Liberty Street Page 4

  “Where’s Nashville?” Frances once asked.

  “Straight south, as the crow flies.”

  Which is why Frances is sitting in the tire by herself, wondering whether her mother will get famous and end up on TV, or change her mind about the Grand Ole Opry and come back. She’s thinking that she can’t feel her fingers in her mittens. She’s hoping her mother is driving carefully now, because she’d spun gravel from the whitewalls of her pride-and-joy Ford when she left.

  She hears a car coming up the road, but she can’t see it yet. Not a car, a truck. Her father’s truck turns onto the approach and appears through the bare branches of the trees. He parks down by the barn as he always does and walks back toward Frances.

  “I think your sandbox is done for until spring,” he says to her. Then he notices that Alice’s car isn’t in its usual spot by the house and he says, “Where’s your mother?”

  Frances shrugs. “Nashville, I guess.” She gets up and slaps her mitts together to get the snow off.

  “You come up with the darnedest things,” her father says as she follows him into the house. He takes off his coat and looks around for a note. “Are you sure you don’t know where she’s gone?” he says. “That’s not like her to leave you alone.”

  “We’re not supposed to worry,” Frances says.

  “Nashville, eh?” he says. “Well, no reason to worry about that.” Then he washes up and turns on the television, and waits for Alice to come home and put his tea on the table.

  When six o’clock rolls around and her mother still hasn’t returned, Frances goes to the fridge and gets out a plate of sliced ham and the butter dish and a jar of mustard, and puts them on the table along with a loaf of bread and two plates out of the cupboard. The old mahogany tea caddy from England is on the table next to the salt and pepper. It used to have a lock, because at one time tea was precious. (“Imagine,” her mother said. “So precious people used to lock it up as though it were gold.”) Frances thinks about making tea for her father, but she’s not allowed to use the gas stove, so she gets a pitcher of Tang from the fridge instead.

  “What’s this, then?” Frances’s father asks when she calls him to the table and tells him she’s going to make him a sandwich.

  “Our tea,” she says.

  “Oh, I think your mother will be home soon to fix us something better than ham sandwiches.”

  Clearly, he hadn’t believed Frances about Nashville, but then he hadn’t heard her mother that time in the car on the way to Yellowhead, singing about honky-tonk angels and saying to Frances, after the song was over, “I could be on the radio, don’t you think?” Then later, in the orthodontist’s office, when Frances had asked about the woman with sunglasses and blonde hair on a magazine cover, her mother told her it was Marilyn Monroe. “People hound Marilyn for autographs everywhere she goes,” she’d said. “Of course, that’s partly because she’s a sexpot, and don’t ask me what that means.”

  “So would you want to be a movie star?” Frances asked.

  “If I had my druthers, I’d rather be a famous singer. But neither milks cows or shovels manure, that’s for sure.”

  “How do you get to be a singing star?”

  “You go to Nashville,” her mother said. “If you want to be a movie star, you go to Hollywood, but singers go to Nashville.”

  So that was it. When she left the house with her white overnight case, saying, “No, you can’t come with me,” and “Oh, don’t look at me like that, and tell your father not to worry,” Frances knew where she was headed.

  She pours two glasses of Tang from the pitcher and then pulls out one of the chrome chairs—carefully, because they’re tippy—and says, “I’m too hungry to wait.”

  “Frances,” her father says, getting up from his chair in the living room, “is there something you’re not telling me?”

  So then she has to tell him again, and she adds the fact that her mother took her overnight case, the one from the Eaton’s catalogue.

  He looks concerned. He scratches his chin. “You’re sure?” he asks. “She took her little suitcase? The white one?”

  Frances nods. “But we’re not supposed to worry,” she says again, although she is beginning to worry. She’s thinking about the way her mother drove out of the yard without stopping to look. A truck could have T-boned her and that would have been that. How was she supposed to not worry? She gets a bad feeling in her stomach.

  Then her father sits at the table and makes himself a sandwich, and Frances takes that as a sign that he isn’t worried, that everything is all right, but he eats only half of it. He throws the remaining half in the slop bucket, and then he puts the ham and mustard and Tang back in the fridge.

