Leaning, Leaning Over Water

by Frances Itani

  With this, we both snorted with laughter. The day before, we’d taken the bus to Hull and crossed the river to Ottawa to shop in the only store that sold women’s shoes, size ten and up. Although it was a store we hated, it was not without interest. It was a small narrow shop with displays lining the side walls, nothing longer than a size nine in sight. Everything else was hidden away. The all-male sales staff greeted women as they slipped in and out of the Sparks Street entrance. A bell tinkled overhead every time an oversized foot pressed the welcome mat at the door.

  Lyd and I were ignored but we’d braced ourselves; we’d been there the summer before and we’d been ignored then, too. We walked around the edges of the shop, keeping an eye on women in matching suits, purses and gloves. We did not know who they were but, clearly, they were rich and we were not. We were there only because of the size of Lyd’s feet, and because she’d saved enough babysitting money for one pair of shoes.

  The oversize shoes were discreetly stacked in towers of boxes behind what Lyd and I called the Curtain of Dread. Eventually, an older man came over, took a look at the two of us, took a look at Lyd’s feet and pointed to a chair. “Kick up the pumps, kid,” he said, and held out his hand for her foot. That really set us off.

  The reason I was with Lyd in the first place was because it was unthinkable for her to be in this store alone. If humiliation was going to fall her way, we would share it. Over the past year and a half we had devised a repertoire of foot-andheight rituals that we carried out every time we were in town. It was my responsibility to walk on the inside because sidewalks slanted downward towards the curb and Lyd felt shorter on the outside. If I forgot, she hissed and rushed around behind me. We knew we would have to keep up this behaviour until her feet and the rest of her body stopped growing but we had no way of knowing when that would be.

  “Don’t work on me, Trude,” she said now. “You know I hate the dances on Skinner’s Road. I always end up with the one guy who comes up to my armpits. Tell me why the shortest guys ask the tallest girls to dance. Tell me that.”

  “Maybe they never had Mommies,” I said. But the remark had flown out of me before I could stop it.

  We never talked about the details of Mother, the reminders of the life of her. We’d never given away the special dresses, the hand-sewn ones that still hung in the long closet in plastic wardrobes. Or the brush-and-mirror set that had been cleared off the top of her vanity and crammed into a bottom drawer. We didn’t speak of the way she’d never gone out without first putting on a pair of earrings or a pair of white gloves, even to take the bus to town to get groceries at the A&P. Or the time she hauled the Queen Anne chairs and the Tiffany lamps and the kitchen set down to the riverbank, chopped them up and burned them because she wanted something new, of her own.

  “Do you think we don’t have enough money?” I asked Lyd.

  “We don’t have two cents,” she said. She sounded like our mother when she said that. She even looked like our mother.

  “Not us. I mean the family, Father. He’s cheating on next year’s tax receipts in the other room.”

  “I don’t want to hear it,” she said. “I absolutely do not want to hear it.” She stood up and dangled two brilliant yellow shoes from her index fingers. “Done,” she said, and held them out for me to see. These were the shoes we’d come away with the day before, the one and only pair the salesman had carried out from behind the Curtain of Dread. They were flats, straw flats. Yesterday, they’d been mauve. Lyd had not expected them to fit and they hadn’t. She’d paid up and we’d run out the door and kept on running for two blocks until we reached the corner of O’Connor. We’d stood in front of Zellers, gasping for breath until we calmed down.

  “We’re cursed,” Lyd said. “The females in this family are doomed to have big feet.” I didn’t agree because I was pretty sure mine had stopped growing, but I didn’t say anything. Then we went inside, and Lyd picked out the canary yellow shoe dye.

  I began to work on her again. With or without permission, I was going to the dance. It would be a lot easier to get past Father if Lyd and I were to leave the house together. But Lyd liked to stay home.

