbott and Costello killed Sabrina, their antics made her yelp with laughter, squirm on the sofa like a little kid. The other side of her loved the Dick Powell musicals, the song-and-dance routines, the moony, dreamy, fairy-tale sundaes the old-time studio soda jerks served up.

  Sabrina was a lot less chippy, a lot less belligerent off her home turf. By turns she could be goofy and serious, playful and big-sisterly stern. When it came to playing big sister, it wasn’t long before she started to ask me What are you going to do with your life? I was fifteen, my ambitions didn’t extend much further than getting my driver’s licence in a year and maybe, if I could summon up the guts, inviting Jenny Likes to Play the Squeezebox to go for a ride with me in my father’s half-ton.

  Sabrina put the big career question to me just after Dick Powell had finished singing and tripping his way through 42nd Street. As usual, although it was only three o’clock in the afternoon, all the curtains were drawn for security reasons, to make sure that nobody out on the street spotted who was hanging out at the Dowd residence. The room was full of heat and very dim, but in a little sparse light filtering through the drapes I could see earnestness gleam on Sabrina’s face.

  “I don’t know,” I said, resorting to flippancy. “Be a fireman. Be a cowboy. Indian chief.”

  “I’m serious,” she said. “Don’t act like a bonehead. You’ve got to think ahead, Billy. You’ve got to plan. At least start treading water now or you’ll sink.”

  “That’s pretty extreme.”

  “No, it isn’t. You think you can just float along and one day you’ll just float to the top of the world? No way, Billy, you’ll end up sinking like a stone. You’ve got to set your sights on something.”

  “Okay, so tell me, what have you set your sights on?”

  “Getting out of this town. Away from them.”

  “That’s not much. Boy, what a huge ambition.”

  “One thing at a time, Billy. One thing at a time. I’m saving money for the day I can wave goodbye to Groveland. That’s the first step.”

  Setting your sights on something wasn’t the only thing Sabrina harassed me about. She was big on me improving myself. In fact, sometimes I got to feeling I was no different than a project for a science fair. Here’s this bucket of gritty sand and look what you can do with it, blast it with ambition, blow the glowing, heated mass into a very nice glass vase you can stick a flower in. Beautiful.

  One afternoon she picked up the paperback copy of Goldfinger I was reading, started turning the pages, stopping here and there to skim a passage. When she finally put it down, she was in full big-sister mode. “Why do you waste your time reading this crap?”

  I was annoyed. “Because it’s entertaining. I like it. That’s good enough for me.”

  “No, it isn’t good enough for you. That’s my point. It’s idiotic. James Bond boinking women with names like Pussy Galore. How old is the guy who wrote it? Ten?”

  In my defence, I dredged up something I had heard or read somewhere. “President Kennedy loved James Bond. If it was good enough for the leader of the Free World, it’s good enough for me.”

  “Yeah, but he had already got to where he was going. He was entitled to do a little slumming. You, on the other hand, seem pretty much to be spinning your wheels.”

  That was the problem with Sabrina; she had an answer for everything.

  But mostly things went smoothly between us. At her prodding, I even started to read some of her favourite books that she borrowed for me from the library because, needless to say, I had never bothered to get a card. Sometimes we talked about them. An air of quiet domesticity established itself. Sabrina even began to do a little housecleaning, occasional vacuuming, giving the bathroom a swab, putting things back in place that I left lying around.

  During our supper conversations I relaxed, did start to open up, did say a few things that, when voiced out loud, took on an air of plausibility. I even volunteered that maybe going into business would be the thing for me. “I like math; my marks are all right in geometry and algebra,” I said modestly. “What’s business but numbers and figures?”

  Sabrina pursed her lips. “I don’t know. I think business is more than that. More than numbers and figures,” she said. “It seems to me you’ve got to be a tough nut in business, be ready to use people without thinking about it too much. You need to be selfish.”

