Liberty Street

by Dianne Warren

  When Vince takes Frances and her parents to look at his lot, they have to walk up Liberty Street in the snow because it hasn’t been ploughed. There is a line of bush between the tracks and the lots, and the trees are bent to the ground with snow blown about by the passing trains. The lots themselves are empty. Basie says he hopes they don’t flood when the snow melts.

  Alice, a bit bewildered by the desolation, even though the town is just across the tracks, asks, “Which lot is yours?”

  Vince says he doesn’t know, and he doesn’t suppose it matters—one is as good as another—but he and Basie check the paperwork so they’ll be sure to put the foundation on the right lot in the spring. As they’re studying the map Vince was given at the town office, a train goes by and they have to stop talking. Frances watches the blankets of snow that fly up all around the train as it passes.

  “Bertie is going to love this,” her mother says under her breath.

  Frances hears her and wants to know, What is it that Bertie will love?

  “Oh, the fresh Canadian air,” her mother says.

  Because the survey stakes are covered by snow, Basie and Vince have to guess at the location of the lot he’s bought. Once they’ve decided, Vince wants to put stakes at the corners, even though they’ll fall away when the snow melts. They cut some willow shoots with Vince’s pocket knife and stand them in the snow, and by the time they’re done, their feet are all frozen. Vince stands with his shoulders hunched up and his hands in his pockets looking at his lot, and announces that he’s going to build his bride-to-be an English country cottage so she’ll feel right at home.

  “With shutters and window boxes and all,” he says. “She likes flowers. She’s a hundred pounds soaking wet. She’d get lost in a big house.”

  As they tramp back to the car through the snow, Vince says, “This country is colder than a witch’s tit,” and Frances’s mother says, “Vince, please.”

  Frances’s nose drips from the cold and she wipes it on her mitts. She sits between her parents and takes off her boots and puts her stockinged feet right on the heater.

  When they get home, Vince sits down at the kitchen table and draws a picture of the house he has in mind. Frances’s mother says it looks like a dollhouse. Frances thinks it looks like a house for Peter Rabbit or Mrs. Tittlemouse. Her feet hurt from being so cold, but her mother says that will go away by bedtime.

  “Best not mention that to Bertie when she gets here,” Uncle Vince says. “Frostbite and all.”

  WHEN SPRING COMES, Uncle Vince begins work on what he calls Bertie’s cottage. Frances’s father helps with the construction when he can, which leaves her mother with all the barn chores and the evening milking, but she is so worried Bertie will arrive and have to move into her house that she doesn’t complain. Frances argues her way to town with the two men most days. She’s there the day a load of lumber is delivered by a man from the lumberyard, and she overhears Uncle Vince ask her father under his breath whether the man is a genuine Red Indian, and if so, what he’s doing off the reservation, aren’t they all on reservations now? Frances’s dad says no, he supposes not, if they have jobs like everyone else. They unload the lumber and stack it in a big pile by the foundation while Frances watches, and then the man from the lumberyard drives away. As he passes Frances with his window down, he winks and tips his cap.

  Under orders from her mother, Frances stays away from the railway tracks, but she watches the cars flash by every time there’s a train. When the men stop work for lunch one day, Uncle Vince shows her how to put a penny on the track so the train will flatten it, and then as an afterthought he tells her she is never to do that on her own because she might lose an arm, and he suggests that she not tell her mother about that particular trick. The next day Frances tries to leave the house with a pocketful of coins from her piggy bank, and her mother finds out about Vince showing her the trick and decides she shouldn’t be allowed to go to town anymore. Frances decides she doesn’t care. She was getting bored in town.

  Uncle Vince says, “Well, you’re a big girl now; it’s time you stayed home to milk the cows anyway. No more skiving off.”

  “I don’t like cows,” Frances says.

  “I don’t like work,” says Uncle Vince, “but someone has to do it.”