  Father and I—I wasn’t sure how this had come about—had begun to set up resistance to each other. No matter how small the issue, our wills collided. He didn’t seem to be able to deal with the fact that Lyd and I were turning ourselves into women—though she and I never talked about or even spoke the word. It was like being on an unstoppable journey, heading into future unknown without parental approval. If Father had noticed that we were growing up, he wasn’t letting on. Lyd and he were okay, and Eddie managed to stay out of his way, but sometimes he and I would look each other in the eye and anger would erupt. He was trying to keep me back, I thought; he was trying to hold me down in childhood forever.

  I remembered a prediction Mother had made on my tenth birthday. “You,” she said. “Just wait till you’re in your headstrong years. Your fighting spirit will rear up from its hiding place and come rushing out, just like your father’s. I never saw a child so strong-willed.” But even as she’d warned, I’d felt her yield to the complicitous weave of genes. Wills. One will rising to meet another. Nothing could prevent that.

  Lyd surprised me suddenly and gave in. It was an unexpected collapse of her will. She pushed a foot into one yellow shoe and stood in the middle of the kitchen and took the shoe off again.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll go. But this is the last time I’ll be your cover. Get the scissors and I’ll start working on your hair.”

  Though Leo and I liked to dance together, most of our conversation was about his car. He had quit school two years earlier and bought an old green Pontiac. It needed so much work I knew there would never be an end to it. Already, he’d done fender repairs, paint job, had added secondhand tires and a furry beige cover that stretched across the front seat. Leo was five years older than I, the reason I had to keep him away from Father. He was also teaching me to drive. When we were in the car together on country roads, I slid over beside him and shifted gears while he took care of the clutch. Twice, when there’d been no traffic, I’d climbed across and taken over the wheel completely. I couldn’t get my licence for another year and a half, but by then I planned to be an expert driver.

  Lyd did not approve of Leo. Too old, she said. Watch out for him. And dumb sideburns. Temperamental about his car, too. What I hadn’t told her was that he’d begun to collect glasses and saucers and cups at the drive-in movies, and that these were stored in a cardboard box in the trunk of his car. He’d talked to me about wanting four little red-haired children but it had never occurred to me that he had me in mind as their future mother. I didn’t have so much as a streak of red in my hair and neither did he. There was simply no connection.

  One afternoon when he picked me up at my high school he let me have a glimpse of a photo he held in one palm and quickly covered over with the other. It was a photo of a pyramid of adult bodies, all naked. Each naked body was doing something to the one on top and the one below. I was shocked by the photo but my reaction only made Leo laugh. He had taken the photo from his father’s collection at home, he said, and would have to put it back. I was too young to have a second look, he told me. He pressed his hands against my hips. “What the girls in the picture know is how to wiggle these,” he said.

  Another day, he told me that once the work on his car was finished, he was going to save to buy an old farm. When he had enough money, he would start to fix that up.

  I knew there were people like Leo and my childhood friend, Mimi, who seemed to know what their future would be and then shaped themselves to fit the plan. But when I looked into my own future I could see nothing ahead but space. I didn’t know what Lyd would do, but my plan was to get out of St. Pierre as soon as I finished school. I had no idea what would happen after that. The plan, if there was one, was simply to leave.

  I didn’t see Mimi often any more but Lyd and I had met her on the bus when we
were coming home late from school one Friday afternoon, at the beginning of May. We had boarded the bus on Taché Boulevard near the Standish; we’d moved to the long seat across the back, and there she was.

  Mimi was only a year older than I but already she looked older than Lyd. She’d quit school in the village after Christmas and now worked as a filing clerk for the government, in Ottawa. She’d had to lie about her age, she said; she and her mother had fixed her birth certificate.

  She was wearing a shiny green dress that was sheath tight, and three-inch black patent heels. She wore large earrings and long beads that made me think of the rosary I’d once painted and that we’d buried beside the river. We’d never gone back to dig it up. Seven or eight bracelets clattered up and down her arms and as they slid over her bones I caught a glimpse of tiny wrists. She was wearing eggshell make-up and I could see the line where it ended, along the side of her neck. Lyd and I were allowed to wear lipstick, that was all.

