Leaning, Leaning Over Water

by Frances Itani

  The woman smiled at me when I went in and then she closed her eyes. She was wearing a johnny shirt and was tucked up to her chin in a heap of blankets. Even so, she kept shuddering. The walls of the examining rooms were thin and we could hear her doctor in the next room, questioning a patient.

  The woman behind the wall did not seem to understand English; a second woman was translating.

  “My mother doesn’t want surgery,” said the voice.

  “Well, her uterus is falling out,” the doctor’s voice said. “Tell her.” He seemed exasperated. “I’ve inserted a pessary. What happens when she has sex?”

  “Ma?” said the younger voice, and a flurry of words was exchanged between the two. I didn’t know the language; it wasn’t French.

  “She says my father is rough,” said the voice.

  “She has to tell him not to be rough, or I’m going to have to operate.”

  There was a long excited conversation between mother and daughter.

  “She says my father isn’t going to like it,” said the young woman’s voice.

  My patient opened her eyes and moved her head back and forth as if to say, “For God’s sake, do we have to listen to this woman’s private life?” But there was nothing we could do to escape. We heard the door shut on silence and then our own door opened. The doctor came in and I fled.

  I headed for Emmy who was across the room but the head nurse intercepted. “I’m sorry, Trude, we’re getting another patient from Emergency. I don’t know what’s going on over there but we can’t staff our own clinic and look after their patients, too. I don’t have a nurse or a pair of hands to spare. If you’ll stand beside the new patient in room three, I’ll have her prepped for surgery as soon as someone’s free.”

  Emmy was beckoning with one hand and shaking her head back and forth but I had no choice.

  “It’s a young woman,” the nurse went on. “She’s stable now, apparently. I don’t have her name yet—she’s to go straight to the OR from here. Just a kid, I guess. Abortion. She stuck knitting needles up herself. Jesus.” She shook her head. “Jesus, Jesus.”

  I went into room three and shoved chairs out of the way. An orderly was pushing a stretcher towards me from the swinging doors. A young woman, small-boned, her face as white as parchment, was wheeled in.

  “Mimi?” I said. “Mimi, oh God.”

  Mimi lifted a hand out from under the blankets and reached for one of mine. Her fingers were cold; I could feel the bones of them under her skin.

  The orderly and I lifted and pushed her over to the examining table. He rolled up the bloody sheets and stuffed them onto the lower shelf of his stretcher and wheeled it back towards his own department. “Watch her, kid,” he called over his shoulder, and he shut the door.

  “I really did it this time,” Mimi said. “I’m so scared.”

  She reached for my hand again and gripped me as if she would be cast adrift if she were to let go. Streaks had appeared on her face as if someone had pressed long hard fingers into her cheeks. Even so, she seemed to be gathering herself fiercely.

  “I think I was bleeding a lot,” she said. “It feels like it stopped now.” She twisted herself to her side and faced the wall as if she didn’t want to see me any more. “I guess you and I never thought we’d be here,” she said. “I really have something to tell the priest at confession, now.”

  I felt an edge, a twist to her voice. She flopped onto her back suddenly and looked scared again.

  “Get something quick, Trude. It’s coming.” She yanked at and kicked the blankets away from her and I reached for the buzzer.

  “No!” she said. “Put something under me. Quick.”

  I looked between her legs and what I saw first were two tiny feet. They were the colour of red rubber erasers and were hanging out of her. Then, membranous knees and perfect miniature legs, the whole tiny body emerging from Mimi feetfirst like some bad voodoo joke, veins and arteries attached on the outside.

  I reached to the shelf for the first thing I could grab and shoved a basin between Mimi’s legs. The baby slipped into it and lay there, its rubbery body coiled into permanence against the cool silver sides. It was about seven inches long. A complete human being. A dead and still and purply red miniature being with sealed eyes like membranes, and a tiny penis, and fingers and toes all separate and complete. It might have washed up on a shore of some remote and bloody river, the name of which we had never known.

  I pressed the buzzer on the wall and heard Mimi at the head of the mattress, a new hardened Mimi in a new hardened voice, staring up at the ceiling, saying, just as blood began to pool and the door opened and a nurse ran in: “Is it out yet? Did you get it all out?”

  I drove to Woolworth’s to get Lyd and thought about Father. I’d gone upstairs to the surgical floor during my lunch break. He’d been wearing a hospital robe and was standing at the window looking down over Ottawa’s streets. I knew he hated traffic, did not like being in the city, did not want the suffocation of its throb and beat around him. I knew, also, that now that he was free of St. Pierre, he’d never go back. He had told me once that what a man wanted was a house he could drive up to. Where he could park his car at the curb and know that his family was safe, inside. Where he could walk down the street and be greeted occasionally by a handshake and the warm touch of an old friend.

  His surgery was scheduled for the end of the day, the last case in Orthopedics. I told him I’d be picking up Lyd, that we’d be in the room when he returned to his ward. Eddie had an evening paper route in our area and would meet us later, at the hospital.

  “This isn’t much,” Father said. He made a gesture towards his knee. “They have to take out the pin, make sure the joint’s okay, that’s all.” He seemed to be preparing himself. I knew he was glad that Lyd and I would be there, later.

