Mennonites Don't Dance

by Darcie Friesen Hossack

  “I see,” Lizbeth’s father said. He folded his hands, leaned back in his chair and looked at Ben as though he was an over-assertive rooster that might be ready for the soup pot. Chop-chop, nothing personal.

  When Lizbeth reached for a bun, Ben stopped her by gently catching her hand. “I thought you were trying to cut back.”

  “Right. No, you’re right,” she said. She glanced at her father before she turned her attention to sweeping a spray of crumbs from the table into her hand and brushing them into her plate.

  After lunch, Lizbeth followed her mother into the kitchen to help wash up, leaving Ben to drink coffee with her father and brothers. Lizbeth wished for her sisters, who usually helped blitz through the dishes in a matter of minutes and could talk steadily about village gossip the whole time.

  “Lizbeth, you don’t even know his family,” her mother said after a while. Lizbeth could tell she was being deliberately slow with the dishcloth. “He doesn’t seem right for you.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Lizbeth said. She scrunched a tea towel into a glass tumbler and gave it an anxious twist.

  “He makes me nervous, the way he doesn’t want to talk about the two of you. And he seems very overprotective. You need someone who will be sensitive, who will understand where you come from.”

  “Are you trying to say I’m supposed to find someone simple?” Lizbeth said, teetering on the edge of angrier words. “If he’s overprotective, at least that makes one person around here who’s willing to look after the people they care about.”

  “Lizbeth. We’re your family. We’ve always looked out for you.”

  “Sure. Like you looked out for John? If I was murdered in the garden, you’d all just forgive the person who did it and go on with your lives and eat more bread.” Lizbeth looked at her mother, who seemed confused, and had taken a step back as though pushed. Another step and she’d lose her balance. “If something happened to me and Ben didn’t do something about it, he’d never, ever get over it. He’d be miserable the rest of his life.”

  “Oh, Lizbeth. Is that’s how you think we should be, too?” her mother said. “I’m so sorry you feel that way. But you know we loved your brother as much as you did. We grieved for him as much as you.”

  “No, I don’t know that.” Lizbeth was breathing hard and stumbling over her thoughts.

  Later, in Ben’s car as he drove them back to town, Lizbeth stared out the passenger window as the countryside slipped by.

  “Your father told me what happened,” Ben said. Lizbeth knew that he meant what had happened to John.

  “Do you see me differently now?” she said without turning to look at him.

  “No,” he said. “You’re you. That hasn’t changed.”

  But when Lizbeth tried to focus on her reflection in the glass, it shifted and blurred with the changing horizon.

  On a Wednesday afternoon, three months after they’d met, and without telling anyone, Lizbeth and Ben went to City Hall. Lizbeth wore a white dress she bought off the rack at Woolworth. She repeated her vows with grave attention and listened as the judge called her by her new name. She was Mrs. Ben Bryant. A name she’d never heard in her whole life until she met him.

  “Mrs. Bryant,” she said, trying to pull it over her head like a new dress. But it was more like an apron that left her old clothes showing.

  Afterwards, when they left the building, she sat on the front steps and cried.

  “I don’t understand you, Lizzy,” Ben said, a little roughly. There were people coming up and down the stairs and all of them were either looking at her or trying not to.

  “It’s just — ”

  “Is it because your folks weren’t here?” He crouched down beside her so he could tip up her chin and look into her eyes. “Lizzy, I thought we were going to be enough for each other. That we didn’t need anyone else.”

  She was quiet for a few moments longer. “No, you’re right,” she said and let him help her up. She took a deep breath and held onto it for as long as she could.

  When Ben was offered a research position in Calgary that meant they’d be able to afford a house and Lizbeth would no longer have to work, they packed up the few things they owned and moved.

  At first, Ben took Lizbeth to places like the zoo and rode with her on the newly built C-Train so they could see the city together. They went to an Indian restaurant, Taj, sandwiched between a linens store and a bookshop in Kensington. They bought a few pieces of new furniture together and Lizbeth busied herself decorating their house in the north end.

