Mennonites Don't Dance (20 page)

Magda's grandmother had never learned to drive. So whenever she came to the city on her own it was on the Greyhound bus. And for as long as she was there, there'd be lots of good food and the whole house would get cleaned from top to bottom and smell like bleach and baking. Her grandmother kept so busy it was as though she had no ‘off' button and never needed to rest, which seemed to have the opposite effect of making her mother grow more and more tired.

“You can't get tired from watching someone else work,” Magda had said, more than a little snippily. She was annoyed with her mother for being short with her grandmother who'd spent half the morning cleaning dust and grease from the tops of their kitchen cabinets.

“Wanna bet?” her mother said, looking up from a cup of cold coffee .

If it was a summer visit, and if Magda's grandfather came too, he'd drive Magda to the Co-op a few blocks away. Together they'd thump on huge watermelons, looking for just the right one to go with her grandmother's
rollkuchen
. Her grandmother made a slit in the centre of each rectangle of soft dough and pulled the ends through, so that after they'd fried and puffed up they looked like big doughy bows.
Rollkuchen
with thick, dripping triangles of watermelon was Magda's favourite thing to eat. Especially when she and her grandfather sat outside on the front step and spit seeds onto the lawn.

“Now, don't swallow those seeds, eh?” he'd say. “They'll plant themselves in there and next you'll have watermelons growing in your stomach.”

“Are you fooling me, Grandpa?” Magda said. At the time she was still young enough not to know for sure and her suspicion that he might be putting her on was even more delicious than the cold fruit and warm dough.

He laughed through his nose and patted her on her shoulder, said she was a good gurdie.

Things were always best when Magda's grandparents were around. Even so, after it had been months since Magda's father left them for that last time, her mother told them they shouldn't visit for a while. And no, she didn't know when would be a good time. Maybe next year. Maybe never.

“We're fine here alone,” her mother said, her voice a wound-up spring. “There's no reason I can't take care of myself and my own daughter.”

“Why won't you let them come?” Magda said afterwards, her fingers fisted together.

“What, and take care of us? Are we so helpless without your father? When did he ever do anything for us? Tell me that.”

“At least when he was here you tried to cook and keep things nice.” Magda looked around at the mess that had gradually begun to crowd in on them. “Well, I want Grandma and Grandpa to visit. Or doesn't anything I want matter?”

“Yeah, well, maybe I should send you to live with them,” her mother said. She took a step forward and stood over Magda, but instead of looking larger as was the usual effect, her mother suddenly seemed smaller and far away.

“Great. When do I leave?”

From her hiding place in the tall grass Magda listens to her grandfather's footsteps as he comes near. He's looking for her and it takes all of Magda's resolve to keep from revealing herself to him.

When she first came to live with them, Magda used to disappear for hours at a time. There were endless places to hide on the farm. After a while her grandfather would always come looking. He was good at knowing where she'd be and seemed able to see her through anything.

“Why don't you just leave me alone?” she said whenever he found her and, with creaky knees, slid down to sit beside her on the ground against whatever outbuilding had been her shield.

“Why would I do that?”

“I dunno. Maybe because I don't want to be found.” But as many times as she'd hidden and as many times as she said things to make him want her gone, her grandfather never stopped finding her. Eventually she had stopped trying to hide.

Even now, although she's crouching as still as she can in the grass, she's sure her grandfather can see her. Especially when that stupid magpie flies off the telephone line above them and lets out a shrill laugh as if to tattle on her. She'd like to throw a rock at it, strike it right out of the air, but she'd give herself away for sure.

Magda can hear her grandfather take a deep breath, like a slow drink, and let it out. She knows he's looking at the sky, appreciating the beautiful day. He always does, even when it's not.

“She'll come home,” her grandfather says to himself, loud enough for Magda to hear. His voice is gentle and sure and Magda has never understood how he can be so calm when the sky is falling. Literally. Like when it hails and he doesn't even get uptight about all the crops that are being ruined.

He waits there a few moments longer, just feet away, until Magda thinks he's going to wade into the grass and crouch down with her. But he turns back towards the house and walks away, leaving Magda to decide whether to follow.

When her grandfather is gone, Magda gets up and goes round to the other side of the trees, her feet fat and numb from squatting so long. Soon, though, she feels the thousands of pinpricks of blood rushing back into her tissues, as though she's walking on a pair of her grandmother's tomato-shaped pin cushions.

Behind the grass and trees, hidden from the house, is the garden. Really it's two gardens. There used to be a fence between them but it was taken down when, a long time ago, her grandparents bought the house next door to theirs and used it to store old furniture, tools, and potatoes. It's a rickety old building that wouldn't be good for living in anymore, but Magda likes it, even though she knows, now, that the people who once lived there were responsible for what happened to her mother's brother. He had brought a Bible over to talk to them and was shot dead for it later while he worked in the garden. Afterwards, her grandparents wanted to make sure they'd never have to worry about neighbours again.

“Your mamma was so broken-hearted,” Magda's grandfather told her when she asked about that time. “It was as though we buried two children instead of only one.”

But Magda doesn't care how her mother felt. She thinks she should've gotten over it by now.

As Magda stands in the garden she wonders if she'll be here to help with the harvest this year when her grandfather turns over the potato mounds with a pitchfork. He always pays her a nickel for every ice cream pailfull she empties into a wheelbarrow, which he takes to the root cellar in the old house.

Although they're not the prettiest plants in the garden, Magda likes the potatoes. Even when the prairie winds scrape over them, the plants are both sturdy and flexible enough that they'll bend without snapping. It would take one storm after another to lay them down.