  Later that morning, it warms up so much that Frances goes outside without even a sweater. When her mother has finished cleaning up after the milking, she suggests that Frances help her wash her car, the car that no one but her gets to drive because it was she who’d had the premonition about winning it. She’d lined up at the fair in Yellowhead and paid her two dollars while Basie waited impatiently, thinking they might as well give the two dollars to a beggar man, better use for it, and then that evening at the grandstand, right after a man in a tuxedo did an act with spinning plates, what if they didn’t draw her ticket out of the barrel they’d wheeled onto the stage? When they read her name—Mrs. Alice Moon—she almost fell off the bleachers. She had her picture taken with the car for the Yellowhead paper—she was wearing a checked cotton maternity smock because she was expecting a baby (who turned out to be Frances)—and then she got to drive it home because it was the last day of the fair. She didn’t even have a driver’s licence, but it would be a frosty Friday before she’d let anyone else drive her new car, which had only seventeen miles showing on the odometer. Basie followed her home in the truck, holding his breath the whole way.

  Frances walks the length of the car and runs her hand along the shiny chrome moulding, picturing her mother as she waved to the crowd at the fair. She’s all ready for scrubbing in her rubber boots (wellies, her mother calls them) and rubber gloves (which come up to her elbows), while her mother is in the house gathering her buckets and cleaning supplies. The car radio is on and the front windows are partway down so they can hear it. Ray Price is singing “Heartaches by the Number.” Her mother likes this song. When she comes from the house with two buckets full of warm, soapy water, she’s singing along.

  “Do you think you sing like a frog?” Frances asks her.

  “Did your father tell you that?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Well, what does he know about singing?”

  Frances’s job is to wash all the whitewall tires. She squeezes her sponge onto a front tire and tries to make the water run around the circle of white. She sticks her hands so far in the bucket that her gloves fill up with water, and when she lifts them it runs up her arms and she gets soaking wet. Her mother tells her to quit playing and get busy. Frances squeezes the sponge so water fills her rubber boots.

  “It’s called work, Frances,” her mother says. “Vince was right—you could be doing something to help out. We’ll all have to work harder around here if your father’s eyesight goes.”

  “Goes where?” Frances asks.

  “I don’t know. Down the road, I suppose.”

  Ha ha. Her father is usually the joker, but that’s funny—his eyesight heading down the road without him.

  “Will he be blind then?” she asks.

  “No. Forget I said that.”

  Frances gets a better idea than washing the car. She decides to wash the spring mud from Kaw-Liga, and she struggles off toward the barn with her bucket and sponge and her boots full of water.

  “Frances!” her mother calls, but Frances ignores her. The bucket is slopping water all over her pant legs. Halfway to the barn, she gives up and sits down in the dirt. She pictures a train flattening a dime and a nickel. She changes her mind about town being boring and wishes she were there. She leaves the bucket in the middle of the yard and asks her mother if they can do something else. Her mother says, “Get that bucket back here and finish what you started.”

  Frances pouts, but she does what she’s told. It takes hours for her mother to finish washing and waxing the car. Frances wants to know why it has to be so sparkling clean.

  “This car was a windfall,” her mother says. “Let this be a lesson.”

  Frances
doesn’t know what the lesson is, or a windfall either.

  IT’S JULY NOW, and it’s really hot almost every day. Uncle Vince says he had no idea Canada could get so hot. “Hardly fit for an Englishman,” he complains at breakfast. Bertie has still not arrived from England. She’s waiting for her house to be done.

  It’s washday and Alice is hanging the sheets on the clothesline while Frances hands her the pegs. It’s so hot and breezy that the first sheet is dry by the time her mother gets the last one up. She starts to take the dry ones down but then pegs them back up again and says, “Oh bother, let’s we two girls go to the lake.”

  Frances can’t believe it. She hadn’t even asked.