  I didn’t say I suspected I was just that, selfish. The thought made me uncomfortable so I switched the spotlight to her. “And you? You never say anything about what you want to do once you beat it out of Groveland. What are you going to be good at?”

  “I could be good at a lot of things.” Sabrina could say something like that without sounding conceited. On her lips it was a statement of fact, hardly different from declaring, I weigh 123 pounds. “I don’t know. I like to draw and paint.”

  I was incredulous. “You mean you want to paint pictures for a living?”

  “I said I didn’t know. Just something different. Not run of the mill,” she said, suddenly irritable.

  We left it at that.

  I had become so attached to Sabrina that when I realized my father would soon have a few days off from work, I felt disappointed that I wouldn’t be able to see or talk to her for a while. Sometimes I wonder if the failure of my two marriages didn’t have something to do with the fact that dinner conversations with either of my wives never went as easily or freely as they did with Sabrina Koenig. Maybe I was spoiled early.

  The Saturday morning I expected Father to show up in Groveland he phoned me from Weyburn; he had driven there overnight, straight from the job site. Father said he had bad news; the doctors thought it would be at least another month before Mother would be ready to be released. He added, “I won’t be home until late Sunday. Don’t let me forget to give you a cheque for your board.”

  I had prepared for this. Once or twice I had heard Father talk about “working off the books,” the advantages of keeping the government out of the loop, from knowing everything there was to know about your income.

  “Mrs. Koenig prefers cash,” I said. “On account of taxes.”

  The line went briefly silent. “It’s a little tight,” he said. “I don’t have all that much walking-around money on me. I can probably give you thirty bucks tomorrow and mail the rest of it to you later when I get to a bank. You think she’ll go for that?”

  “I can talk her into it.”

  “Good boy,” he said. “I like to see you showing initiative.”

  Next day, Father arrived, coughed up the dough for Mrs. Koenig, gave me another cheapskate instalment on the “emergency fund,” and made a quick inspection of the house. “You’re keeping this place pretty clean and tidy,” he said. “It looks like you’re growing up. Learning to be responsible.”

  Having given me that sticky-fingered pat on the head, he roared off.

  Sabrina and I resumed our routine. Thinking about it now, I suppose we were like two little kids shutting the real world out, imagining ourselves living in an alternate universe where life was like it was in Abbott and Costello and Dick Powell movies, everything hilarious or inconsequentially light-hearted, a place where no one was saddled with a horrible, shameful family or a crazy, angry, sad mother.

  Everything was fine, better than fine as far as I was concerned, until one afternoon Sabrina went quiet while we were watching Buck Privates. I sent her a curious What’s up? glance, but when she didn’t take the bait I chose to let her be and concentrated on Abbott and Costello’s loony capers. After a few minutes, she whispered huskily, “Hey, I want to ask you something. We’re friends, right?”

 
Her tone alerted me that this something was not going to be either inconsequentially light-hearted or hilarious.

  “Sure we’re friends.”

  “You know me. Always making plans, using the old forebrain?”

  “Right.”

  “I graduate this year. I’m going to be valedictorian.”

  “So how do you know you’re going to be valedictorian? Isn’t it months before they choose somebody?”

  “My marks will be the best.” One eyebrow tilted wryly. “Then there’s the pity factor. My leg.”

  I dodged saying anything about her leg. I didn’t like to be reminded of it. “Okay, so you’re going to be valedictorian. Congratulations.”

  “The valedictorian and their date lead the graduates into the school gym after the ceremony. For the dance. It’s tradition.”

  I played stupid, just stared at her.

  “So who am I supposed to march in with? Nobody’s going to ask me to be their date. I’ll be humiliated. It’ll be the most humiliating thing in the long string of humiliations I’ve had to live with.”

  “You don’t need to be valedictorian. Nobody can make you be valedictorian. You can turn it down.”

  “I don’t want to turn it down! Goddamn it, what’s the matter with you? I want to be valedictorian! And I need a date!” she shouted at me.

