Liberty Street

by Dianne Warren

  Then one day Uncle Vince goes to town for the mail and doesn’t come back. Instead, he falls over and dies. Dead. Gone forever. Frances’s parents phone England long distance to tell Bertie. After they get off the phone, Frances’s mother says that Bertie sounded kind of relieved.

  “Not that she doesn’t have to marry Vince,” she says. “I didn’t mean that. But that she doesn’t have to come to Canada.”

  Frances wants to know what Bertie will do with her dress.

  “Hang on to it until she marries someone else, I suppose,” Frances’s mother says.

  Since Vince didn’t know anyone in Canada, there is no funeral. He gets buried in the graveyard in town. Her parents aren’t sure what to do about the house: Does it belong to Bertie now? they wonder. But a lawyer says not. The house goes to the next of kin—Basie—and after everything is settled Basie wants to sell it, but Alice says it might come in handy if they have to move to town someday. It’s just too bad, she says, that Vince didn’t build a more practical house—a one-storey bungalow, say, like the other new houses in Yellowhead.

  Basie says, “Talk all you want, woman, but the day I move to town is a day you’ll never see with your twenty-twenty vision. After I’m gone, you can do as you like. If I go first, you’re more than welcome to move into Vince’s toy house.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Apparently I won’t.”

  Frances wants to know what they’re talking about.

  “Your mother thinks I’m going blind,” her father says, and then he puts on his cap and goes outside.

  What? Really?

  “You said he wasn’t,” Frances says.

  “I never said for sure. Anyway, don’t mind him. He’s upset about Uncle Vince.”

  Worrying about her father going blind is one thing, but now the phrase “after I’m gone” keeps repeating itself in Frances’s head. What did her father mean by that? She worries that he’s planning to leave the way her mother did that time, the way Doreen did when she went back to England.

  Then she understands that he means “leave” in the way Uncle Vince had left.

  Which is much, much worse.

  IN SEPTEMBER, SCHOOL begins. Not kindergarten, which Frances hadn’t attended because her birthday is late in the year, but real all-day first grade, which her mother had made a case for because Frances knows her colours, and what else do they learn in kindergarten? The bus stops at the approach every day to pick up Frances and take her to the Elliot elementary school, an old two-storey brick building. The bus drops the younger students off first and then drives around the block to the high school, which is a newer building across the schoolyard. She’s the only grade one on the bus. She sits at the front and the bigger kids sit at the back, unless the bus driver hauls one of them up closer for being rowdy. Frances looks down most of the time she’s on the bus. If someone talks to her, she pretends she doesn’t hear. She does the same thing at school, except with the teacher. Her mother tells her she has to pay attention to the teacher.

  Six weeks into school now and Frances has begun tapping her fingers as if she’s playing the piano, although her parents have no piano and she doesn’t know the first thing about white and black keys or holding your hands as though they have oranges under them. One, two, three . . . she counts in her head as she taps one finger at a time. When she runs out of fingers, she makes up patterns—one, three, five, two, four—or she counts backwards or practises tapping finger four by itself because it won’t behave like the others do. She wonders why this is.

  She tap, tap, taps for a reason, although she’s afraid to explain it to anyone in case it stops working. The teacher at school is always telling them to count to ten before they decide whether they have to cry (girls) or hit someone (boys). Frances rarely wants to cry or hit anyone, but sometimes a storm brews up inside of her and makes her think of Dorothy and Toto being tossed around in the cyclone, and when she tries counting—one two, three . . . tap, tap, tap—bingo, it works, and the storm settles back to stillness. Tapping becomes a habit that feels good, like laying your cheek on the coolness of the kitchen countertop or running your fingers along the satin edge of a blanket.

  At home, it annoys her mother. She says, “I don’t know why you do that. It’s not normal.”

  One day at school, Jimmy Gulka sees her tapping on her knees under her desk and says, “Look what Loony-Moony is doing.” He gets in trouble for calling her a name, but after that, Frances tries so hard to keep her fingers from tapping that she forgets to listen to the teacher.

  Frances is just in the door after school one day when the phone rings. She can see her mother turning away from her, the phone cord wrapped around her shoulder, for what she calls a private conversation, which is still not very private.

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Frances hears her mother say. “I hardly think ‘slow learner’ is the right term. What are the teacher’s qualifications for making an assessment like that? (A pause, listening.) Well, yes, we do know that . . . she’s an only child, remember? . . . yes, I know she has trouble paying attention. (Another pause.) A psychologist? Really? I hardly think that’s necessary. (Long pause.) Well, at least he sounds more qualified than your teacher—or you, for that matter. I will agree, yes, but for no other reason than to prove you wrong.”

  “Who was that?” Frances asks as she hangs her coat on a hook by the door, even though she’s guessed it was the principal.

  “Just some divvy,” her mother says. “Never mind.”

  Ha ha. Frances knows what a divvy is. An idiot. Her mother has just called the principal an idiot.