For a while, after threatening to send Magda away, her mother made an effort to improve things for the two of them. She filled the fridge and pantry with groceries and spent time every day in front of the stove, an open recipe book next to her on the counter. During the day she listened to gaggingly uplifting music and hummed as she tidied the house, scrubbing places she'd never scrubbed before, like under the fridge. She bought a cheery plant for the kitchen windowsill, an African violet that she watered every day. She fussed over Magda too, hovering to make sure she was keeping up with her homework, asking whether she was happy. Although Magda wanted to trust the change in her mother, she could practically feel the ground shifting beneath them.

“Molly and some friends are going to the mall today. Can I go with them? Her mom's driving,” Magda said one Saturday when the calendar said it was spring but the weather didn't agree.

“Of course you can.” Her mother clucked like a fretful hen as she reached into her purse and handed Magda five dollars. One of many little love bribes that she'd handed over lately. “I want you home early though, so I'll pick you up by the Yogen Früz at four o'clock sharp. Don't be late, okay, honey?” Calling Magda honey was part of the whole happy charade, too.

“Sure, whatever — I mean, thanks. Really.”

For two hours Magda and her friends roved from store to store, giggling and trying on new clothes. Everywhere they went they were watched closely by suspicious sales clerks who had no patience for anyone under twenty. But the girls didn't care. It only made it more fun to have an audience when, with mock despair, they lamented their too-big bums or breasts that refused to grow, even though there were girls in their class whose had. Just before four o'clock Magda finally spent her money on a large Coke from the food fair, and a T-shirt that she found in a discount bin.

“The mall doesn't even close until five,” Molly said when Magda announced that she had to go meet her mom. Molly was relatively new to Magda's school and had become instantly popular for her hair that was the colour of fresh beeswax and always looked as though she'd just had it cut, and for the way she made faces behind the teachers' backs and always got away with it.

“Yeah, but she'll freak if I'm not there.”

“Whatever. But you're missing out,” Molly said to Magda's back as she hurried towards the Yogen Früz, the ice in her Coke rattling against the cup.

“Crap,” Magda said under her breath when her mother wasn't there. If there was anything she and her mother had in common, it was that they hated to be kept waiting.

Magda plonked down on a mall bench and, for the next fifteen minutes, jiggled her foot impatiently. She glowered at the glass doors until her mother was half an hour late. “C'mon, c'mon, c'mon, c'mon, c'mon,” she said under her breath, looking at her watch every few seconds. “Okay, now. Okay, now,” she said, over and over, after it had been forty-five minutes. She blinked hard and willed her mother to magically appear every time she opened her eyes.

When she finally did show up it was five past five and the mall was closing.

“Have you been here long?” her mother said. Her voice was high and sweet but she was flustered.

“Yes!” Magda said, standing up. “Where have you been?”

“I got busy at home. Besides, I thought you'd like a little extra time with your friends. Did you have a good afternoon?”

“How could I have a good time? You told me to be here at exactly four o'clock and I've been here since exactly four o'clock.” Magda waved her arms. “Now I'm starving.”

“Don't you raise your voice at me,” her mother said, a whisper ground to an edge. “I gave you five dollars. Why didn't you buy yourself a yogurt? You're not the only one who matters here, you know. You think I wanted to come pick you up today? I have enough to do and think about without you always wanting something from me.”

“I didn't want you to pick me up. I could've come home with Molly.”

Magda's mother pinched Magda's arm hard and started to pull her towards the door, where Magda could see that the car had been left running. She twisted herself free before they got there and stomped away in the opposite direction. When she looked back, expecting to see her mother coming after her, she found that she had left. When Magda walked into the house an hour later, soaked to the shoulders with wet snow, neither of them said anything.

The next day, the flowers fell off the African violet in the kitchen window. Magda's mother packed up Magda's things and they drove to her grandparents' farm, six hours away and as far removed from the life Magda knew as if they'd driven to the moon.

“It's not your fault, Magda. It's not you. I just can't do it anymore, not alone,” her mother said, words spilling from her mouth when they finally turned onto the gravel driveway that led to a white farmhouse with black trim. “Just — just promise me you won't be too happy with them, okay?” She bit her lips as she pulled up to the back door, shifting the car into ‘park' a moment too soon. The car rocked to a stop as Magda's mother grabbed one of Magda's hands in hers and pressed it to her face, which was hot and damp. Magda knew her mother wanted her to cry too, wanted it to be something they did together. But Magda just looked out the passenger window and thought about grasshoppers.

The first spring that Magda lived with her grandparents, her grandfather gave her a new pair of gardening gloves and a watering pail filled with shiny new hand tools: a spade, a weeder, and a trowel. The three of them went down to the garden and planted flowers. With seeds from last year's blooms, they filled in rows that were roped off with her grandmother's kitchen string. There were petunias and sweet peas and marigolds which, when they finally bloomed, nodded their heads in the breeze. Everywhere else in the garden were sensible pickling cucumbers and carrots, radishes, green onions, kohlrabi, peas, musk melons, strawberries, and prickly canes of raspberries. The garden was like a patchwork quilt, with the flowers, Magda learned, covering the place where her uncle had died. When the sweet peas were tall enough, Magda helped train them to grow up kitchen-string trellises, until they became a screen of colour.

Now when Magda wanders through the rows of flowers, she picks the pink and purple sweet peas that look like little lips. She litters the soft petals behind her as she walks. When she comes to the marigolds she pulls the nearest plant up by the roots, some of which gets torn away and left behind in the soil.