  She puts on her bathing suit while her mother packs a lunch and their beach bag. She says they can stay for only an hour—“so don’t pester me to stay longer”—and they get in the car and go. Her mother has changed into clean shorts and a sleeveless blouse, and she has her sunglasses on. Frances sits on the seat beside her in her yellow cotton bathing suit, wishing she had some sunglasses too.

  It takes half an hour to get there. There are no other people at the spot they like because it’s a weekday, but there are several cars in the parking lot and a few families down the beach where the picnic tables are. Frances immediately goes to the shore and begs her mother to go in the water with her and hold her for the dead man’s float, which Alice does, but not for long because, she says, their white English skin burns too easily. She makes Frances put on a hat and convinces her to sit on the blanket in the shade and play crazy eights.

  When her mother says she has to go the toilet (“Badly, Frances—I can’t wait”), Frances doesn’t want to go with her. She hates the pee smell of the outhouses and tells her mother that she will throw up if she has to go near them. Her mother says she can wait outside, but even then Frances digs her heels into the sand and has to be dragged along until they reach a path through the trees, and then she gives in and follows.

  “You wait right here,” her mother says when they come to the outhouses, one for men and one for ladies. There’s another path through the trees, which is the one Frances thinks leads to the playground. Her mother sees her looking at it and makes her promise she will stay right where she is. Frances promises, then her mother lifts the latch on the ladies’ toilet and goes in.

  Frances can smell the toilets, even outside. She starts to walk backwards away from the smell, but it follows her, so she turns and runs through the trees and down to the beach, even though she knows her mother will be mad. She’s just about to sit on the blanket when she sees an old Styrofoam rescue ring lapping at the water’s edge, so she walks down to the shore to check it out. She looks up and down the beach. In one direction, there are some teenagers throwing each other around in the water and a man tossing a stick as far as he can into the lake for a dog to fetch. In the other direction, there’s a little point of land with shrubby trees on it but no people. There doesn’t seem to be anyone watching Frances.

  She’ll be quick, she thinks. Try out the ring and then be back on the blanket before her mother returns. (Is that her mother calling now?) She knows she should wait—she’s not allowed to go in the water on her own—but instead she grabs the ring and runs along the beach until she’s out of sight around the point. She steps into the ring, pulls it up to her middle, and wades into the water until she feels her feet lift off the sandy bottom (magic!), and all of a sudden she’s bobbing like a frog on a lily pad.

  She forgets about her mother and the blanket. All she thinks about is how perfect it is to be floating on the warm surface of the water as though she’s in a magic water world. When she looks down, she can see rocks on the bottom of the lake and big brown fish nestled there with their fins rippling and minnows everywhere—hundreds of them—and she thinks she’s living in a fish world, and they don’t seem to mind. A brown duck comes close with six ducklings peeping and darting around like water bugs, and they don’t seem to mind her being there either. Her legs dangle down into the clear water, and when she wriggles her toes or kicks her feet, the fish move lazily along the bottom right underneath her, their bodies curving one way and then the other, and they give not one sign that they think Frances shouldn’t be there, or that they are afraid of her.

  Then a man and woman in a canoe come along and ruin everything. They get excited when they see her, and the man wants her to come with them in the canoe, but she says no thank you, even though she is beginning to shiver, and the closer the man and woman come in the canoe, the more Frances wishes she were back on shore because now the chills are going right down to her toes dangling in the water. The woman suggests they tow her back to shore and Frances thinks about that and then nods. She lets the man wrap a rope around the ring, and the woman holds the end of it while the man paddles. They paddle back to the beach, staying close to the shore, while Frances hangs on to the ring. She points to the blanket where she’d been sitting with her mother, who still isn’t there. The woman watches Frances the whole time, as though they might lose her. Just before they get to shore, she takes out a camera and snaps Frances’s picture. “Smile,” she says.

  The man beaches the canoe and the woman hands him the rope, and he hauls Frances to the water’s edge. Once she’s on land, she drops the ring in the sand and heads for the blanket, shivering so badly she can hardly hold herself up. She wonders why her mother isn’t back yet.

