Mennonites Don't Dance (9 page)

Ani licked her lips and pressed them together. Blood was rushing through her ears.

“I don't know,” she said.

“Where did you leave it this morning?”

“In the kitchen? Next to my cereal bowl?” It was a guess, but she hoped if she guessed right, he'd let her have her doll back.

“Right. You left the bowl for your mother or me to clean up, and you and I both know that you know better than that.”

“But, she — ” Ani gestured at the doll, its dress already dirtied with potato peelings and wet coffee grounds. Ani longed to rescue her, wash her up and put her back in her room. She'd promise to never leave her lying around again.

“You're getting too old for dolls, anyway,” Clive said. He stood up and patted Ani, in a reassuring way, on the shoulder before pushing the lid down on top of the garbage. “Now don't let me see you trying to get that thing out of there.”

Later, when Ani's mother found her crying on her bed, Ani tried to explain what had happened. But it came out sounding childish.

“Susie will think I let her get thrown out.” Ani said. “She won't understand.”

Ani buried her head in her knees and sobbed. The next day was garbage day, and she felt sick to her stomach imagining what would happen to her doll. Susie would be covered in other people's garbage and compressed before being taken to the nuisance grounds.

“I'm sorry, but there's nothing we can do about it now, honey. That was one of Clive's rules,” her mother said. “Maybe we'll both have to be more careful and considerate.” She squeezed Ani into a hug. “I'm sure he didn't intend to be mean. Just remember how well the two of you got along last Christmas.”

Ani could no longer sleep. Clive insisted she become accustomed to noise at night, and to light from the television that flickered from the living room to the frenetic rhythm of old western shoot-outs. And if it wasn't the TV, the scratchy sounds of old country and western records whined in her ears. Even after Clive finally turned them off and he and her mother went to bed, the motors from the ice house droned on and off all night. They flicked a switch in her mind every time they powered up.

“It's something you're just going to have to get used to,” Clive told her the first time she crept out of her room and asked if he could turn down the record player.

“Just a little?” She looked to her mother, who was reading a magazine. “I can't get to sleep.”

“Well, it won't happen with you standing here. Just put it out of your mind,” Clive said.

Ani wanted to tell him that it was stupid to think anyone could sleep through all that horrible honky-tonk. Although the words were climbing up her throat, she didn't let them out. After she went back to bed, she heard her mother and Clive talking.

“It's not her fault,” her mother said. “I always made sure it was quiet for her at night.”

“Sure you did, and now she expects it. You didn't do her any favours by spoiling her, you know.”

“I just think it's a lot to adjust to — a new home along with everything else.”

Clive disagreed and that was the end of it.

By the time Ani was ten, a year after her mother married Clive, it became harder and harder at school to hide her fatigue. After math one day, her teacher, Mr. Buchanan, told her to stay in her seat. When all the other students were gone, he came and leaned over her.

“I'd like to know why you're always so tired in my class, Ani,” he said. “Do you have a proper bed time?”

Ani was quiet and didn't look at him, but she could feel pressure building in her chest as though her heart was a balloon, ready to burst.

“Do you have an answer for me?” Mr. Buchanan said.

Still looking down, Ani said the only thing she knew that would get him off her case. “It's just PMS.” She got up out of her desk and left the room. After that, Mr. Buchanan left her alone, and Ani knew it was because ever since Janelle Klassen had gotten her period when she was nine and a half, and told him so, he let her get out of anything she wanted. “Can I sit out of gym class because I have cramps?” became Janelle's favourite way to be excused from a hated sport. Mr. Buchanan's face would turn beet red and he'd let her get away with anything.

There were times over those first years when Ani thought Clive was finally getting used to having her around, that he might decide to like her again. He took her fishing once, but when Ani couldn't think of what to talk about between casting her line, he told her she didn't know how to appreciate anything and if she wasn't careful she was going to become a gloomy girl. “Nobody likes gloomy girls.”

“Yeah, well nobody likes being called gloomy, either,” Ani said. It was the first time she had ever answered him that way. Afterwards, she began to avoid Clive whenever possible. A hard thing to do in an apartment.

One morning he came upstairs from the butcher shop and found Ani brushing her hair in front of the bathroom mirror, getting ready for the first day of the seventh grade. He stopped in front of the door and stepped into the bathroom behind her. He stared at Ani's reflection until she was forced to look back at him.

“I'm going to give you some advice,” he said. “My life hasn't always been a hayride, but every morning I look at myself in the mirror and grin or make a funny face. I decide to be happy and that's that.”

Ani rolled her eyes. “You've got to be kidding.”

“You know what your problem is, right? You take yourself too seriously. Just try it once.”

“This is dumb,” she said. But when he didn't leave, she stuck her tongue out at herself.

“You can do better than that. Try again.”

Ani studied her own face, her forehead that was breaking out in a fresh crop of pimples, the dark circles under her eyes. She stuck out her tongue again and looked at Clive in the mirror to see if their little exercise was over and she could go.

“Again,” he said.

But when Ani forced her face into a smile, it was like drawing electricity from a pickle — an experiment from her sixth grade science class. It didn't last, and you had to use a different pickle every time.

“I'm going to be late,” she said.

“Never mind that. Watch.” Clive said and his face crinkled, his eyes lighting up as though the movement of his mouth had turned on a bulb. The twinkle Ani still remembered from when she first knew him appeared. But now she knew it was nothing more than a bare bulb in an empty room, and the switch could be turned off without warning.