  There was no mistaking where she was headed. “I can’t dance,” I said.

  “So you can’t dance. You think I’ve been spending my last three years of high school dancing up a storm? With this?” She struck her stick-like leg with a white-knuckled fist, hard.

  I had to look away. It says a lot about me that I knew it was wrong to feel a certain way about something but that I could still keep feeling it. The sight of that leg, the jerky way she had to flop it forward with every step, her lunging, plunging gait always gave me the heebie-jeebies, made me want to look away.

  “Billy,” she said, “the first dance is always a slow dance. All we have to do is hold on to each other and shuffle.”

  “Let me think about it,” I said. “There’s no hurry. It’s a long way off.”

  “We could practise,” she said. “You could get comfortable with the idea, with doing it.” She waited for my answer. When it didn’t come she fired a strident “Billy?” at me.

  I was sweating clean through my pants, thinking of me and Sabrina Koenig trooping the graduates into the gym, everybody looking at us, whispering, smirking.

  “I said I’ll see.” I was stubbornly holding my eyes off her. I heard Sabrina struggle up from the sofa, the floppy, slapping sound the sandal on her bad leg made as she crossed the floor. The television clicked off and the radio sitting on top of it snapped on. She started fiddling with the dial, setting off strangled bursts of rock and pop until she hit the only station in the area, maybe the only station in the Western world, that still devoted itself twenty-four hours to geezer music. The opening strains of Tony Bennett’s “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” wafted into the room.

  I raised my eyes. Sabrina was standing there in the middle of the floor, waiting for me. All right, I said to myself. Suck it up. I got out of my chair and walked towards her. As I did, she slowly raised her arms to shoulder height, held them straight out before her like zombies do when they go for a stroll. I ducked under them; she laid her forearms shyly on the tops of my shoulders, I placed my hands on her hips, and we began to gingerly shift our feet about as if we were edging our way through a field of land mines. And all the while Tony was listing all his unsatisfactory experiences in Paris and Rome and going on about how he had been terribly alone and forgotten in Manhattan.

  We started to sway. Sabrina said, “See, Billy? It’s not so bad.”

  But it was bad. I’d had nothing to do with girls, and just my hands resting on Sabrina’s rounded hips, the scent of shampoo in her strawberry-blond hair mingled with some other slightly musky, ripe, and inviting smell, a smell I believed to be a distinctly female, sexual smell, had been enough to produce a trouser-bolt, the head of which had poked its way out of my Jockeys and was nuzzling the fabric of my jeans in a way that it was liking far too much. And maybe it was only my imagination, but it seemed to me that Sabrina was imperceptibly inching closer to me as Tony mournfully crooned his discontent with various world-class metropolises.

  “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” is a longish song, but that afternoon it seemed to last an eternity. Finally, the tune ended; Sabrina and I drew apart, and you could have cut the awkwardness with a knife. Her eyes wandered about the room, lighting on everything but me. “That graduation dance’ll be over before you know it. Relax. It’ll be okay.”

  When she said that, Sabrina reminded me a lot of my father. I said, “We’ll see.”

  Over the next few weeks what I was going to do about the dance caused a strain between us. Every once in a while Sabrina would make mention of something that touched upon graduation, tell me how she had money put aside for “a nice dress,” talk about the likelihood of her collecting a number of bursaries and scholarships that would enable her to go away to school. I played deaf, dumb, and blind no matter what she said. She got nothing from me.

  I was angry that Sabrina couldn’t see that my escorting her to graduation was not only ridiculous, it was just plain wrong. A girl could get away with dating a boy as much as four years older than she was, but a girl never dated a younger boy. No teenaged female would be caught dead doing such a thing. Other girls would have branded her a cradle-robber, thought she was ridiculous. Our grade eight health teacher had drummed into us that girls matured far faster than boys, not only physically but above all socially and psychologically. The implication of this was that God and Groveland had a plan for the sexes, and that plan didn’t include me taking Sabrina, two years older than I was, to graduation.

