Mennonites Don't Dance (8 page)

Back when she stacked ice here, she forced herself to memorize the different turns in case the power was suddenly cut off and the lights went out, leaving her to find the door before becoming too cold. She practiced by tying a blindfold, a strip of old butcher's apron, around her eyes and feeling her way along the walls of meat lockers that customers rented to store their extra cuts of beef and pork. That way, if the freezer's motors droned to silence and the light withdrew into the walls, she would know what to do. But the day it finally happened, Ani was facing the wrong way. She became disoriented and lost her sense of direction. Reaching blindly into the space around her, Ani had scuffed along a few inches at a time, hesitation causing her to trip and her already frozen fingertips to bump into the solid hedges of wood.

From the time Ani turned nine, she lived with her mother and stepfather, Clive, in an apartment above the old red-bricked butcher shop with its deli in front. Before that she and her mother lived alone on Seventh Street in a small, blue-sided house with evergreen trees in front and a big backyard with a garden. Every spring, while Ani watched from a distance her grandfather decided was safe, he and one of her uncles drove down the back alley with a grain truck full of manure to spread on their garden. After they negotiated the truck into just the right position, by inching it back and forth in the narrow alley, they tilted the grain box until the manure began to spill over the back fence. Wearing rubber boots, they climbed inside and shovelled out the rest.

If it was a cool day, the garden steamed with the rich, composting fertilizer as the men tilled it into the soil with pitchforks. Afterwards Ani would hold the garden hose for them to wash their hands under, then go inside and carry out glasses of pink lemonade that tonkled with ice cubes, and plates of pink-frosted cream cookies her grandmother sent from the farm in an ice cream bucket.

“Sometimes a little shit is all a potato needs before it can grow,”

her grandfather said, pulling Ani onto his lap for a whisker rub as he sat on a sun-worsted lawn chair and they admired the garden together. Ani laughed behind her hands.

“Just don't repeat that to your father,” her mother said later, trying not to laugh herself. “I have enough problems.”

A few weeks after the manure was delivered, Ani's grandfather always came back into town to help them plant the peas and carrots, radishes, corn, potatoes, and the pale green kohlrabi Ani liked to eat raw and still warm from the sun. With an old, rusted hoe, he'd carve furrows into the soil and Ani would follow behind dropping seeds.

The butcher shop was downtown on Central Avenue, surrounded by parking lots and other stores on a one-way street where the traffic noise was constant. Upstairs, the apartment had windows on two sides, the south-facing ones overlooking a barely-used parking lot. From the east windows, Ani could watch the deliveries of freshly-slaughtered animals. Cows, pigs, lambs, and sometimes a deer, if a hunter wanted sausages made.

“You'll have a real papa now,” Ani's grandfather said, reluctantly, as though he himself had only been a bookmark, keeping the place where a dad belonged. Her own father, who lived a province away in Edmonton, was too far away to fill the role more than a couple of times a year. Ani didn't see her grandfather as much after the wedding.

“Why can't you come live with us in
our
house?” Ani said to Clive one day, a few weeks before the ceremony. She and her mother had dropped by to visit him at work after buying new shoes to go with Ani's flower girl dress. Ani liked a pair of white sandals, but because the wedding was going to be in October — an unpredictable month for weather — Ani agreed to a pair of patent leather Mary Janes with embroidered butterflies on the toes.

“Come with me,” he said and led Ani from the front of the shop, down the long, dark hallway towards the ice house, pushing aside a hanging pig carcass to let her by. “Hear that?” he said when they stopped in front of the big door that led inside the giant freezer.

“Uh huh,” Ani said, although she didn't know what she was meant to listen to.

“I have to live here so I can tell if the motors in the ice house go off in the middle of the night. Otherwise I might come to work in the morning and find everything melted. Understand?” He opened the door and disappeared inside for a few moments before coming back out with a pair of popsicles. One for Ani and one to give to her mother.

At the time, although Ani knew the food in their freezer at home didn't thaw all that quickly during a power outage as long as the lid was left closed, she hadn't questioned Clive. And when she and her mother went home that day, she continued to quietly pack her things — plush animals into pillow cases; books and clothes into boxes and suitcases — and helped her mother throw away their old garden tools — the hoe and rake her grandfather had used, and the old kitchen utensils that Ani kept for making mud pies. They were too old and rusted to be of use to anyone else.

“You would have stopped playing with them soon, anyway,” her mother said, as though it were a good thing. “Clive says his daughter, Caroline, used to spend all of her time painting with watercolours when she and her mother still lived with him.”

Ani thought she'd like to meet Caroline. She imagined them painting together, going out to her grandparents' farm, Clive taking them for ice cream.

When Ani first met Clive, she was eight years old and it was the afternoon before she left to spend Christmas with her father's vegetarian family. Clive was a not-quite-tall man with black hair, and crinkles around his eyes that made him look as though he liked to laugh.

“Hey there, kiddo,” he said, smiling so wide she could see his fillings. He put out his hand for Ani to shake. When she stepped forward to take it, his skin smelled smoky and warm, like bacon on Sunday mornings. Her mother later told her that he made his own bacon and sausages in his butcher shop.

“How'd you and your mom like to have Christmas dinner today?” Clive said. “Can't have you going without turkey this time of year now, can we?” He folded his arms across his chest and leaned back slightly in a way that made him look as though he knew all the best secrets.

“It's not Christmas yet,” Ani said. She felt tingly, as though tiny bubbles were rising through her body, and knew this was what her father meant when he told her she was prone to reckless happiness — ready to give her heart away to anyone bringing presents.

“Just wait here a minute,” Clive said.

Ani couldn't wait, and followed him into the winter air without a coat and mittens. The cold nipped at her fingers. In another month or so, the weather would become severe. In December though, it was still possible to rush outside and quickly back into the house before getting frostbitten.