Nevertheless, for weeks afterwards, Ani forced herself to look happy around Clive, even though it made her feel fake. She spread an artificial smile across her face when he gave her the job of packing ice after school.

She wore the smile as she shoved her arm, shoulder deep into the ice machines with an aluminum scoop, piled the cubes into plastic bags printed with cartoon polar bears and loaded them into the grocer's cart.

She didn't show on her face when her fingers froze, became clumsy and slipped off the handle into the sharp ice that cut her skin. Just little nicks, like paper cuts, but when there were enough of them, they stung like crazy.

Most of the time Ani worked as fast as she could so she'd only have to make one trip into the back. It was hard to keep the first bags she'd filled from melting before she could finish tying up the last. But she dreaded pushing the loaded cart down the narrow hallway because along the way hung the carcasses of pigs brought in through the back door. Suspended from a track in the ceiling by hooks slipped between the bones and tendons of their hind feet, the pigs were heavy and stiff, hard to push aside to make room for the cart. No matter how many times she did it, she never got used to their raw, porky smell, or having to touch their lardy hides with her bare hands.

One day, as she pushed the cart into the hallway and began to make her way past the first carcass, she nearly bumped into Clive coming from the smoke house.

“Hey there, kiddo,” he said, looking at the way she was touching a pig with just the tips of her fingers. She gave the carcass, with its scooped-out belly and bristly pink skin, a big shove to show that it didn't bother her.

“I have to get these bags into the ice house before they melt,” she said, hoping Clive would let her go on her way without saying anything else.

“You've let most of it melt already.” He wiped his bloodied hands on the front of his apron and blocked Ani's way. Ani stood up a little straighter, although she wished she could back down and leave. She wished, also, that her mother, who was busy with customers at the front of the shop, would come and interrupt them. Clive was careful around her, though, and if he did say something mean, he did it in a joking way that could be mistaken for being friendly. In fact, half of the time Ani couldn't tell, either.

“You know, Caroline used to do your job, and she was happy to help out,” he said. “She didn't think she was too good to do it.”

“As long as I pack the ice, does it matter if I'm happy about it?” she said, holding his gaze.

“Well, I guess that's the difference between you two. She didn't mind getting her hands a little dirty. You could learn a thing or two from her.” He took one of Ani's hands and rubbed the blood from his own hands into it, mashing gritty bits of fat between her fingers.

Ani stiffened. When she spoke, her voice wavered.

“Can I ask you something?” Ani said. Whatever courage she had a moment ago had already drained away, but she went on anyway. “Wouldn't the ice house stay frozen even if the power went out? Even if it was left overnight? There was no reason we had to come live here, was there? You just didn't want to change anything for me.”

“You think you have everything all figured out, don't you?” Clive said. He grinned and his eyes crinkled at the corners, as though they were playing a game and Ani had just made a bad move.

Ani gave the cart a push and Clive let her pass. In a few moments she opened the door to the ice house and disappeared inside. She breathed in the cold, crisp air until she felt calmer. Unlike in the rest of the shop, where the smell of meat was heavy and sickening, here the smells were absorbed in the ice.

Despite the cold, Ani worked slowly at stacking the bags she'd packed, laying down a row and placing the next bags on top in the grooves in between. Her mother always said she was proud of Ani's neat rows. It was, Ani thought, a silly thing to be proud of.

With the last bag in place, Ani was about to turn the cart around and push it back through the alleys of lockers towards the door, when the lights went out. There was a moment before it became completely dark. The light seemed suspended, as though taking a breath. Then it was gone. And it was quiet.

Ani heard her heartbeat quicken, her clothes rasp as she turned suddenly and bumped into the cart.

When she reached out to find something to hold onto, the tips of her frost-burnt fingers bumped into the nearest wall of meat lockers. Blindly, she touched the wood, fingering the hinges and locks that were pitted with rust. As Ani felt her way in the direction she thought the door was, she began to shiver. She tried to focus on her hands moving along the lockers, placing her feet one in front of the other. Except for what she could touch, the room had disappeared, and so had her memory of how to find the way out. Blood beat against her eardrums as she groped along the lockers and came to a dead end in the maze. There, she pressed her back into the wall and hung her head. She slid down to sit on her heels, feeling icy, metal latches scrape through her clothes and cut her skin. She listened to the silence, focused on the darkness.

Now, ten years later, the ice house's motors have gone silent for good. Not even the drone of outside traffic penetrates the thick layers of insulation.

“Ani,” her mother says, startling her. For a moment, Ani is still that young girl. She's trapped and her mother has finally come to find her and show her the way out. She shivers, then remembers that the room is uncomfortably warm and the entire building will soon be torn down.

“What were you thinking about just now?” her mother says, but doesn't leave a space for Ani to answer. “You have to come have a look at what I found up front.”

“I got lost in here once. The lights went off,” Ani says.

For a moment her mother looks startled. Her voice is forcibly bright. “No, I don't think so, honey. I would have known about that. Or Clive would have known and said something. One of us would have found you. Your stepfather always sensed when something was wrong.” She takes Ani's hand and holds it tightly, but doesn't look at her. Then she turns around and walks away, leaving Ani to follow her out of the ice house to the front of the shop.

When the lights finally came back on that day in the ice house, Ani tried to get up and run to the door. She had no reason to think her mother would be there waiting for her on the other side, but was sure of it, anyway.

Ani was too cold to run, and stumbled clumsily, using the lockers for balance. When she got to the door, she threw it open and plunged into the hallway. Her lungs stung with the warm air.