Going Down Swinging (14 page)

“Yes, of course he asked about you and how you were doing and I told him you were at ballet—he seemed to get a chuckle out of that.”

“What do you mean, a chuckle?”

“Well, I mean a kick, you know, he said, ‘Yeah? boy that’s real good, that’s real good for her,’ and I told him what they were going to cost and he didn’t offer to pay for them. You know. The usual.”

“Oh. Is he coming here?”

“Well, he said he might come in the spring. And pigs might fly, but they’re very unlikely birds. He said Charlie’s out there again. She’s there with a guy, staying at some joint your father’s got on Bloor Street. Apparently he’s a pretty tough customer, the guy —his name’s Ian.”

“Ian?”

“Yeah. He’s an albino.”

“Like a rat?”

“Apparently.”

Mum was right about Vancouver. By the end of March it was T-shirt time; kids were already getting tans on their faces. And I had a friend called Gabrielle. My sore throats ended up being the flu and I had to stay home from school for a whole week—it was Gabrielle who showed up at our door with a big envelope of get-well cards that the grade 3 class made. I knew our teacher made them do it and Gabrielle was just delivering them, but still, it was practically like she made them herself. Plus, it turned out to be that Darlene, my babysitter, was Gabrielle’s big sister.

Gabrielle was like Pearl, kind of, but prettier. She lived a block and a half away, in The Projects, and she was one of hardly any kids from around there that my mum didn’t say was riff-raff. Sadie and Eddy were riff-raff.

The first couple times I brought Gabrielle home after school, we had the place to ourself. We drank milk with Strawberry Quik and played cards at the kitchen table until she had to go home for dinner. The third time she came over, Gabrielle taught me snap. Gabrielle won every practice round and I made sure she knew they didn’t count. I cracked my knuckles while she dealt our first real game. I planned on being one of those pool shark guys who stomped everybody when they played for real. I slowly turned cards off my hand until she waggled her finger at me, like Gladys Kravitz on
Bewitched
, cuz she said I was holding back, trying to see her card before she saw mine. Then she yelled, “Snap!” and grabbed both our twos and the piles underneath them. And “Snap!” again and the next time and the next. I was down to around eight cards and the sound of her voice was starting to bug me, that word—if she said it one more time. “Snap!” I snapped, but it was a four and an ace. Gabrielle giggled and snapped at the next pair. I was getting bored when my mother came home.

Mum was in a good mood; she was coming home from General Brock, our school, where she got a job doing volunteer work with the first- and second-graders. She tried to do teaching in Vancouver when we first moved here and found out she wasn’t allowed to in B.C. unless she went back to school and did more classes. She said forget-it to that and then got this idea to do volunteer work, cuz maybe it’d be an
in
.

Gabrielle gave my mother one of her shiny blonde smiles, said hello and held out her hand. I never saw a kid shake hands with a grown-up before that. My mother looked all impressed and said, “Gabrielle,” and rolled her r like she was French or something, “tu parles français?”

“No. Not really. My dad does. My sister and I were born in Montreal, but we’ve been here since I was really little.”

Mum sat in the chair on the other side of her. “Oh, Montreal, I used to love Montreal; the way the women dressed—just fantastic! The French women really do have a way—I used to want to stay there forever just so it would rub off on me a little.” Gabrielle was still smiling at my mother, glinting her with her glasses. Her glasses were too big and Mum’s reflection practically took up Gabrielle’s whole face, one of her on each side. “You have such pretty hair, Gabrielle, the colour of butter,” and then she touched it. She put her hand on Gabrielle’s hair and ran it all the way down to the middle of her back. She touched it the way she touched blouses she couldn’t afford in department stores. “Goodness, it’s like velvet!”

Gabrielle got even shinier the more my mum paid attention to her; all teeth and glasses. She said that her mother bought her a special conditioner that smelled like apples. Mum hmmed and went to the fridge to pour herself a Fresca. I asked what conditioner was. Gabrielle giggled and said you put it in your hair after rinsing out the shampoo. I fanned out the four cards I had left in my hands—kids were putting stuff in their hair that made it soft and I never even heard of it. Mum didn’t say anything, just put the Fresca bottle back in the fridge. We didn’t even use shampoo.

