“Cora Mae,” he called back over his shoulder, waving a white hand, “c’mere.”
Cora Mae bent to rub a smudge of dust off the top of her sandal. Then she straightened with decisive grace and looked down at me, wrinkling her sunburned nose. “I used to have a barrette like that.”
The plastic butterfly I’d used to jam my overgrown bangs from my face was an old yellow one, part of a set I’d received several Christmases ago when my mother began selling Avon. I raised my fingers, flushing with embarrassment as I touched the rough corner where I’d chewed most of one wing away.
“We’re staying with my Uncle Alec,” Cora Mae said gaily. “For a week. Our parents are in Florida. They’re always somewhere.” Then, unnecessarily, “We don’t live here, of course,” looking up and down the wide, bald expanse of Main Street—empty, except for us—with an expression of semi-amused wonder that anyone could. I hoped Barney Burkenchuk would not that moment drive his tractor down Main Street, as he sometimes did.
“You want some gum?” she asked, thrusting a pack under my nose.
I did but said no anyway, staring at my thongs, worn to a thin edge at the heel, and at the jagged curves of my toenails. “You could gut a fish with those,” my mother had quipped the night before. Ever since she’d started selling Avon, she’d thought of me as a kind of walking advertisement for what she called the junior miss products: creme rinse and talcum powder and those little plastic brooches with scented pomade inside, the ones shaped like animals. I eyed Cora Mae’s white sandals. They had a bit of a heel. Hardly any girls in town wore white sandals. None wore heels. “They’re just not practical, Audrey,” my mother would say, sniffing. “Grooming, now that’s what tells. It wouldn’t kill you to wear a little lip gloss.” Cora Mae’s toes poked from the tips of her sandals, nails trimmed into neat pink squares. I slid my feet under me on the step and turned partially away, pretending to peer off at something interesting in the distance. I thought Cora Mae might take the hint and leave, but instead she flashed her hand in front of my face.
“Ever seen a mood ring?” she asked. “They’re the latest. It changes colour depending on your mood. See? Light green. That means I’m calm.” She turned her hand so the sun caught the silver setting. “My boyfriend gave it to me,” she said, and sighed. “Ex-boyfriend.” She twisted the ring off and handed it to me. “Here, you try.”
I hesitated. I could tell it would be too small. “You have your father’s hands,” my mother was fond of saying, “literally.”
“It’s okay,” Cora Mae said, misreading my hesitation. “We broke up.” She looked critically at my hands and added, “Try it on the pinky. It doesn’t matter—your mood’s the same in every finger.”
She squished the ring onto my pinky, and we sat staring at my hand propped awkwardly against my knee. I wondered if Cora Mae noticed how the skin dried in white cracks across my kneecaps. “Moisturize,” my mother would say, “moisturize.”
“You have to wait a while,” Cora Mae said, and tapped her sandal against the concrete.
“Cora Mae,” Boyd called again, “hey.” This time, neither of us looked.
“There. See?” she said. “It’s changing.” It was. Darkening against my hand like a beetle. “Purple!” she cried. “For passion.”
I tried to slide the ring off my finger. “Purple,” Cora Mae repeated in a breathy voice as I bent my head, trying to hide the fact that I was twisting the ring mercilessly. “That’s rare. It hardly ever turns purple. You must be in love. Are you in love?”
I briefly considered the boys from town.
Cora Mae tapped my hand. “Don’t worry about that. You can get it off with baby oil.”
“Oh.” I didn’t know what else to say. “Okay.” I kept twisting anyway, but discreetly, hoping she wouldn’t notice. I had begun to sweat and thought, optimistically, it might help.
“You shouldn’t do that,” Cora Mae said. “It looks like your finger’s swelling a bit.”
It was a relief when Boyd’s pale, tense face appeared over his sister’s shoulder. “Hey, Cora Mae,” he said, “look what I got.” He offered his cupped palms.
“So,” said Cora Mae, picking a piece of lint from her skirt. “A dead bird.”