  On the day of her appointment with an educational psychologist who is making his rounds of the rural schools, Frances wears new brown corduroy pants and a blue sweater with buttons. She likes the blue sweater and agrees now with her mother that blue looks good with her red hair. It would look better still, she thinks, if she had her new front teeth. She worries every day that they won’t grow back, and that she will have no teeth all her life. No other kids in her class have had to have all their teeth pulled. Why her?

  Once she gets to school, she doesn’t have to wait long before the teacher takes her to the principal’s office and introduces her to Doctor Somebody-or-other. Not a medical doctor, he explains to Frances—not someone you go to with measles or chicken pox—but a different kind of doctor. He sits with her at a child-size table looking funny because his knees are almost up to his chin. He has a briefcase with papers and pencils in it, and he tells Frances that she’s lucky because she has been chosen to play a few special games with him. He gets out some activity papers that require her to match shapes and do things with numbers, which she is happy to do—very happy, because now she’s in a quiet room, just her and this doctor.

  After she’s done, he says, “Now, Frances, your teacher tells me that you are reluctant to talk in class. I’m going to ask you some questions about school, and I hope you will try to answer them. Is that all right?” She nods. He begins to ask his questions and she practically explodes with talking: the teacher is nice, the other students aren’t very, she doesn’t like being called Looney-Moony, she likes swimming and knows how to do the dead man’s float, she’d like to know how it feels to be a fish, she wishes her teeth would grow in, her mother sings with the radio even though she sounds like a frog, her father might go blind someday.

  “Thank you, Frances,” the doctor says when she seems to be done. “Do you have any questions you would like to ask me?”

  She tells him about Uncle Vince dropping dead in front of the post office and asks him if he knew that could happen—bango—dead as a doornail and lying on top of a letter from his girlfriend in England.

  “And I wonder,” she says, “does Uncle Vince, even though he’s dead, know that Bertie’s going to marry someone else? And is Uncle Vince still wishing, even though he’s dead, that he’d waited to keel over until after he’d opened the letter so he could see what was in it? Or once you’re dead, can y
ou read right through the envelope? Is that possible? Even though you’re in the ground?”

  “What do you think was in the letter?” the doctor asks.

  “I don’t know for sure,” Frances says. “But here’s something else I wonder: Do people write their letters with accents? The way they speak. Do they write that way?”

  The doctor studies her and Frances wants to drop her eyes, but she doesn’t. She looks right back at him. He places a hand over hers to stop the tapping (she didn’t realize she’d been tapping), and then he says that he does know a person can die unexpectedly, and it’s hard for those left behind. The doctor tells her he will think about her other questions, about the letter and writing with accents, and get back to her. (Which he never does.)

  A few days later he calls Frances’s mother and says he’s had a look at Frances’s tests and thought about their little chat, and he thinks he’s got to the bottom of things.

  “She’s a bit of a worrier, isn’t she?” he says. “And a girl with, shall we say, an active imagination.”

  Frances’s mother gets right to the point. “But is she a slow learner?” she asks, trying to get out of her mind the picture of an uneducated grown-up Frances aging into a dim-witted spinster.

  “Quite the opposite,” the doctor says, and he explains that Frances is “very bright” and probably needs more mental stimulation. He asks Frances’s mother if they have an encyclopedia in the home, and perhaps a globe of the world, and whether she reads aloud to Frances. He says he believes she will open up in the classroom once her teeth have grown back. Other grade one students are losing their front teeth too, he says, but not all at once, the way Frances has. And the death of her uncle . . . it’s normal for children, especially bright children, to worry about death.

  Alice can’t wait to get off the phone. She thanks the doctor for calling, and once the telephone receiver is back in place and she has exhaled with relief, she immediately inhales with indignation that a teacher could be so foolish as to believe that Frances is anything but bright—especially a teacher who looks like a high school student. She calls the school and asks to speak with the teacher.

  “Might you be giving my daughter some extra attention for being the smartest student in the class?” she asks her, making no attempt to hide the sarcasm.

  The teacher, making no attempt to hide her condescension, says, “Well, Mrs. Moon, I don’t think the psychologist said she was the smartest student. And Frances certainly needs to make more of an effort. She seems to be a bit lazy.”

  Frances’s mother is stunned by this response. She tracks down Frances and reports the news—that she’s smart but lazy—waving a finger at her and saying, “You’d better prove that teacher wrong, Frances, that’s all I can say.”

  Frances feels as though she’s done something wrong. She’s been caught in a lie again or caught hiding something from her mother, or maybe the teacher. When her father comes in from the barn and is told what the psychologist thinks, he says, “Huh. Wonder how much money he was paid to come up with something I already knew.” When he hears what the teacher dared to say, he is unfazed. “I imagine we should just turn a blind eye to that.”

  Ha ha. Her father is so good at jokes, especially blind jokes. Frances is relieved that he at least isn’t blaming her for anything.

  Her mother calms down and makes supper, and then they all play cribbage. Soon after, they get the World Book Encyclopedia, and Frances and her mother start going to the library in town for new books. Her mother begins reading to her every night before bed and not just on the weekend or rainy days. She gets up on the bed with her and stretches her legs out, puts on her glasses, and reads from Little Women and Anne of Green Gables, which Frances loves because Anne has red hair. She gets her mother to read the good parts over twice.