  Frances is still sitting at the table. He turns her chair toward him and kneels in front of her and says, “Now, Frances, I want you to remember everything. What exactly did your mother say? Don’t tell me anything that she didn’t say right out loud. Nothing that might have been just in your head. I want to know only what she said.”

  “Don’t look at me like that,” Frances says.

  “I’m not,” he says.

  “That’s what she said. Don’t look at me like that. And don’t worry.”

  “That’s it?”

  Frances nods.

  “And all she took was the overnight case?”

  “Yes, that’s all. And her sunglasses. Are they a clue?”

  “They’re a clue that the sun was shining,” her father says, even though it hadn’t been. “All right, then. Your mother has gone to Yellowhead for a holiday. The overnight case is just that, for overnight. She’ll be back tomorrow.”

  Then he sends Frances to bed, but he forgets to run the bath for her, so she doesn’t have one. In the middle of the night she leaves her own bed and crawls in with him, and he doesn’t send her back to her room. She knows he’s awake. He’s lying on his back and staring at the ceiling. There’s enough light in the room that she can see that.

  When Frances wakes up in the morning, she can hear her father on the phone. She knows what he’s doing. Calling people. When he gets off the phone, he sits and twirls his cap on his index finger the way he does when he’s thinking, then he puts on his coat and tells Frances not to get into any trouble while he’s in the barn.

  Frances says, “I don’t think anyone else knows about Nashville.”

  Her father stops and looks at her and says, “Why do you keep going on about Nashville?”

  “She’s gone to be a singer,” Frances says. “Like Skeeter Davis and Kitty Wells.”

  “Oh,” he says. “Well, that’s ridiculous, Frances. Your mother has the singing voice of a frog.” Then he puts his cap on his head. “Judas Priest,” he says on his way out the door to finish his chores.

  The voice of a frog? What?

  It warms up that day, and the skiff of snow that fell the day before melts. The new barn kittens are now big enough to take away from the mother cat, so Frances goes to the hay shed and gets her favourite. She takes the kitten to the bare caragana hedge where she has a tree house (which is really a platform on the ground) and names it Marilyn, and she pretends that she and Marilyn have all kinds of fans wanting autographs. That night she sleeps in her parents’ bed again, and she wakes up in the darkness and her father isn’t there. She hears a sound coming from the living room and realizes it’s her father crying. She puts a pillow over her head and wraps herself up in a blanket like a mummy. Later, she hears him come back to bed, and he unwinds her so he can get under the covers.

  In the morning, they have scrambled eggs. When Frances asks what her mother is having for breakfast, her father says that she’s eating Cheerios somewhere, as usual. Later that afternoon, she comes back. Frances is in the hedge again with Marilyn when she sees her mother’s car come through the trees. She’s about to run to the car, but then she feels suddenly shy, and she hides in the hedge and watches as her mother stops at the house and gets out. Her father is at the barn and Frances waits
for him to come, but he doesn’t. Maybe he hasn’t heard the car. She decides someone has to welcome her mother home, so she steps from the hedge, and as she does her mother turns toward her, still wearing her sunglasses and what must be a new blue scarf. She holds out her arms—“Franny, Franny, come here,” she’s saying—and it’s as if she’s been gone for a month, maybe two, and Frances does run to her. Her mother is carrying the white overnight case and also a shopping bag (which Frances later finds out has new clothes in it), so Frances can’t fall into her the way she wants to, and she stops herself and is shy again and doesn’t know what to do, so she blurts out, “How was the drive?” the way her father might.

  Her mother laughs. “How was the drive? Is that all you have to say? Not, I’m glad you’re back and I’m so happy to see you?”

  Frances doesn’t like being laughed at. She starts to cry. Her mother puts her bags on the ground and says, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, stop your wailing. I’ve only been gone a few days. Come here and give us a proper hug.”

  Instead, Frances runs back to the caragana hedge, where she discovers that Marilyn has gone missing. She crawls around on her hands and knees in the muddy hedge until she finds her, and then she takes her back to the hay shed. The mother gives Marilyn a couple of licks on the head, but then she wanders off, which Frances thinks is mean, but she knows cats do that when the kittens get big.