  For weeks, Lizbeth spent her mornings at home looking through the Yellow Pages, which sat comfortably on her lap like a soft, flexible weight, and tore out pages with places they could visit on weekends. Museums, heritage sites, bird sanctuaries, long walks along the Bow River that took them downtown where the tall buildings seemed to close snugly around them like fingers.

  In the afternoons, when she was alone, she explored the nearby Nose Hill Park where, in the distance, if she climbed to the top of the long, meandering path, she could see a blue ridge of mountains. She picked wild flowers and carried them home to arrange in jam jars, which she set out around the house.

  After work, in the evenings, Ben sometimes brought home spicy curries with mango pickle, dhal, and chapattis. The exotic spices made Lizbeth feel as though she could step outside herself and into a different skin, as though who she was really was only a garment. She could decide to be different if she wanted to.

  When the newness of the city faded and was no longer a distraction, homesickness began to pull at her. Without meaning to, she thought of cooking with her mother and sisters in their old kitchen, her brothers coming in for lunch. She thought of John, the games they used to play, his blood on Liam’s shirt. She saw the hole in his neck and his casket being lowered into the ground. Her parents knelt and wept by his body, betraying him with their forgiveness. And she could have stopped all of it from happening if she hadn’t chosen to meet Liam that day.

  “Why do you think about all that stuff? You’re making yourself sick,” Ben said. He didn’t hide his disgust when he woke up one morning to find Lizbeth throwing up in the bathroom. “Why don’t you go do something? Keep busy.”

  “Maybe I’m sick of you. Did you ever think about that?” Lizbeth reached over and shoved the door closed. Later she came out and apologized.

  “I don’t feel very well lately,” she said.

  The more Lizbeth slipped into herself, the more Ben became brooding and distant. Whenever he thought Lizbeth was in a sulk, he left her at home and went for long drives by himself. Sometimes he came back with a gift-shop trinket from Banff, or a new kind of food, Thai or sushi. But when they didn’t cheer her up, Lizbeth could tell that he was giving up on her.

  “It’s just self-indulgence,” Ben said. “All this feeling sorry for yourself. That’s all it is. You’re being selfish. I didn’t think you were like this.” He had come home late one evening to find her sitting in the dark. It was a Sunday and he’d been gone since morning.

  “Like what?”

  “Like someone who can’t make up her own mind to be happy without a bunch of external stuff.”

  Lizbeth laughed flatly.

  “That’s funny,” she said. “And here I’ve spent the entire day trying to figure out how to tell you that I’m pregnant.” She threw the words at him and wondered whether he’d think it too external of her if she decided to be happy about the baby.

  Lizbeth gave birth to their daughter, Magda, on a freezing winter morning. The kind of morning that was thrillingly cold and, when she was younger, had made her feel as though the air would freeze in her lungs if she inhaled too deeply.

  In the car, on the way to the hospital, Lizbeth panted through the pain in her belly and back and legs, her breath coating the windshield with a fine sheet of ice that Ben had to scrape away with his driver’s license in order to see. He was quiet all the way there, and all through the delivery while L
izbeth let the waves of agony push everything else around her out of focus. The pain was like dark water, pulling her under, until the nurse put Magda in Lizbeth’s arms for the first time. At that moment, the water suddenly drained away, leaving her cold.

  Lizbeth looked at her daughter’s downy head. She drew her finger over her soft, pink forehead and cheeks, over her nose and mouth. She uncurled her long fingers and counted them.

  “She looks like my mother,” Lizbeth said. She closed her eyes and leaned back into her pillow, shuddering with a wave of homesickness. When she opened her eyes, she expected Ben to say something, be annoyed that she’d seen anything in their daughter but the two of them. But Ben surprised her by taking out a new camera he’d bought and snapping a picture.

  “My two girls,” he said and kissed Lizbeth on her forehead. The warmth of his mouth spread over her and felt something like joy.

  For a moment, Lizbeth believed they’d go home and Magda would fill the space between them. They’d be a family.

  Lizbeth doted nervously over Magda, worried at each sound she made, each sound she didn’t.