  When we got off at the same stop in the village, she invited me to come over. “We hardly ever see each other now that you go to school in Hull,” she said. “Grand-mere misses you. My mother, too. She can’t get a divorce, you know, and that’s sad. We don’t even know where Bee-Bee lives. My mother’s appendix nearly burst last year because we couldn’t find him to sign the consent. Well, never mind, he put in a bathroom before he left. Mes tantes stood around the bowl and took turns flushing.” A sharp laugh came out of her and for a moment she seemed on the verge of hysteria. “Anyway,” she said, “come over some weekend and I’ll show you what I’ve collected for my hope chest. Every pay, I buy one new thing. Last pay it was a cigarette box from Tunisia. With a lid. Next month I’m buying a pair of baby dolls at Murphy’s—they’re black, mostly black lace.”

  I thought of Lyd and me and our shared dresser and how we swapped clothes for school—Kitten sweater sets, mostly Orion. And cinch belts, hair bands and short-sleeved blouses. The thought of either of us having a hope chest, or black baby-doll pyjamas from Murphy Gamble on Sparks Street, was preposterous.

  Lyd and I spent most of the afternoon sitting on the edge of the bed, playing “I Almost Lost My Mind,” over and over on the record player, wailing along with Pat Boone while we did things to ourselves. Lyd evened out the sides of my chopped hair but couldn’t get the back the way she wanted. “I give up,” she said. “I can’t fix it.” She dug into her top drawer and held up the fake ponytail she’d bought at the Metropolitan in Hull at the beginning of June. The match was perfect for my own dark hair but when she pinned it on I felt as if something free-floating and unnatural had been attached to my skull. I didn’t want to wear it but I didn’t have much choice.

  “Leo will never know it isn’t yours,” said Lyd. “Nobody will. You can’t even see the pins.”

  I moved to the right and the hair shifted side to side. I moved forward and back and reached up to check that it was still attached.

  “Don’t touch,” she said. “If you do, you’ll loosen it. It’ll be perfectly okay if you keep your hands off.”

  We took a blanket to the backyard and stretched out to tan our legs in the last rays of the afternoon sun.

  Ten minutes later, I sat up in disbelief. I’d heard the unmistakable nasal voice of Kitty Wells singing “Searching.” Leo was driving right up to the front of the house, windows down, radio full blast.

  “For God’s sake,” I said, “Leo must be crazy. He’s driving up to the front door. Run around the side of the house, quick, Lyd, find out what’s going on. For God’s sake, does he think Father’s going to want to meet him?” I tore down to the end of the yard as if that would distance me from Leo’s behaviour. Lyd disappeared around the corner of the house.

  Not a minute later I watched the Pontiac turn away from the river and head back towards the village. Lyd returned, her face white, her lips set like the grim messenger she was.

  “Father told him to come back in twenty years,” she said. “Leo said he wanted to take you to the dance. He said he intended to pick you up at the front door and Father said, ‘Fat chance.’ That’s when he told him to come back in twenty years. Leo’s such a lout,” she added. “You’d think he’d have asked before coming here. Didn’t you tell him what Father is like?”

  Father came to the back door and stood behind the screen looking out as if he were ready for a fight. “You won’t be going out of this house tonight,” he said. “Either one of you. And I don’t want to hear two words about it.”

  “I’m not a baby!” I yelled at him from the yard. I thought he would tear down the steps after me, but he didn’t. “I’m old enough to go out!” I yelled again. He stared at me for a moment and then turned and disappeared into the shadows of the summer kitchen.

  “You’re lucky he didn’t come out,” Lyd said. “The ponytail saved you. I think he was trying to figure out what was different. Anyway, that settles that. We won’t be at the dance tonight.” She sounded relieved that she didn’t have to go.

  Technically, by Father’s own rules, we knew that Lyd could go if she wanted to. She was already sixteen. While one part of me raged at the injustice, another part thought, He’ll never keep me in. It isn’t fair and there’s nothing wrong with going to a dance on Saturday night and all my friends will be there and if he won’t let me go, I’ll run away. I felt so weightless inside this decision, I wondered why I’d never thought of it before. But I had to take Lyd; I knew I couldn’t run away alone.