“It’s not dead,” Boyd said, “just hurt.”
I stood up to look closer. “It’s a meadowlark,” I said.
“Yeah.” Boyd stroked the bird gently with his thumb. “I know. Young. A female. You can tell by the colourings. There’s not much yellow. See?” I had not known there was any difference. The bird looked like any old meadowlark to me, but I leaned in closer, pretending to examine it. Boyd shifted his feet, as if anxious to go somewhere. “You think they’d give me a box?” he asked, looking up at the store.
“You can’t take a bird in there,” Cora Mae said. “It’s probably got lice or something.”
I had to agree. My mother alone would have at least one fit at the sight of it. “I could go see,” I offered.
Boyd hesitated, bouncing a little on the balls of his feet. “Okay, sure,” he said finally, “but not too big. About the size of a shoebox maybe. With a lid.”
“Do you always have to make a scene?” I heard Cora Mae say as I swung through the door, thongs slapping.
My mother stood at the counter talking to Elise Halson, who worked the cash. I didn’t know her well—she’d graduated the year before and then gone away to beauty college in Medicine Hat—but I still admired her with that mixture of fear and awe reserved for all the high school girls. She was leaning with one hand on the cash register, the other hooked in the back pocket of her jeans.
“All I’m saying,” my mother was whispering, “is it’s time he grew up. She’s already got three kids—she doesn’t need a fourth.” As soon as she noticed me, she hooked my arm and pulled me over.
“Here,” she said to Elise, “you see?” I winced as she snapped the barrette from my hair and scooted my bangs over my face. “You see? If you could just give her something shorter, something … perky. For the summer.”
“Sure thing,” Elise said, flicking judiciously at my bangs. “That’s a cinch.”
I brushed the hair out of my eyes and noticed Elise was looking past me.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
Cora Mae, standing just inside the door, looked at me, then back at Elise. “I wanted to see about the box for my brother,” she said politely. “Please.”
“You need a box,” my mother said, “for your brother?”
“For his bird,” I said, sticking my barrette in my pocket.
“He’s not bringing it in here, I hope.” My mother craned her neck toward the door. Boyd pressed his face to the glass. She frowned. “Is that him?”
“A small one,” I said to Elise, “but with a lid.”
“Sure thing,” she said, unhooking her hand from her jeans pocket and rummaging under the counter. Her T-shirt had a big pink heart with Foxy Lady written across the centre in silver glitter that had flecked off in places.
The three of us stood waiting.
“So, Audrey,” my mother said finally, beaming at Cora Mae, “who’s your friend?”
“It’s nice to see you socialize more,” my mother called through the open kitchen window. “I can’t stand your lurking around the house all summer. It gives me the creeps. I hope you changed your shirt.”
I was slumped against the front steps waiting for Cora Mae. My mother had invited her. I was hoping Boyd would come, too, though the invitation had not included him. “She gives me the creeps,” I said, meaning Cora Mae.
“Don’t be silly,” my mother said, and closed the window.
I spotted them as soon as they turned the corner, Cora Mae several brisk steps ahead, yellow skirt swishing, Boyd trailing behind, balancing as carefully as a fishbowl the mandarin orange crate Elise had given him. I straightened, rubbed dirt from my hands where I’d been idly digging, with a degree of undisguised resentment, in one of my mother’s flowerpots.
“I told him not to bring the bird,” Cora Mae grumbled as she came up our sidewalk.
“That’s okay.”
Boyd minced his way across the lawn delicately, as if walking on tiptoe. It looked funny, but I didn’t laugh. I walked down the steps and sat on the grass. Cora Mae joined me, but Boyd stayed by the cotoneaster hedges, tucking his box gently in the shade. He had on the same pair of brown corduroy pants and light blue T-shirt he’d been wearing the day before, and for some reason this made me like him immensely. He opened the lid and bent over the box, speaking earnestly.
“He thinks he can teach that bird to talk,” Cora Mae snorted. “That’s pretty stupid. Don’t you think?”