  At first, she kept up almost feverishly with the housekeeping, cooking simple dishes from a cookbook for beginners. Creamed peas on toast. Hamburger and mushroom soup casserole.

  Soon, though, pockets of laundry began to accumulate around the house, which Lizbeth pushed together with the side of her foot to form fewer, larger piles that she sent tumbling down the stairs into the basement where she could almost forget about them. In the kitchen, dishes filled the sink and cans of food sat, half-eaten, flaked tuna turned fishy and green.

  Lizbeth tried to sleep when Magda did, but worry kept her awake even in the afternoon. She imagined waking to find Magda had disappeared into thin air, as though she’d never existed. Except that Lizbeth would know what was missing by the piece of herself that was also gone.

  Once, when Magda suddenly stopped crying and Lizbeth thought she wasn’t breathing, she pinched her hard, making her screech and leaving a mark on her leg.

  “What the hell did you think you were doing?” Ben said when he saw the red welt.

  “I just thought — ” Lizbeth said, fighting herself to keep from crying useless tears. “I don’t know. My mother always knew what to do.”

  “Of course she did. She had a hundred children,” Ben said.

  “When my youngest brother used to fuss, I remember her giving him a dropper of something,” Lizbeth said, a gurgle of hope rising into her voice. She laughed a little. “But I don’t know what it was.”

  “Yeah, well that doesn’t surprise me much. It’s no wonder you make yourself miserable, what with no one holding a dropper over you all the time. I suppose you wish she was here to do everything for you now.”

  “No. I don’t. Really.”

  “We’re your family,” he said. “Me and Magda. I don’t know why that can’t be enough for you.” He left the house, slamming the door behind him.

  When he was gone, Lizbeth whispered to herself, “It is enough, it is. It is.”

  The next day, when Ben hadn’t returned, Lizbeth stood in her kitchen, swinging Magda in her arms in a wide arc to stop her from crying.

  “Please stop, baby. Please stop crying for Mommy. I don’t know what to do for you,” she said, the words crumbling out of her mouth like dry toast. The more Lizbeth tried, the more Magda refused to be comforted. Finally Lizbeth strapped Magda into her baby seat and placed her on the kitchen table. She sat on a chair across from her, pulled her bare feet up onto the seat and, as Magda wailed, lowered her face to her knees. Her heart pounded so heavily in her chest that it felt like a ball being bounced against a wall. Finally, she couldn’t stand it any longer, and had to get up.

  She walked back and forth across the kitchen, opening cupboards, noisily pulling out pots and bowls and an old wooden rolling pin. She swept a hedge of dirty dishes into the sink and took out a bag of flour, scooping some into a metal bowl. She broke eggs against the side of the bowl, letting bits of shell slip in. She added a spoonful of salt and dribbles of water and mixed until the dough seemed like it might be right. She turned it out onto the counter and gathered it into a ball, pressing it with her knuckles over and over, kneading and kneading, desperate to make the dough feel the same as her mother’s.

  When she rolled the dough out and cut it into pockets to fill with cottage cheese, the seams kept coming apart. She wet them with water and tried to press them back together, but the dough became thin and gluey at the edges and, when she dropped them into boiling water, the varenyky opened and escaped curds churned in the pot until all there was to scoop onto a plate were soggy flags of empty dough and rubbery, boiled cheese. Trembling, and with the sound of Magda still crying behind her, Lizbeth covered the dough with lumps of floury cream gravy and ate bent over the countertop until she felt sick and empty at the same time. She crammed the dirty pots into the sink, picked up Magda and carried her to bed, ignoring the smell of her soiled diaper. Lizbeth lay down with Magda stinking and crying beside her. In the middle of the night, when it was darkest, Lizbeth picked up the phone.

  “I don’t need — ” Lizbeth said when she heard her mother’s voice. “I just — ” Her mother said something Lizbeth couldn’t remember later. After a little while she fumbled the phone back onto its cradle and fell asleep.

