Liberty Street Page 7

  Then she sees herself right now. She can just see herself doing this, with Jimmy Gulka holding her arms so she doesn’t fall. At home in the living room (without her skates because her mother won’t let her wear them in the house), she holds the wagon-wheel arm of the couch for balance and practises lifting her leg the way the older girl does. She practises until she can do it perfectly. On the day of the recital, once they’re in their makeup and costumes and waiting to go onto the ice, she whispers to Jimmy what she’s going to do and what he’s supposed to do (just hold her arms for balance), and says they will impress everyone.

  Jimmy doesn’t want to. He says no, they’ll get in trouble with the coach. Frances tells him she’s going to do it, and he should hold her arms when she says or they’ll both fall. He looks around for someone to tell, but the coach is talking to the older pair, giving them last-minute instructions.

  “Are you two ready?” Melody says to Frances and Jimmy, and Frances can see that he is about to tell, but then their music starts and they hear their cue, and they have to step out onto the ice.

  Jimmy Gulka looks terrified. When they’re most of the way around the ice, Frances says, “Now,” and he says, “No,” and holds on tight to her arms, and she tries to turn around and face him so she can lift her leg and go backwards, and of course she falls and pulls Jimmy over on top of her, and his skate gets caught in her fancy sequinned skirt (painstakingly sewn by her mother) and rips it. Melody comes running on the outside of the boards to where they lie in a heap and hisses, “What the hell was that? Get up. Finish your circle.” Frances and Jimmy get to their feet and Frances thinks they should waltz the rest of the way around, but Jimmy skates for the boards and the gate without her, so she follows him. By this time everyone is laughing—they think it’s so cute, and maybe even part of the routine. The older boy and girl step onto the ice, both of them trying not to laugh, and Frances heads for her parents instead of following Jimmy to the dressing rooms, because now she knows he’s mad at her. When Frances does find her parents she starts to cry, but she doesn’t tell them she was responsible for the fiasco and just says, “I fell.”

  Jimmy Gulka’s parents hear what really happened, though, and they complain to the coach. Melody searches out Frances, and she takes her aside and tells her she can’t just do things like that on her own, especially when she’s a beginner and can barely skate a circle around the rink. “I trusted you, Frances,” she says, “even though Caroline is a better skater.”

  What? Now she hates Caroline even more.

  “It’s Jimmy Gulka’s fault,” she says. If he’d held her arms like he was supposed to, they wouldn’t have fallen. She says this even though she knows it isn’t true.

  “You can’t blame your mistakes on someone else, Frances,” the coach says.

  After the recital, figure-skating lessons are over. Frances says she’s never taking skating lessons again. She says she’s never going back to school either, but her mother says she has to. She expects Jimmy Gulka to call her stupid Looney-Moony at school on Monday, but he does something worse: he ignores her completely. He hates her so much that he won’t even look at her. Frances taps her fingers under her desk so fast she can’t keep track of the patterns.

  That weekend, Frances’s father clears the snow off the shallow slough just behind the barn. The slough is still frozen over. He puts a bench on the edge of the ice, and he hauls Kaw-Liga down the hill and props him in the snow so she’ll have company. She can practise by herself, her father says, whenever she wants.

  “By next year, you’ll take the biscuit at skating,” he says.

  She practises her circles, but that’s all she knows how to do. Every time she tries a fancy move, even a little turn, she falls, so she quits going down to the slough. Her father says if she isn’t going to use the ice, he isn’t going to waste his time clearing it off for her, and not long after that, the snow gets soft and freezes into slushy ridges. Her father forgets to move Kaw-Liga and the bench back to the barn, and when spring finally comes and the ice melts, they both fall into the slough. Frances’s dad fishes the bench out, but he leaves Kaw-Liga there because he’s falling apart anyway.

  “Poor old Kaw-Liga,” Frances says at the supper table that night.

  “Kaw-Liga nothing,” her mother says. “Poor Patsy Cline.” She says this because Patsy Cline died in a plane crash a month ago.

  “Are you still going on about that?” says her father.