“What kind of conditioner do you use?” Gabrielle asked me.

“I don’t know, let’s just play.”

Mum leaned against the counter and sipped her green bubbles. “Grace and I use good ol’ soap and water. I never really believed in that racket, shampoo and conditioner and all that.”

Gabrielle laid a card down. I laid mine slowly across from hers. “Snap!” She picked up both cards and cackled. “Grace isn’t getting the hang of this that good.”

“
I
am so.”

“Well, you’re not that fast, I mean. You keep losing.”

“So you lost crazy eights, y’lez.” The word fell on the table like dog poo.

Mum coughed on her Fresca. “What? What kind of talk is that? That sounded like a
Sadie
if you ask me.”

Gabrielle blinked under her glass plates. “What’s a lez?”

“People who put conditioner in their hair.”

“Grace! for goodness sake. Sorry, Gabrielle, I think your friend took too many crabby pills today.” Mum gave me the look. I wished she’d quit saying Gabrielle’s name or quit saying it that way, the way people say cream or caramel. She changed the subject. “So I had a nice interview with your principal, he’s really lovely. We had a terrific little chat—actually, he’s kind of handsome, well, maybe more cute than handsome. And I start coming in a couple hours a day next Monday! Isn’t that great!”

I said uh huh. The phone rang and she went off to the bedroom. I watched Gabrielle’s cards and wondered how I’d look with glasses. “Snap!”—my first victory. I grabbed the cards over to my side: four of her cards. Four captured cards. I wondered out loud about the glasses thing. She smiled and pushed hers up.

“I don’t know, you kinda have a nose like Fred Flintstone; they might look funny.” I rubbed a finger along my nose bone. She explained, “Well, your nose kinda goes down and then boing, kinda there, boings out in a round part on the end and glasses might maybe make you look more like you’re from Bedrock.”

I looked at the clock. Gabrielle cranked her head around too. She had to go, her aunt was coming over for dinner and Gabrielle had to help, had to do things like set the table and stir stuff in pots just in time for it all to be laid out at once. Probably things like stew and mashed things, cabbage rolls; reasons I was too afraid to go to other kids’ for dinner. Mum came back in the kitchen as Gabrielle was getting ready to go and told her goodbye, said how nice it was to have met her, then touched the little blue flowers on her cuffs and said, “What an adorable sweater,” and asked if someone in the family’d made it. She told Gabrielle how my nanna knitted too, that I had nighties and slippers she made. I wished they’d shut up.

When the door closed, Mum folded her arms and smirked, “Boy oh boy, somebody’s a green-eyed monster today,” and she started into a song she sang all the time that went, “Jealousy, it’s crawling all over me,” and didn’t knock it off until I left the room. She called after me, “Come here, you monstrosity, I have to tell you something. Come ‘ere—come ’ere … we have to talk about something.” I stayed in the kitchen and looked in the fridge like I was hungry. She came in behind me and said, “Charlie called last night.”

“What—why didn’t you let me talk to her?”

“Because you weren’t here, you were at the bookmobile.” Every Tuesday night, a bus with a library on it came around and stopped for two hours on Main Street, two blocks from our building.

“Well, why didn’t you tell me?”

“Just hold your horses. She’s pregnant. And her son-of-a-bitch boyfriend’s been knocking her around. And—just wait, don’t get yourself all in a knot—she’s OK, but she was talking about coming to Vancouver. She wanted to know if she could stay with us for a little while and I told her she could but to give it some thought and call me today. I didn’t want to tell you until I knew for sure—you know how she is; changes her mind every mi—”

“So is she coming or not?”

“Keep your shirt on; that was just her on the phone now, she’s coming. I don’t know how she got the money, but she’s catching a plane tomorrow. And I don’t know what kind of shape she’s in, but it’s probably pretty bad if it’s enough to make her leave this goon and come out here. So don’t be shocked if you see her and she doesn’t look too hot.”

Grace Five
MARCH/APRIL 1974

S
HE DIDN’T LOOK
too hot. My sister’s face was still puffy with bruises. Her left eye was half shut, rock blue and purple down to her cheekbone. There were cuts across her nose and lip and stitches through her eyebrow.