  When Frances finally goes to the house, her jeans are so muddy she has to take them off at the door. Her father is watching the news and something is cooking on the stove, and it’s as though her mother had never left. Frances pulls out one of the chrome chairs to sit at the table, but it tips over and makes a loud bang as it hits the floor, and her mother says, “Those darn tippy chairs.” Frances can feel the dark building inside her—a storm, a big angry tornado. She hates the chrome chairs, hates the way you always have to think about how you move them away from the table, always have to be careful. Other people’s chairs don’t tip over, even when you’re sitting on them and not being careful, and she gives the chair a good kick, and then another, and before she knows it she’s shouting about how she hates these stupid chairs and why can’t her mother once and for all buy some new ones so they don’t all break their necks.

  Her mother stands staring at her, the stew ladle frozen in her hand.

  “Hey, hey, hey,” her father says, getting up from his chair.

  Her mother puts the ladle in the pot. “Okay,” she says. “You’re mad.”

  Frances stops kicking and says, “You can bet that Kitty Wells doesn’t have chairs like these.”

  “Kitty Wells?” her mother says. “What does Kitty Wells have to do with this?”

  “Pick up the chair, Frances,” her father says. “There’s no point taking it out on a chair. They may be stupid, but they’re the only ones we have.”

  Frances picks up her chair and sits on it, still in her socks and underwear because she’s taken off her muddy jeans.

  “Aren’t you cold?” her mother asks.

  “No,” Frances says. “I’m boiling.”

  After that, her mother puts the meal on the table and they all eat in silence. At bedtime, Frances wants to sleep in her parents’ bed, but they make her go back to her own. Her mother reads aloud a chapter from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which means it’s not an ordinary night, and then she closes the book and says, “Nashville? Honestly, Frances, don’t you think if I were going somewhere that far away, I’d just go back to England?” She must have seen the look on Frances’s face, because she adds, “Oh, don’t you dare start worrying about that. I’m home now and I’m not going anywhere. Do you understand? Tell me you do so we can all sleep tonight.”

  Frances nods, but that’s not good enough and her mother makes her say it out loud.

  “No one is going to Nashville or back to England,” Frances says.

  “Right,” says her mother. “No one is going anywhere.” And that’s that. Out goes the light.

  But oh, Frances would love to hear what her parents are talking about. She climbs out of bed and opens her door just a crack—just enough to hear—and there’s her mother, standing in the hallway with her hands on her hips, looking right at Frances’s door.

  “Get back in bed right now and go to sleep,” she says, so Frances gives up.

  THE NEXT DAY, her mother shows her the new clothes she bought in Yellowhead—a skirt and bolero jacket (“All the rage, according to the lady in the shop”), a sweater set, and a new pair of high-heeled shoes. (“Pumps, they’re called. Who knows where I’ll wear them.”) She has a present for Frances: a package of underwear, seven pairs, each a different colour and each with the day of the week embroidered near the waistband. Today is Thursday, the day Frances was born, but she puts on Monday because Monday is pink, and also Monday’s child is fair of face. Thursday’s child has far to go, whatever that means. Who would ever want to be born on Thursday?

  After supper that evening, while her mother is having a bath and Frances is alone with her father, he tells her that Alice hadn’t really been missing, that she’d just gone on a little shopping trip, and she’d meant to leave a note but had forgotten, and Frances is not to worry anymore, or talk to anyone about it, especially not about Nashville.

  “Do you understand me, Frances?” he asks.

  Frances nods.

  “Tell me you understand,” her father says. “Out loud.”

  “No one is going anywhere and I’m to forget about it and not talk.”

  “You can talk,” her father says. “Just not about . . . well, you know.”

  Then her mother comes out of the bathroom and sits down beside her on the wagon-wheel couch, and when Basie goes to the kitchen for a glass of water, Alice says to Frances, “Stop looking at me like that. It’s not like I did something wrong, is it?”

  Frances isn’t sure.

  When her father comes back, they watch Country Hoedown, which is set inside a barn. Frances wants to know if the barn is in Nashville, and her mother says no, it’s a fake barn set up in a TV studio in Canada.