  It was after nine and the dance had started but Lyd and I were still in our room, waiting for Father to fall asleep in his maroon chair in the living room. By the time the front of the house was silent, it was quarter to ten. We set the radio volume low and turned out the light and humped pillows under the bedclothes. I’d been working on Lyd for hours and we were both strained and exhausted from the effort. Not only that, we were petrified. This was our greatest act of defiance, and even though we were running away we knew that wherever we would run, Father would find us. He would track us down and there would be some unknown consequence that none of us, not even Father, had ever had to imagine.

  It wasn’t difficult to tumble out the bedroom window; we’d been doing it all our lives. Father had sprung fire drills throughout our entire childhood and we’d learned to leap in and out of the bungalow windows from every part of the house. At the last minute, though we hadn’t done any planning, Lyd turned back and riffled through the closet and hauled out her long blue winter coat. When we reached the main road, we checked our pockets. Between us we had two quarters, two Smith Brothers cough drops and the blue coat. Lyd was wearing her canary yellow shoes. The fake ponytail was swinging behind me, and I kept putting my hand up to check that it was still there. I wondered if Leo would notice, and then I didn’t care. I was furious at him and my Father. No one owns me, I thought. Not Father and not Leo. It’s all Leo’s fault in the first place that Lyd and I have to run away. We could have gone out to meet our girlfriends and somebody would have given us a ride to the dance later, and Father would never have known.

  We headed out of the village but the first time we heard a car behind us, we jumped down into the roadside ditch. Father didn’t own a car, and even though it was unlikely that he was out of his chair, I couldn’t help imagining possible scenarios: Father running through the house like a chicken with its head cut off. Father calling his old friend Roy and shouting into the phone like a madman. The two men jumping into Roy’s big car, its searchlights roving the night trying to pick out canary yellow shoes or two hunched backs in the ditch. Our plan was to get out of the village and phone Leo from the crossroads, a mile away. There was a small restaurant there, called Herbie’s, a few tables inside and a pay phone outside. We’d get change for one of our quarters and call the dance hall, where I was pretty sure Leo would be waiting. There were always people hanging out by the pay phone there, and everyone knew the number. I imagined what my friends from school would say.

  Lyd and Trude have run away.

&nb
sp; Oh my God, you’re kidding. Their Father will kill them.

  They’re on their way here. They want Leo to go to Herbie’s to pick them up.

  Trude’s not supposed to go out. Her father’s really strict—especially since their mother died.

  Their mother drowned, you know, the year before last.

  I know that. They’re practically orphans.

  If they’ve run away, where will they run to after the dance?

  This was something we hadn’t considered. I’d been reluctant to bring it up in case Lyd changed her mind. As it was, her enthusiasm had begun to wither. When I went inside and sat down after phoning, she said, “I think we’d better go home.” She said it flatly, using her older-sister voice. “I don’t care if Father kills us.”

  “We can’t go home. How can you come this far and give up? What’s the matter with you? We’ve already walked—run—more than a mile.”

  “The dance is the first place Father is going to look,” Lyd said. “That moron Leo might as well have broadcast it to the whole world.”

  “Well, he’s on his way. And he’s bringing your date. We can’t go home now.” I tried to compromise. “We’ll go for two dances and turn around and come right back.”

  “Forget it,” said Lyd. “I don’t want the blind date any more. I never did. This is the stupidest thing we’ve ever done. Look at me!” she shouted. She pointed to smudges on her skirt, to the dirt on her yellow shoes. We’d been in and out of the ditch four times. The winter coat was heaped beside her on the seat.

  “Look at me, why don’t you!” I shouted back. We were half-laughing, half-crying. But Lyd was right. This was the stupidest thing we’d ever done. And it was true that Father was going to kill us.

  I didn’t tell Lyd that Leo and I had fought, over the phone. He was angry about Father turning him away and he wasn’t happy about leaving the dance to come back to get me. It was almost ten-thirty and the dance would end at midnight. In the time it would take him to come back for us and drive there again, we’d be lucky to be there for twenty minutes.