  Lizbeth woke the next day, not knowing what time it was. Someone had opened her curtains and she could tell that the sun was already above the house. She reached beside her, pressed her hand into the spot where Magda had been and was dimly aware that a good mother should be worried. But instead of getting up she turned onto her back and tented her knees. She rubbed her face and stared at the ceiling until, from the kitchen, Lizbeth heard the sound of Magda laughing.

  Magda doesn’t laugh, Lizbeth thought.

  Still in the same clothes from the day before, Lizbeth got up slowly and walked down the hallway, thinking Ben must have come home, even though the house smelled clean and he never helped with the housework. Or with Magda.

  The house was tidy. The washer and dryer hummed in the basement and the windows had all been opened to let in fresh air. The smell of bleach wafted crisply from the bathroom and, in the kitchen, where Lizbeth found her mother bouncing Magda on her hip, clean dishes were stacked, drip-drying in a rack next to the sink, ready to be wiped and put away.

  Relief flooded over Lizbeth as she stood just outside the kitchen watching as her mother moved easily from the sink to the stove, where there was a pot on the boil, its lid rattling with the steam of chokecherries being made into syrup. Her mother’s shoulders were round and relaxed, as though she was as familiar with Lizbeth’s kitchen as her own, as though they’d never had to carry any weight for very long.

  “Mom, I didn’t expect you to come,” Lizbeth said. Her voice was dry and cracked when she spoke, and she stiffened a little when her mother turned towards her. “When I called last night. It was late. I didn’t mean for you to — ” She stopped and thought. “How did you get here?”

  “Wouldn’t you know it, there’s a bus that comes right from Swift Current to Calgary,” her mother said. “I could hardly believe how easy it was. All I had to do was sit and listen for the driver to tell me we were here. And there were taxis right there outside the front doors of the depot. I gave them your address and, next thing I knew, I was here. You should keep your door locked in the city.”

  Lizbeth looked around and noticed a large suitcase balanced on the seats of two chairs in front of the table. She had never known her parents to own a suitcase, but there it was, flung open to reveal a nest of different-sized bowls, a flour sifter and a bundle of wooden spoons and other tools. Taking up one whole side was an open Styrofoam box containing a raw chicken and an ice cream pail of frozen Saskatoon berries.

  “I brought a few things. I didn’t know what you’d have,” Lizbeth’s mother said.

  “Mom, I’m fine. Really. I said I didn’t need anything.” Lizbeth became silent.


  “I’ve already made the noodles for the soup and the chicken is ready to go in the pot,” her mother said.

  The chicken, with its neck tucked into its breast and feet still attached, was still dimpled from when its feathers had been plucked, probably a day or two ago. It was so fresh it looked as though it had had a sudden chill.

  “I can’t believe you brought a chicken on the bus, Mom. We have chickens here, you know.”

  “Yes, but this one’s from home.” Lizbeth’s mother came up to her and lifted Magda off her own hip and into Lizbeth’s arms.

  “She’s beautiful.”

  “She looks like you, Mom. Every time I look at her, I see you.”

  “I noticed that. Cries like you used to, though.” She was quiet for a moment as she unscrewed the cap of Lizbeth’s salt shaker and poured some into the chicken pot. “I’ll tell you a secret if you like. A dropper of brandy does the same trick for her as it did with all my babies.”

  “Brandy,” Lizbeth said. “You can’t be serious.”

  “Your dad always had to go to the French village down the road to get it. It was the only thing that calmed you down enough to see that things weren’t as bad as they seemed.”

  “Maybe that’s my problem. I should drink.”

  “Well, nobody ever said it was a long-term solution. At some point, there has to be something else. Now, why don’t you go have a bath? My granddaughter and I will take care of things in here,” she said, taking Magda back.

  When Lizbeth returned to the kitchen after a long shower that left her skin hot and tingling, she found Magda asleep in her baby seat on the table. The chicken was floating in a pot on the stove, along with slices of onions, chopped carrots and whole anise seeds. Lazy bubbles rose up to the surface from the bottom of the pot.

  Lizbeth picked up one of her mother’s spoons and tried to push the chicken’s scaly yellow feet under the water. They bobbed back up, refusing to stay down. Even when she pressed the lid down on top, they toed their way out.