  Maybe there is no real Nashville, Frances thinks. Maybe it’s just a place on television or the radio. When the Singin’ Swingin’ Eight come on TV, her mother grabs her and they do-si-do around the living room. She didn’t realize her mother knew about square dancing, but it’s fun.

  The shopping trip is not mentioned again. It disappears just like the cowboy hats, the ones Frances has never been able to find. Too bad. They would have come in handy for the do-si-do.

  FRANCES’S FATHER HAS a brother in England. His name is Vince, and there’s lots of excitement when Vince says he’s coming to Canada for Christmas. When they pick him up at the train station in Yellowhead, he tells Basie he sounds like a proper Canadian now and then he turns to Frances and says, “Give us a speech, luv, so I can hear what you sound like.” But she’s too shy to say anything. On the way home, Uncle Vince keeps whistling his admiration of Frances’s mother’s blue-and-white Fairlane—“You don’t see cars like this in England”—and also they learn that he is not just staying for Christmas, he’s moving here. To help with the farm, he says, until he can buy his own place nearby. Frances’s father says, “Well, that’s just great news, Vince,” but her mother does not look entirely happy (although she looks happy enough later, when Vince unpacks and gets out a box of canned fish and pies from Marks & Spencer, and for Frances there’s a rag doll that he calls a golliwog). They have steak-and-kidney pie for supper, and when it’s bedtime, Uncle Vince sleeps on the top bunk in Frances’s bedroom. He groans in his sleep. Frances tells her mother he sounds like a bear.

  After New Year’s, when Vince has been there for two weeks, Frances overhears her mother say to her father that the house isn’t big enough for three adults (especially when one of them is in his cups as much as Uncle Vince is—which means, she tells Frances when she asks, that he drinks too much coffee). Uncle Vince has his own money, so he should get looking for a place to live if he’s s
erious about staying.

  Then Uncle Vince comes in the door with a letter in a blue airmail envelope from a woman named Bertie, and he says he’s asked Bertie to marry him.

  Frances can tell that her mother is surprised, but she manages to hide it and says, “Well, then, you’ve got a reply there, I imagine. Has she said yes?”

  Uncle Vince’s glasses are all steamed up. He takes off his new winter coat and hangs it on a hook by the door. “She’s thinking about it,” he says. He takes off his glasses and cleans them on his shirt. “Did I say her name is Bertie? You’ll like her. She’s more fun than monkeys in a coconut tree.”

  Monkeys in a coconut tree do sound like fun to Frances, but not, apparently, to her mother. She says four adults can’t possibly all live under the same roof. Frances thinks she’s being rude, but Uncle Vince says, “No, no, right you are. I’ll get on that. Bertie will want her own place and all.”

  A week later, another letter comes from Bertie.

  “Still thinking about it,” Vince reports.

  The problem is that Bertie is afraid to live out in the country due to wild Red Indians, even though Vince has assured her that they’ve been tamed. She wants to live in a town. In fact, she will say yes to his proposal only if he promises her a place in town.

  Frances’s mother has an idea. She remembers something about a veterans’ subdivision in Elliot. Vince is an English veteran, not a Canadian one, but maybe that won’t matter. She’s heard the lots are inexpensive. Vince could work with them on the farm—God knows, they need the help—but he and Bertie could live in the veterans’ subdivision.

  Vince says, “Brilliant.”

  He looks into the veterans’ lots and learns that what Alice heard is true. Years ago, Elliot had somehow acquired a strip of land along the rail line, but it wasn’t much use because it was separated from the town by the tracks, so after the war, the council had come up with the idea of honouring its young returning veterans by offering them cheap, tax-free lots on the vacant land. The town built a road, surveyed, ran the power line, and erected a light standard and a street sign that said Liberty Street. From a clerk in the town office, Vince learns that in the years since the war they hadn’t sold a single lot—because the veterans were all farm boys and didn’t want to live in town—but the tax-free offer is still in place. The clerk is beside herself with excitement when Vince tells her he’s interested. It might be the start of something, she says, who knows, one purchase leads to another and, yes, absolutely, he can buy a lot even though he was in the British army, not a problem, it’s the Commonwealth, after all, and all the boys were fighting the same enemy, weren’t they.