I knew you couldn’t teach a meadowlark to talk. At least, I didn’t think it was likely.
“I guess.”
“Trust me,” she said. “It’s stupid.” She leaned back, propping herself on her elbows. “He’s in for a surprise next year, though. They don’t let a person get away with that kind of thing in high school.”
“High school?”
“Yeah,” she said, plucking at the bands of her white knee socks. “They skipped him ahead. He should only be in eighth.”
High school. I could hardly imagine it, could hardly imagine Boyd with his skinny arms and quick, nervous gestures circulating in that realm populated by Elise Halsons in Foxy Lady T-shirts. I couldn’t picture him there any more than I could picture myself. I looked again where he crouched by the orange crate, collecting cotoneaster leaves in fat bunches. And then I thought, Why not a meadowlark? If some birds can talk, why not others? Why not a meadowlark?
“You have dirt on your knees,” Cora Mae said.
I licked my fingers and rubbed. Then we both sat silent, watching Boyd, listening to the faint buzz of a lawn mower down the street.
My mother tapped on the glass of the kitchen window and waved cheerily, then glanced suspiciously toward Boyd before disappearing.
“She seems nice,” Cora Mae said.
“Mmm-hmm.”
I slipped my thongs off, noticed the rim of dirt around my soles, slipped them back on again.
“Anyway,” Cora Mae said, nodding toward Boyd, “he just does it to get attention. He’s not half as sick as they say he is.”
“He’s sick?” I said. I looked at him. He didn’t look sick. “What’s the matter with him?”
“Nothing,” Cora Mae snapped. “It’s all up here.” She tapped a finger to the side of her head. “If you know what I mean.”
I didn’t, but did not say so. I felt uneasy with the subject, with the way Cora Mae talked as if we were old friends. She reminded me, in some weird way, of my mother, of the way she and her friends exchanged confidences over coffee, making thinly veiled allusions to matters of an intimate nature.
“Anyway,” Cora Mae said again, after a while, “I could care less. I’m changing schools this year. That’s exciting, don’t you think?”
“What are you changing schools for?”
She shrugged. “Just for a change,” she said.
She scowled and stretched her legs in the grass. I noticed with a touch of alarm that they were covered in a soft blonde fuzz, like the skin of a peach.
“I have to go,” I said abruptly. “I have an appointment.” It wasn’t a lie, not really. I was supposed to be at Elise’s for a haircut by three-thirty. It couldn’t have been much past one. “Here’s your ring,” I said, digging in my pocket.
Cora Mae looked genuinely disappointed. “What kind of appointment?”
I held out the ring but kept it low, away from her face; it still had a fatty smell from the lard I’d used to squeeze it off my finger. Some had seeped into the setting, though I’d tried to dig most of it out with a toothpick.
“It’s way on the other side of town.”
“Oh,” Cora Mae said, standing up. “We can walk you.”
I got up reluctantly, brushed grass from the back of my shorts. “Here,” I said, pushing the ring at her.
“You keep it,” she said. “I’m kind of sick of it anyway.”
I both did and did not want it, but she’d already turned away, so I stuck it back in my pocket, thinking she’d probably ask for it later. Maybe by then the lard smell would have worn off.
“Come on, Boyd,” Cora Mae said. Without asking where we were going, he carefully packed up the crate and followed. Cora Mae walked quickly, purposefully, as if she was the one with the appointment, and Boyd trailed behind, weaving from the sidewalk to the pavement and back again. I dragged my heels, too, partly because it was only a fifteen-minute walk at most, even though Elise did live on the other side of town, partly because I was hoping Boyd would catch up.
“How’s the bird?” I asked him.
His face looked grim. “I don’t know. She doesn’t seem much better. I thought it was her wing, but it seems worse than that.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“So what’s there to do around here anyway?” Cora Mae interrupted.