Charlie sat at the kitchen table while Mum tilted her chin up and looked and sighed. I stood beside Mum and asked why he hit her and Charlie said, “Because he’s an asshole. He’s a fuckin lunatic,” and told us how Ian put her head through a wall, that he just kept hitting her and hitting her, and how screams had started coming out of her that she didn’t even think were hers and she could see blood all over the place and it looked like poster paint. When the cops showed up, they separated her from Ian; one stood in front of him and the other kneeled beside her and asked what happened. She could still see Ian’s eyes and they had the same look as the night when he held a gun to her head and asked her if she loved him. So Charlie told the cop that she fell down the fire escape. The one beside her was young with smooth chocolate-coloured skin, she said, and he kept talking softly, telling her she could press charges and have the guy put away She could feel the blood crusting on her chin and hear the leather squeak on his holster and she thought how the good guy was the one in black and the bad guy was in white. And it didn’t matter what she did, the bad guy had her by the throat. The cops finally gave up and took her to the hospital to get stitches in her eyebrow.

I wished I could wipe off the cuts and bruises, like they were dirt—give her one of Mum’s spitbaths. My mother took a deep breath and growled it out, saying, “So where is he now?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t tell him I was leaving, I just pretended everything was fine and when he went out this morning, I packed a bag and grabbed the money under the mattress. I took the bus to the airport and flew standby.” My sister’s fingers came up to pick a pimple on her chin. “There was a hundred and sixty-five bucks under the mattress.” Mum patted her hand away and Charlie hid her fist between her thighs. “I left him five.”

Mum chuckled. Charlie tittered from her chest. Mum looked at her and giggled louder. Charlie laughed up her throat and through her nose, trying to hold her lip still so it wouldn’t hurt. Mum burst out a giant laugh. Charlie put her hand over her mouth and squeaked through her lips and palm. I laughed too but I wasn’t sure I got it, so I said, “It’d be enough to eat at McDonald’s for lunch. And dinner.” My sister howled now with all her fingers on her lip and doubled over, gurgling and making little acks and ha-has while Mum held the kitchen counter and wiped tears from her eyes. Our eyes flicked on each other and we got quiet and tried to hold back the noise still in our bellies, as if we were all hiding in a closet trying not to give ourselves away.

So then I said, “But why didn’t you tell the police? They were there, they would’ve took him away.” Mum corrected my English and Charlie sighed and looked down at her basketball tummy. She rested her hands there and let her hair fall over her face. I looked back at Mum, she opened a kitchen cupboard and grabbed Adelle Davis’s
Let’s Stay Healthy
off the counter.

“Charlie, we should put something on your face so it doesn’t scar. And here, you should take some ascorbic acid, it helps you heal, so I’ll give you some vitamin C … and B-complex and …” She sat down beside my sister with her arms full of brown plastic bottles. “First we’ll put some vitamin E right on your poor little facey.” Charlie looked at Mum’s mouth and watched her nip the end of a vitamin E capsule. She let her breath go like she’d been holding it all this time and closed her eyes while Mum drizzled oil over the hard black threads in her eyebrow, the split in her lip and across her nose.

No maternity wear, no shopping for baby clothes, in fact she hardly talked about being pregnant at all. If Charlie looked like anything, it was tougher. She was still wearing the same tight jeans, except with the zipper down, big hippy blouses hanging over top, and her platform boots. And the boots seemed like they had their own scariness, like they were looking for a neck to stand on. She zipped all her money in those boots right along with her killer feet (she told me she knew how to high-kick someone right in the head now). She told me more than I ever remembered her telling, things I wanted to tell my friends with all the details right. My eyelids practically peeled back so I could see more of her when she told me about street fights she got in, gang fights, and how she learned to take care of herself from her boyfriend before last, the Hell’s Angel guy. Her eyes were more flicky when she told those stories, like she thought the door might fly open and something bigger and wilder than her was going to knock us all down. He was Cree Indian, the only Indian in the Hell’s Angels, she said, and he took her everywhere with him on the back of his motorcycle. She told me about dreams she had when they were together —crossing desert plains with feathers in her hair and a papoose on her back, straggling way behind the rest of the tribe. She didn’t have moccasins and her feet were burning, but she just kept walking, playing with two speckled eggs in her hands and singing Indian songs.