  Alice puts her Patsy Cline album on the record player that evening, and plays it over and over.

  One good thing: not long after that, Frances’s new teeth start to come in.

  JIMMY GULKA AND Caroline Smith and the other kids at school are ignoring Frances. She experiments to see if she can get anyone to pay attention to her. She turns around in her seat and asks the boy behind her if she can borrow his eraser. He quickly tucks it into his desk. “Why can’t I borrow it?” she says to him, and the teacher tells her to turn back around and quit talking. She waits five minutes and taps the shoulder of the girl in front of her—a girl she doesn’t even like named Daphne Rose—but she shrugs Frances’s hand away and whispers, “Can’t you see I’m busy?” When Frances does it again, Daphne puts up her hand and tells the teacher that Frances is bothering her, and the teacher tells Frances to stop annoying the other students and do her work. Frances looks down at her math workbook, but she can’t concentrate. She wishes she really were invisible. She waits another five minutes and puts up her hand to ask if she can go to the bathroom. The teacher looks as though she is about to say no, but then she nods and Frances leaves the classroom and walks slowly down the hall toward the door that says Girls in tarnished brass letters.

  Inside the bathroom, there’s a window wide open. Frances goes to the window and looks down at the empty playground. The snow is gone now, and the grass is starting to turn green. She imagines her invisible self on a swing, pumping with her legs and going higher and higher, the swing going back and forth, all on its own to anyone watching. Then Frances hears a sound above her, and when she looks up she sees a boy’s legs hanging out of a window. He must be sitting in the open window, she thinks, a big boy, grade eight, because that’s the class right above the bathroom. He’s wearing jeans and black canvas running shoes, but that’s all she can see. Then all of a sudden he’s coming right at her, out the window and falling, and as he passes her on his way down, she sees that it’s Dooley Sullivan, a boy whose name she knows—everyone knows—because he’s older than the other grade eights and always doing funny things and getting hauled out of assemblies by the ear. Their eyes meet as he goes by the window, his face just a few feet from hers, and he looks surprised to see her there. She instinctively holds her hand out to him, but he’s gone—he’s passed her—and then he hits the ground right beneath her. He tries to roll when he lands, but mostly he lands on his ankle. He makes an attempt at getting up to run but he can’t, and she hears a yelp and he flops down on the ground again, and then he puts on a clown’s pantomime of ow, ow, ow, I’m dying. He looks up and grins. At first she thinks he’s looking at her, but then she hears cheering above her, and she cranes her neck and sees that all the second-storey windows are full of students, who begin to yell things like “He did it! Hey, Dooley. Ha ha, crazy Dooley, did you see what he did?” That’s when Frances realizes he didn’t fall—he jumped, on purpose. Then teachers’ faces begin popping out of the windows to see what’s going on, and bang, bang, bang comes the sound of windows closing.

  Now that it’s quiet, Frances can hear Dooley moaning below her for real, and she’s glad when someone comes running out to help him. It’s the principal, who says, “Dooley Sullivan, what have you done now?” A few minutes later, the town’s ambulance arrives, and the one attendant and the principal help Dooley onto a stretcher. Then it’s as if Dooley remembers Frances in the window, and he looks up and sees that she’s still there, and he waves. She waves back. Then she quickly ducks down so the principal won’t see he
r. By the time she peeks over the window ledge again, they’re putting Dooley in the ambulance. When she returns to the grade one classroom, her teacher says, “Frances, I was just about to go looking for you,” and Frances doesn’t say anything about Dooley and what she’s seen, because she doesn’t want to share it with the other students, the ones who are ignoring her. She doesn’t tell anyone she saw the whole thing, even when the story circulates on the school bus.

  That night she dreams about Dooley Sullivan falling past the window. He stops falling when he reaches the place where she’s standing in the window, and he floats there, hovering, grinning at her. She says, “Come inside now, Dooley Sullivan,” the way a teacher might, and she reaches out and offers him her hand, but he doesn’t take it, and then he starts to fall again and disappears in blackness below her. When she wakes up she wonders what would have happened in the dream if he had taken her hand, whether she would have tumbled out the window and fallen with him.