I considered. There was the five-pin bowling alley, Dan’s Café, the swimming pool, though that hadn’t yet opened for the summer. There was the river, though I was certain Cora Mae wouldn’t set foot in that brown, swirling water. Besides, there was always the risk it might get back to my mother, who had forbidden me even to approach its muddy banks. That left the Sand Hills, the only other place visitors to town ever seemed to want to go. “If you haven’t seen the Sand Hills,” my mother would tell them, “you haven’t seen Saskatchewan.” And she would happily drive them out, bumping the car along the narrow prairie trail, then stop and point from the window, tapping a long fingernail against the glass. “There,” she’d say, “isn’t that something, now.” And the visitors would ask if they could get out, walk around a bit, take a closer look. “Oh,” she’d say, “you could,” and then wrinkle her nose to imply that it was best just to admire from the car.
“There’s the Sand Hills,” I said. “My mom might drive us.”
“Oh,” Cora Mae said drily, “we’ve seen those.”
“Uncle Alec and Aunt Marion took us,” Boyd piped up behind. “It was amazing. Just like a desert, all those ripples in the sand. It must go for miles.”
“Is that your school?” Cora Mae said, pointing ahead.
I nodded, embarrassed by the bland flat-roofed building, the weeds in the dusty playground. I hadn’t been there since classes let out, and it looked much smaller than I remembered.
“Uncle Alec said all the kids in town go there, from grade one right to twelve.”
Actually, kindergarten to twelve, but I didn’t tell Cora Mae that. I kicked at a stone in the road and it pinged against a metal fence post.
“Everybody?” Boyd asked. I was walking so slowly he couldn’t help but catch up. Even when he was poking along like that, there was still something erratic about his movements, a potential for disaster. He reminded me of that party game my parents sometimes played when, well into the first bottle of rye, they’d fill a cookie sheet with water and take turns with their friends racing haphazardly across the living room, shrieking with laughter. I always thought there had to be more to that game than I was seeing. Boyd reminded me of that. Intensity and lack of control and some other element I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I kept watching him, thinking, He’s going to drop that box any minute.
“Everybody?” he asked again.
“Everybody what?”
“Goes to the same school?”
“We’re not all in the same room or anything,” I said. “The high school is down at one end and the little kids at the other. Way at the other.”
“And you’re in the middle,” Boyd said.
Actually, the grade five classroom was pretty much at the little kids’ end, so I didn’t say anything. It wasn’t exactly a question anyway.
“That must be terrible,” Cora Mae sympathized.
I hadn’t really thought about it. It wasn’t terrible. It just was.
But be
fore I could answer, Boyd said, apparently without animosity, “Cora Mae doesn’t understand the meaning of terrible.”
Her face stiffened. “What do you know?” she said, voice low.
“I’m just saying there’s nothing terrible about that. I think it’s pretty amazing. Just think.”
“Just think of what?” I asked. Cora Mae was walking a few steps ahead of us, shoulders braced. She did not turn around.
Boyd stopped in the road and stared at me. “Why, the potential for”—he lifted the box slightly—“for all kinds of things.”
The Halsons lived at the new end of town, on the last street before Old Man Cassel’s summerfallow field. My mother always said you couldn’t pay her to live over there, not even for one of those “new” (she always used her fingers here to make quotation marks in the air) houses. “Too much wind,” she said. “And you get all the dust. Who needs it?”
The Halsons had the very last lot on the block, which meant they were bordered on one side by Cassel’s summerfallow and on the other by what I called the pond: really just a deep slough frequented by ducks, frogs and salamanders and covered with a spongy layer of lime-coloured algae that smelled in summer. There were rumours of rattlers, but I’d never seen one. I’d always been envious of Elise’s proximity to the pond. It seemed a kind of status symbol, like having a swimming pool in your backyard. I doubted that she appreciated it, doubted whether she valued, as I would have, the slow croaking of frogs through her bedroom window on summer nights. She didn’t seem the type.
“I thought you were getting a haircut,” Cora Mae said sulkily. She had not spoken since the schoolyard.
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