  One night, Frances asks her mother if someone used to read stories aloud to her.

  Her mother says, “I told you. They were tossers.” Then she asks Frances what she thinks of the other kids at school. Does she like anyone in particular? Would she like to invite one of the other girls to the farm to play with her someday—a Saturday, perhaps? Like Anne’s friend Diana, she says. Maybe there’s a girl like Diana in her class.

  Frances thinks for a minute and then says no, not really.

  “Not one?”

  “No,” says Frances. “Not even one.”

  IT SNOWS AND snows. All winter, as though it’s never going to quit. Frances thinks about the snow piling up on Uncle Vince, and she sees how it builds, layer upon layer, on Kaw-Liga’s head, the points of his feather headdress sticking up out of it. She tries playing outside after school, but there’s so much snow she’s restricted to the parts of the yard that have been ploughed by the blade on the tractor, and there’s no fun to be had there.

  “What do you think about ice-skating?” her mother asks her one day. She doesn’t know how to ice-skate herself, but she saw Rhapsody on Ice at Covent Garden before the war. She tells Frances there’s a flyer in the post office about figure-skating lessons beginning in the new year for ages five to seven, Tuesdays and Thursdays after school, and she suggests that perhaps Frances would like to be signed up. Frances barely knows what figure skating is. Dancing on ice, with costumes, her mother says. Frances gets talked into it because she likes the idea of costumes.

  For Christmas, Frances’s dad gives Alice a new record player console and her first LP, Patsy Cline. Along with a spinning globe of the world—inflatable, like a beach ball—Frances gets new white skates from the catalogue. She tries them on and walks around the house in them, but she has to stop because the blades make marks on the floor.

  On the first day of lessons, Frances gets picked up after school by her mother and driven to the new indoor rink. She puts on her skates and her mother does them up tight, and she stumbles out onto the ice with the other kids, some of whom (like Frances) fall all over the place because they’ve never had skates on before. Their coach, a girl named Melody who comes twice a week from Yellowhead, divides them into two groups—the ones who can stand up and the ones who can’t—and she asks the parents of Frances’s group to come onto the ice and hold their children up until they get their balance. Frances’s mother tells the other mothers about seeing Rhapsody on Ice in London just before the war, and Frances thinks she hears one of them saying, “I don’t know who she thinks she is.”

  Once they can all stand without falling, Melody sends the mothers off the ice and tells the kids she is going to teach them forward, stop, turn. Then she does a demonstration, first skating backwards and then doing a jump and a spin, and she tells the beginners they too will be able to do this before long if they keep trying. “Try, try, try, and don’t give up,” she says. “That’s how you learn.” A girl from school—Caroline Smith, whose new front teeth are already growing in—says, “Like this, teacher?” and she skates backwards in a circle. The teacher divides them into two groups again, the ones who can skate backwards and the ones who can’t. Frances hates Caroline.

  After several lessons, Frances is able to make it all the way around the rink without falling, as long as no one bumps into her and knocks her over, which the boys sometimes do on purpose. (She hates them too.) Sometimes there are older girls skating—teenagers, girls who already know how to skate—and Frances watches them and has to tap, tap, tap her fingers inside her mitts because she so, so, so badly wants to skate like the big girls. She can just see herself. It’s boring going around the ice, forward, stop, turn.

  The two beginner groups eventually get joined into one again, and they begin to gear up for the spring recital. The beginners are to wear animal costumes—squirrels and rabbits and racoons—and get pretend-chased around the ice by one of the older boys in a wolf costume, to Peter and the Wolf music. Then the more experienced skaters will do their routines. Frances can’t believe it when the coach selects her and Jimmy Gulka to do a duet. Jimmy Gulka immediately launches a protest, as does Caroline—“Teacher, teacher,” with
her hand in the air—but Melody says, “Shhhh, you don’t argue with your coach, and Frances is right for the part. You’ll see why.”

  “But her teeth,” Jimmy Gulka says.

  “Jimmy,” Melody says sharply. “That’s rude.”

  They are called a pair. The routine Frances and Jimmy Gulka are to do is really the opening part of a routine an older boy and girl are doing. Frances has been selected for her hair, which is like the older girl’s hair, red and curly, and Jimmy has been selected because he is the right height for Frances. The routine begins with a simple waltz, and Frances and Jimmy are to skate once around the rink to the music, holding arms in a criss-crossed, old-fashioned way, and then they leave the ice and the bigger girl and boy come on in the exact same costumes as Frances and Jimmy and do more fancy skating.

  “You two will be so adorable,” the coach says. Frances believes they will be. She decides she has a crush on Jimmy Gulka. The two of them get to practise their routine at the rink with the older pair, without the other beginners there. Once they know what they’re supposed to do, they begin to practise with the music. They learn to listen for their cue and step onto the ice when they hear it. After they’ve done their waltz around the rink, the two older skaters take over. Frances watches closely from the boards as they skate in circles, together and apart and together again, and the red-haired girl spins like a ballerina and skates backwards with one leg lifted behind her while the boy holds her arms. Frances can see herself in a few years’ time.