  The couple follow her to the blanket, where they both stand looking confused until the man asks, “Where are your parents, little girl?”

  “My mother is here somewhere,” Frances says.

  “Heavens, your lips are blue,” the woman says.

  They still look like they don’t know what to do. Frances wants them go away. She sits down and wraps herself up in the blanket, playing cards and all. “My mother’s car is just up there,” she says. “The blue-and-white one. She won it at the fair. You don’t have to wait. She’ll be right back.”

  The couple finally leave her alone after making her promise she won’t go in the water again (not a chance, she’s too cold), and they get in their canoe and paddle away, taking the ring with them. Frances is glad when the canoe is around the point and she can’t see it anymore.

  Then her mother steps out of the trees with another woman and two teenage girls, and she sees Frances wrapped up on the beach. “Thank God,” the other woman says. Then she says, “We’ll tell the others,” and she and the teenagers leave and walk back toward the picnic tables. Through the trees, Frances hears her call, “We found her.”

  After Frances’s mother gets over being relieved, it becomes clear just how mad she is, and also how embarrassed, because she’d had to ask people to help her look.

  “Where were you?” she asks. “You weren’t at the playground. We checked the water. I thought you’d got lost in the bush.”

  Frances says she went for a ride with a man in a canoe. She doesn’t mention the woman. Since it’s a lie anyway, it doesn’t seem necessary to say there’d been two people.

  “What man?” her mother asks, looking up and down the shore. “Where is he? I don’t see a man with a canoe.”

  “He left,” Frances says. “That way.” She points, and the blanket falls away and her mother sees her wet bathing suit.

  “You went in the water, didn’t you?” she says. “After I told you not to. You snuck in someplace where I wouldn’t see you.”

  Frances sees no reason to deny it.

  They pack up the blanket and the playing cards, and all the way home her mother says things like “A six-year-old girl is old enough to listen to her mother.”

  Frances is not quite six—she is almost six—but she doesn’t argue. She worries that her mother won’t ever take her to the lake again. She wishes the people in the canoe hadn’t taken the Styrofoam ring with them.

  And then, a week later, the Yellowhead paper comes in the mail, and there’s a grainy black-and-white picture on page 3 of a girl in a floating water-rescue device. The h
eadline says Lost Little Mermaid. Frances’s mother reads the story to her. It’s about a couple who found a little girl floating in the lake and didn’t know where her parents were, but the girl had shown them her mother’s car and said her mother won it at the fair, and she’d convinced them that the mother was there somewhere, although perhaps they shouldn’t have left her alone on the beach.

  Frances’s mother puts the paper down and looks at her. “Is that girl in the story you?” she asks.

  Frances says no. Her mother gets out a magnifying glass and looks at the photo again, and then says, “Oh, that is certainly not you. Of course it isn’t. How could I even ask?”

  Good, Frances thinks. She’s survived her lie.

  That evening, her mother looks at her from across the room and says, “You’re getting sneaky, and I don’t like it.” Then she says, “I hope the girl in the paper—who could have drowned, by the way—I just hope she learned her lesson.”

  The way her mother looks at her, Frances realizes that she has not, in fact, survived her lie.

  At breakfast the next morning, Uncle Vince slaps his leg and says, “Lost little mermaid. That’s a corker.”

  BERTIE’S NEW HOUSE is ready—at least ready enough to live in—by the middle of August. They have a painting bee and Frances’s mother paints inside (eggshell everywhere, Bertie can change it if she likes), while Vince and her father paint the outside glossy white with green shutters and window boxes. Bertie is ready too, all set to come to Canada and get married. She has her things packed and is waiting on the Canadian government to say she can come. Any day now, Vince says. Bertie reports in a letter (to Frances’s mother) that her sisters had a bridal shower for her, and that she has her wedding dress purchased and will be bringing it with her. She even drew a little picture of the dress.