  When Frances’s mother hears about what happened, she says, “What in the world was that boy trying to do? Kill himself?”

  “He did it for a laugh,” Frances says.

  “How do you know that?”

  “He’s the funniest boy in the school,” she says. “He does everything for a laugh.”

  She knows there is more to it than that, although she’s not sure what. She keeps thinking about the look on his face as he fell past her—or was it in the dream? She isn’t sure, because the two memories have become one. He’d looked puzzled, as if he wasn’t sure how he ended up in the air, or perhaps was trying to decide whether he liked falling through space.

  “I hope you won’t do anything that stupid when you get to be a teenager,” her mother says.

  Frances would never do that—jump out a window.

  “I don’t even like tobogganing,” she says.

  A few days later, Dooley is back at school with crutches and a cast on his foot. In the hallway, Frances overhears the grade eight teacher telling him he’d better pull up his socks, and Dooley says he can’t, he isn’t wearing any under his cast.

  The teacher says, “Dooley, Dooley, Dooley.”

  FRANCES AND HER parents are going to a wedding anniversary party in the town hall, where there will be dancing and a live orchestra, although Frances’s mother says on the way there, holding two homemade apple pies on her lap, that “orchestra” is hardly the word for it, since it’s just Alvin Brown with his accordion and two of his neighbours. “Oh, listen to you, then,” Basie says, “sounding like a proper English toff,” which makes Frances laugh.

  Several of the kids from her class at school are there. Frances’s parents think she is playing with them somewhere, but she’s not. Instead, she’s hiding from them under a table, peeking out from under the white cloth, watching everyone’s legs—all the people dancing—and she’s also watching Dooley Sullivan, who still has the cast on his foot. From her vantage point under the banquet table, Frances can easily follow Dooley’s legs around the big hall because of the cast and crutches. Girls’ legs have been following his all night. She can see girls’ legs following Dooley’s now—four legs, two girls. One girl is wearing flat white shoes with bows on the toes, and she has a swishy yellow dress. The other girl is wearing pumps. They’re white too, and this girl’s dress is turquoise, the same colour as the one Frances is wearing, only Frances’s has checks. Both girls have bare legs. Frances is wearing white socks that come halfway up her calves. She takes off her shoes and her socks, and then puts her shoes back on so she has bare legs like the older girls who are following Dooley. She watches as the girls flank him, one on each side, but then he makes a break for it and his cast disappears among the dancing legs.

  Several ladies’ legs appear then, and Frances can hear the sound of dishes being placed on the table above her. People gather and disperse and gather again—she can hear the clatter of forks on china—and the ladies come back with more of whatever is up there. When the legs around the table seem to be gone, temporarily at least, she sneaks out from her hiding place to have a look. Pie. Slice after slice of pie on little white plates, each with a fork. People keep arriving to study the choices—lemon, apple, rhubarb, some kind of red berry—and then they pick up a plate and leave a hole to be filled by the ladies with trays. Frances waits until the coast is clear, and then she grabs a plate of lemon pie and slips back under the table with it.

  She sees Dooley’s cast coming again, no girls following him this time, and she thinks he’s come for pie. Then he’s shoving his crutches under the table and his face appears, and then the rest of him, and he’s under the table with her.

  “Howdy,” he says.

  It’s dark under the table. She wouldn’t know this was Dooley if it weren’t for the cast. She doesn’t say anything. Dooley is a big boy. What do you say to big boys?

  “Don’t worry,” he says. “I won’t tell anyone you’re under here.”

  She can’t really see him, but he looks too tall for under the table. He’s hunched forward with his arms wrapped around his knees. The crutches are sticking out and someone trips on one, so Dooley grabs it and pulls it under. She remembers Joey, Doreen’s son—the boy who’d wanted to put his hand in her underpants—and how she’d known she should run away from him, known she should be afraid of him. She’s not afraid of Dooley. She puts her plate of pie on the floor next to her and waits to see what will happen. She knows why she’s under the table, but Dooley can’t be there for the same reason. Then Frances sees the white shoes coming toward them, and Dooley says, “Shhhh,” and she realizes he is there for the same reason, more or less. The reason is called hiding.

