Leaning, Leaning Over Water (12 page)

“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.

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.

“I ran away so I could meet you,” I’d said into the phone. I thought I was going to cry. “I’m in a lot of trouble.”

“I didn’t ask you to run away,” he said. He definitely sounded chilly.

“What about Lyd’s date? Where’s he?”

“He’s with someone else. I don’t think he’ll want to leave now.”

“You’d better bring someone,” I shouted. “We’re at Herbie’s and we’re going to wait fifteen minutes and after that, the hell with you!” I slammed down the phone and went back inside.

Leo screeched into Herbie’s parking lot and spun the wheels. There was someone in the back of the car and as soon as Lyd and I saw his head we knew he was going to be short.

“Jesus Poêle!” Lyd said. “Who’s that?”

His name was Willard and he was five inches shorter than Lyd. This didn’t seem to bother him at all and he grinned as he jumped out and opened the back door.

Halfway in, I smelled something as I slid across the front seat. The radio was tuned to the cowboy station, pounding at top volume. Leo was staring straight ahead. There was a brown bag on the floor, at his feet. As soon as we shut the doors he swerved onto the road and hit the gas pedal. Right away Lyd said, “Don’t go so fast.”

I turned around and saw her at one end of the seat, Willard at the other, the winter coat between them. Leo leaned forward and then handed the brown bag over the back of the seat.

“You guys aren’t supposed to be drinking in the car,” Lyd said. “If you’re going to drink, let me out.”

We were on country road now, a long dark stretch between farms. It was a road we knew well because for years we’d been
bussed this way to one-room schools during our elementary grades. The dance hall was still a couple of miles away.

“Slow down,” Lyd said. “I told you I want out. Tell him to slow down,” she said to me.

Leo reached back for the brown bag and steered with one hand. I’d never noticed before how thick his neck was, how square his jaw.
Wills,
I thought. Now it’s Leo’s will, set against the rest of us. The words
cradle robber
jumped into my head and I stared at him as if he’d just swooped down to Earth to scoop me up. I had a sudden urge to tell Lyd about the box of cups and saucers multiplying in the trunk but I didn’t dare turn around. I wanted Lyd to shut up because she was making matters worse. I wanted to get to the dance hall, have our two dances and leave, though I had no idea where we’d go after that.

A momentary image of Father tracking us flitted through my mind. Maybe he’d gone past while we were at Herbie’s and he was already at the dance. Maybe he’d alerted the village policeman, old
Rouge Gorge
with the tin star. Maybe he was just waking up now, in the maroon chair. But somehow, I couldn’t put him through the next moves. I could not create a picture of him opening our bedroom door, pushing at the lumps under the covers, suspicious because Lyd and I had gone to bed early. I could not put a face or an expression to these acts. I could only see the back of his head, hear his knuckles tapping at our bedroom door.

We were coming to the one long curve on Skinner’s Road. There was a black barn on the left, a dairy farm at the end of a lane on the right.

“Don’t be a jerk!” Lyd shouted from behind. “You’re going too fast. Stop the damn car!”

Leo pressed his foot to the gas pedal in response, and passed
the brown bag to Willard just as we entered the curve. And lost control. We went into a long skid on the wrong side of the road and sudden startling headlights exploded in our faces. Leo jammed the brakes and my body lifted forward. As I bumped the mirror I felt his hand reach out and grab my head from behind. I flew back against the seat and stayed there.

We were tilted in the ditch, and though the car was terrifyingly still I could hear sounds of shifting gravel. The other car had landed in the opposite ditch, each car having displaced the other without touching. A man and woman Father’s age were coming towards us. They were holding on to each other and seemed to be walking and walking but never reaching our side of the road. I looked to my left and saw Lyd outside the car holding her coat and one yellow shoe. Her mouth was open and she was banging the shoe against the window on Leo’s side as if she were going to use it to kill him. She hurled it over the top of the car and it disappeared into the night. My head moved towards Leo then, and I saw him staring down into his right hand. He was holding something that looked like black fur and he was clearly astonished and horrified by what he saw. I couldn’t make out what it was but some part of me recognized my ponytail just as he began to shout. He was shaking his hand as if the thing were alive, and he dropped the fistful of hair to the floor. Willard was at the side window, peering back into the car. I hadn’t heard either him or Lyd get out. We were alive, all of us. The man and woman were still walking towards us, even though their car wasn’t more than thirty feet away. I couldn’t stop seeing events as unconnected parts. Sounds were tunnelled and delayed. Anything I might have known before this moment seemed far away and lost.

And then, everything speeded up. Leo was out of the car. I slid under the steering wheel and he pulled me up to the rim of the ditch. My head felt lighter. I kept rubbing my fingers against the bump on my forehead. Voices were shouting. Willard was pounding his fist against the rear fender. Threats and accusations were hurled. Lyd was begging the man and woman to drive us home. Leo fell silent and stared off into space.

“He’s in shock,” the woman said. “He’s all right. Let someone else come and pull him out of the ditch.” She was furious. Her husband went back across the road and managed to back his own car out with ease. It didn’t seem to be damaged, although there was dust on the doors and windshield. He rolled down the window and called out, “I’ve got your licence, buddy. You were doing double speed. You’ll be lucky I don’t report you to the police. It’s a miracle we’re alive, every one of us.”

His wife said, “Come on, girls, get in the back. What on earth are you doing with someone who drives like that, and at this time of night? Your mothers would have a fit. Do they know where you are? Tell us where you live and we’ll take you home.”

“Our mother is dead,” Lyd said. She said it just like that. “We live with our father. We’re sisters and we live in the same house.”

I could not think where that might be.

Lyd gave directions from the back seat and spread the winter coat over the two of us, tucking in the edges. As we drove away, I turned. I saw Leo looking down at Willard and Willard looking up at Leo as if they’d never before seen each other, as if they’d found themselves together in a ditch on a new planet, a place they were visiting for the first time.

“Awwh, for God’s sake, these girls don’t have a mother,” the woman said. Her hand reached towards and then pulled away from her husband’s shoulder. He was holding the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles shone white, even in the interior darkness of the car. There was silence and then she said, between her teeth, “No wonder. But if those two young men had been sons of mine, I’d have knocked their blocks off. I smelled liquor, too. Did you smell liquor?” But her husband didn’t answer.

When we reached our dirt road by the river, it occurred to me to remember that we were fugitives returned. A long time ago, we’d been ordinary sisters living in this house. The man insisted on driving us to the door and even offered to speak to Father, but we persuaded him that we weren’t hurt at all. I looked boldly at him as if daring him to get out of the car. “Our father goes to bed early,” I said. “He doesn’t like us to wake him.” I could see a lamp shining from the living room as I spoke. “Thanks for driving us home.”

The porch was silent. The front of the house looked the same as always. Lyd and I stood still, expecting Father to burst through the door and come roaring down the steps. Nothing happened. We waited a few more seconds and then, instinctively, we crouched down and ran along the side of the house. We’d left the window open and now Lyd shoved the blue coat at me and climbed. Inside, she listened, put a finger to her lips and reached down to haul me up. When I got over the sill I saw that she was wearing only one shoe. She took it off and lowered it to the wastebasket.