While Ani danced back and forth to keep warm, Clive opened the trunk of his car — a large, square boat of a vehicle — and disappeared halfway inside. “Here, you can carry these,” he said as he plopped a box full of brightly papered gifts into her arms. He reached back inside the trunk and came out with a plastic bin full of food and bottles of pink cream soda. On top he balanced an enormous turkey in a speckled black roasting pan. The turkey, its skin buttered and salted all over, wobbled in the pan. And carrying it, Clive looked like a character in a black-and-white movie — the kind that always finished with meaningful, cheery music that meant things had ended happily despite the possibility they might not have. The two of them laughed together when he nearly slipped, which would have sent the bird sledding down the icy sidewalk. For months afterwards, it was their inside joke. When Ani's mother told them she'd nearly fallen when the heel of her shoe broke, Ani would say, “At least you weren't carrying a turkey!”

The following October, wearing her new flower girl shoes and a soft-blue dress, Ani met Clive's daughter for the first time. He had picked up Caroline at the bus depot in the morning and taken her out for pancakes before driving her to the house on Seventh, where all the women and girls in the wedding party were getting ready to go to the church.

Caroline wasn't as Ani had imagined. She was neither shy nor friendly. Didn't have bouncy brunette curls and clothes that Ani could borrow. She didn't wear glasses, which Ani secretly wished they'd have in common. And, two years older, Caroline no longer played with dolls. When Ani asked her whether she had ordered blueberries on her pancakes, she rolled her eyes in a way that let Ani know she was exactly the way Caroline had expected her to be. A bumpkin with butterflies on her shoes.

“What does it matter?” she said. “It was just breakfast. Not like my dad hasn't taken me for pancakes before.”

“I guess it doesn't matter,” Ani said, drawing a curve in the carpet with the toe of her shoe. Until then, she had held a present for Caroline — a tiny silver heart on a chain that her mother helped her buy. Now she set it on her dresser next to a stack of moving boxes. Maybe someday when we're sisters, she thought. But later, although she looked everywhere, Ani couldn't find the necklace.

At the reception in the church basement, while Ani's mother surveyed the dessert table, and her uncles congratulated Clive, Ani wound her way through the chattering guests towards him. The guests were old ladies, mostly, who smelled like baby powder and wanted to pinch and kiss her cheeks. When she reached Clive, Ani slipped her hand into his, expecting his face to crinkle into a smile. She had been sure all day that he would want to give her something special, like at Christmas when he'd bought her a pair of hair combs studded with blue and green crystals and said they made her look as pretty as her mother. She had worn them every day for weeks, until one of the teeth broke and her mother said she should put them away.

“I'm happy you married my mom,” she said and lowered her head shyly to look up at him through her bangs. “Dad.”

Clive was quiet for a moment, his eyes skipping over her to where Caroline was holding a plate of fruitcake, distractedly pushing crumbs around with her finger. Ani watched him look at his daughter. He swallowed hard a few times.

“How are you and Caroline getting along?” he finally said.

“Okay. I mean, I think maybe she's tired from the bus.” Ani tried to sound cheerful but wanted to tell him she didn't think Caroline wanted to be friends. While she tried to think of what else to say, he let go of her hand and turned away towards another conversation. Ani slipped through the guests and didn't see Clive again until he and her mother returned from their honeymoon in Saskatoon.

When they came home early one morning, Ani and the aunt who had stayed with her met them at the door. Clive's face creased but he didn't smile the way he used to. He handed her a gold-coloured pen with a digital clock beside the pocket clip, the kind of pen a salesman might carry.

“He just doesn't know what girls your age like,” her mother said quietly when he had left the room. Ani thought of the hair combs and knew it wasn't true. “I didn't want to discourage him by saying so. Maybe you can go thank him, and then you and I can run out to the Dairy Queen later to get treats for all of us.”

That same day Ani and her mother moved into Clive's apartment. Ani's new bedroom had red carpeting and, after a few days, pink-painted walls. She and her mother had gone to the hardware store across the street together and picked out the colour. They rolled it over the existing wallpaper while Clive was downstairs at the butcher shop. The paint covered up the colours in the paper, but hadn't been able to disguise the little embossed girls carrying baskets of flowers. They were still there as shadows in the paint.

Later, while Ani's mother was shopping for supper, Clive came upstairs and found Ani sitting in her room, admiring the fresh pink.

“Caroline chose that wallpaper,” Clive said slowly. He crossed his arms. “I put it up for her. Damn it, kid.” He turned his back to her and left the room. He closed the door behind him, tightly. An hour later, Ani still didn't know whether she should come out.

After supper though, Ani found Clive looking through the pages of his family picture albums. She went into her room, dug through a box and found one of her own. She brought it to the living room and sat next to Clive on the couch.

In her stepfather's pictures, Caroline was often seen dabbing a paintbrush on a canvas in the room that used to be hers and was clean and tidy for every picture. Ani's pictures were mostly of her in rubber boots, tromping through her grandfather's barn, or in the kitchen with a careless mess of flour and batter spilled on the counter.

“I'm sorry,” Ani said, although she still didn't understand why he was so upset with her.

Clive pointed to a picture of Caroline in which nothing around her was out of place. “I think we'll make putting things away a rule around here, eh, kiddo?” He clapped her on the shoulder, as though they'd thought of a good plan together. “Everyone does their part so the place doesn't go to hell in our sleep?” He laughed and Ani tried to laugh, too, as if there was something funny about what he'd said. Afterwards, she took her photo album back to her room.

A few days later Ani came home from school to find her favourite doll, Susie, stuffed in the kitchen garbage and Clive sitting across at the table. He'd been waiting for her.

“Why do you think I did that?” he said.