  One of the girls—the one in the yellow dress—lifts the tablecloth and says, “You can’t escape from us, Dooley.”

  “I guess not,” Dooley says. He turns to Frances in the dark. “What’s your name?” he asks.

  “You know my name, silly,” says the girl. Her hair doesn’t move around her face even though she’s bent over. Frances wants to reach out and touch it, to see what it feels like.

  “Frances Mary Moon,” says Frances.

  “Who’s under there with you?” asks the girl.

  Dooley says, “Why, Frances Mary Moon, who else?” Out go the crutches and then Dooley, and Frances waits for the tablecloth to drop back down, but it doesn’t.

  “Are you coming?” Dooley asks her once he’s on his feet, peering back at her under the table.

  Frances crawls out, dragging one toe through the slice of lemon pie.

  “Let’s dance,” Dooley says to her.

  Frances doesn’t know how to dance, and Dooley can’t really dance with his cast, but he hands one crutch to the yellow-dress girl and takes Frances’s hand with his free hand, and there she is, dancing with Dooley Sullivan—if dancing is what it can be called.

  “What in the world are you doing?” says the yellow-dress girl as Dooley leads Frances all around the dance floor. People clear out of their way because of Dooley’s crutch. Frances can hear herself laughing, it’s so much fun. As Dooley spins her around, she can see Caroline from school watching—Caroline, who is not dancing with anyone, ha ha, and especially not a big boy like Dooley.

  Then Frances’s father is there and he says, “Mind if I cut in?” and Dooley hands Frances over and hobbles back to retrieve his other crutch. Frances’s father dances her around the floor to where her mother is standing with two other women, and he says, “I think it’s time we got on home, don’t you, Alice? It’s getting late for a dairy farmer.” Her mother goes to the kitchen to retrieve her pie plates and then disappears for half an hour.

  When they finally leave it’s dark outside, but the hall’s parking lot is well-lit thanks to a pair of yard lights. They pass a sprawling group of young people—girls in dresses, and boys in jeans and light-coloured shirts with collars. Dooley is there, the girl in the yellow dress hanging on to his arm. Frances thinks the kids he’s with must go to the high school, or maybe they’re from ot
her towns, because she doesn’t recognize them. They stop talking when Frances and her parents pass them, but then Dooley says, “Don’t let the bedbugs bite, Frances Mary Moon.”

  Frances looks back at him, and all the kids he’s with laugh. The yellow-dress girl says, “Don’t you think she’s too young for you, Dooley?”

  Frances’s mother grabs her hand and pulls her to the car. When they’re inside and the doors are closed, her mother says, “That boy was Dooley Sullivan. How does he know your name?”

  “From school,” Frances says.

  “Well, don’t you talk to him,” her mother says. “Trouble is that one’s middle name. They say he failed grade seven twice and barely made it through the third time.”

  Frances knows better than to say that when she’s old enough to have a boyfriend, she wants him to be Dooley Sullivan. She wonders if Dooley and the yellow-dress girl will kiss later.

  “I think those young people were probably drinking,” her mother says. “Even the girls.”

  When they get home, her mother realizes that Frances is not wearing her socks, and that there’s a big blob of lemon pie hardening on the toe of her shoe.

  “What am I going to do with you?” she says.

  “Nothing,” says Frances.

  That night she dreams about Dooley falling again, this time from the roof of her father’s barn, and he lands in the hay and doesn’t break anything. The yellow-dress girl is looking for him, but she’s going the wrong way, out to the pasture with the cows. Dooley lies in the hay laughing. Frances laughs along with him, until he stops and puts his finger to his lips and says, “Shush,” because he doesn’t want the girl in the cow pasture to hear them. When Frances puts her finger to her own lips to shush him back, she realizes that she has all her teeth, and they’re perfectly straight. When she wakes up, she thinks that was the best dream she’s ever had.