  If we did sashay into that gym, arm in arm, she would never be able to live it down and neither would I. Of course, since graduation was in May, that meant Sabrina would only have to suffer a month of amused condescension before she waved goodbye to Groveland forever, while I would face two more years of psychic mauling. And I wasn’t risking that, for anybody.

  Ten days before school resumed, when the stalemate was still unbroken, I got a call from Sabrina. She said that she wasn’t going to be able to make me supper that day. No explanation. But she went on to say there was a movie on TV that night that she wanted to see. Could she watch it at my place even though it started at twelve-thirty? Her hoodlum brothers always nixed anything she was interested in viewing, just on principle.

  A little miffed that it didn’t seem worth her while to tell me why I was being denied my usual home-cooked meal, I played hard to get, asked what was this movie? Maybe I wouldn’t be interested in it.

  Sabrina said it was Lord of the Flies. Mr. Younger, her English teacher, had lent her a copy to read last year and she wanted to see what the movie was like. The title meant nothing to me. After some dramatic hemming and hawing, I told her, Okay, it would be all right if she came over.

  Being jilted put me in a bad mood and for the first time in ages I resorted to my father’s bottle of Canadian Club. Shortly before midnight I was enjoying a cocktail when I heard Sabrina’s timid tap at the back door.

  “Come in!”

  I heard some furtive movements in the kitchen, then she stepped into the living room, revealed her surprise. It was the first time I had ever seen Sabrina Koenig wearing makeup. Her sandy eyelashes were blackened with mascara, there was blue eyeshadow smeared on her eyelids, and pale pink lipstick smeared on her lips.

  “It’s my Julie Christie look,” she said with a tight, uneasy laugh.

  “Sure. If you say so.”

  “What’s that you’re drinking?”

  “Rye and Coke.”

  “I’ll have one too.”

  I got up and got her a glass. The forty-ouncer was still half full so I didn’t begrudge her a drink, although I was a bit taken aback she had asked for one. It wasn’t Sabrina
’s style, but then neither was the makeup, which made her a trifle weird and scary-looking. She poured for herself a shot of alarming quantity.

  Knocking back her booze, she launched into the story of how she had pillaged her sister Jennifer’s makeup kit, and when she told it, she laughed too much, and in a forced way that sounded nothing like the joyful yelps that Lou Costello’s pratfalls provoked. It was a relief when the movie started.

  For the next hour and a half, Sabrina didn’t say a word, sat silent and still, a stillness only broken when her hand went stealing out for the bottle, tipped it to slop more whiskey into her glass. About the third time she went to that well, I said to her, “Hey, you better go easy on that. You’re slamming it down pretty fast.” But she just ignored me, eyes glued to the screen.

  The British naval frigate collected the child-survivors from the island, the movie ended. “So,” I said, “what did you think of that?”

  She was still riveted on the TV, which was signalling the conclusion of the day’s programming, a flag bravely fluttering in a brisk breeze and the national anthem playing. “I was thinking,” she said in a whisper, “those kids in the movie, they’re like a big family, but then the monsters in the family take control and fuck everything up for everybody else.”

  I had never heard her say fuck before, and the two or three times it had slipped out of me, she had said, “Language, mister. Language.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said. “Every family’s got monsters.”

  For the first time in a couple of hours she looked at me, eyes slightly unfocused, her shockingly blue eyelids hanging at half-mast. “You talking about your mother?”

  I said nothing. My feelings about my mother were difficult to reconcile and even more difficult to explain. I loved her, but right now I didn’t miss her. I was on vacation from Mother and doing my best not to think about her, about where she was, or how she was doing, because I knew that when she came home, the pattern would start all over again. The three of us, Father, Mother, and I, would have to face the same old devil, our very own leering Lord of the Flies who would be preparing another ambush for us weeks, months, maybe as much as a year down the road. Mother’s mental torments would be revisited.