  I drove downtown and parked on O’Connor. It wasn’t Father I was worried about now—he was okay. It was Mimi’s face that was in front of me. She had tried to grin—weakly—when I’d left the examining room. She’d been wheeled to the operating room shortly after that. Emmy had figured out that Mimi was my friend. At coffee break, even Elvis had been quiet. Warned, probably.

  I began to think about the time Bee-Bee had tied us up, Mimi and me, upstairs in their big house. I’d been nine years old, turned ten that summer. Mimi and I had never talked about the incident, after that night. But I’d never forgotten what Bee-Bee’s face had looked like when he’d stood over us in the shadows, and when he’d leaned, slack-jawed, into the closet door. I wondered what Mimi would do now—if she would go back to being a filing clerk, and if she and Rosaire, the guard from the jail, would keep going out. The look on Mimi’s face stayed before me: she’d seemed so small. And the way she’d gathered herself. Some part of her had already moved on.

  Lyd pushed out through the back door of Woolworth’s and I watched as she made her way along the street. She walked the way Mother used to walk; her hair was pinned up neatly and she glanced side to side as she came towards the car. I could imagine Lyd living here forever, being content to stay in one city the rest of her life. I was glad that we were friends and that I loved her as much as I did, but I knew that I would never be like her and settle for the same things.

  “Another one of those days,” she said as she got in. “I’ll never eat another western sandwich as long as I live. She sniffed the sleeve of her cardigan. “I smell like oil,” she said. “I smell like something fried. I smell like mayonnaise and bacon.”

  I pointed the car towards LeBreton Flats. I had no plan; I suddenly knew where I wanted to be.

  “You look like a ghost,” she said. “Where are we going? Isn’t the hospital back there?”

  “We have time,” I said. “Father won’t even be in Recovery till around five.” I spoke as if I knew how everything worked at the hospital. I heard it in my own voice.

  Lyd settled back. “Surprise me,” she said. “The river?”

  I didn’t answer. I drove
across the Chaudière Bridge and through Hull and cut down to the lower road. I could see glints of blue through leaves on the left. We passed the golf courses and the old car barns. I drove for twenty minutes and parked Father’s car in front of our old house on Brébeuf; I knew Duffy and Rebecque would be at work. I headed for the edge of the river and Lyd fell into silence beside me, at the cove.

  The water was low, and rocks were exposed here and there along the riverbed. Two logs side by side on a rock shelf were drying in the sun. There was a breeze and I tilted my face into it so I could feel it on my skin. The woods to the right of the cove were the same as they’d always been, a line of trees into which purple martins lowered themselves in quick vanishing clouds every summer evening at dusk. Mother had loved the purple martins.

  Lyd and I began to walk downriver, following the bank close to the edge. Past the deceptively still shallows we’d often waded through, bare foot, bracing ourselves, feet apart on sharp-edged bottom. I thought about how, as children, we’d stood in water close to shore, bending forward over the soft grey waves in front of the house. Mother had stood in the river beside us, washing her own and our hair. Soap bubbles swirled around our thighs, were caught by the current, streaked away towards the rapids. She’d helped us rinse once, twice, taking turns. Dipped our heads into the river until each strand squeaked between forefinger and thumb. When we finished rinsing we waded the few steps to shore and bent forward again while Mother opened the towels and wrapped our hair. Gently tilting our heads back, creating a turban with a firm twist of her wrist. “There,” she said. I could hear her voice, even now. “Run up to the house and dry. Sit out in the sun while you brush.”

  Lyd and I kept walking, making our way along the banks of shale until we were forced to higher ground. When we entered the Pines we still hadn’t spoken. I glanced to the left, towards the bushes where we’d crouched to watch Mother in the light of the bonfire. It was the last time we’d seen her alive, the night of the corn roast. It was the same place I’d stood on the cliff and tried to fix my gaze on the tip of a wave, a single spot. A childhood game I was sure I would grow to conquer. After Mother drowned I had tried, over and over, to imagine the exact place her life had been swept away. If only I could know that one spot, I had told myself—but the thought was never complete. The spot had been impossible to hold. The eyes shifted with the current, jerked back, would never stay still.

  “I used to think,” I said to Lyd, “every time I came up here—after Mother—every time I walked here I used to say to myself: You have to get past the clump of bushes where you and Lyd hid. Keep on. You have to get past.”

  “You, too?” said Lyd.

  “Our mother jumped off the cliff,” I said. I was astonished at what I heard my voice say.

  I felt Lyd’s body tighten, beside me. “Oh, Trude,” she said, “my God, don’t say that.”

  “She might have,” I said.

  “We don’t know that. We couldn’t possibly know that.”

  “We’ve never said that,” I said.

  “Well, maybe she didn’t.”

  “She was saying something, that night by the fire. I always wished I could have known.” I looked at Lyd’s face and then out across the river. “She did or she didn’t. We’ll never know.”

  “Look at us,” said Lyd. “Since she died. We’ve been trying to recover our balance, every one. Father. You and I. Eddie. That’s what it comes down to.”

  “We never talked about this before,” I said.

  “There was nothing to say,” she said. We were both silent.

  I remembered how we’d walked in the river when we were younger. Farther up, beyond the house. Sometimes we’d be wearing shorts in the water, or underpants. The current was swift but from the beginning we seemed to know how to make our way. Chest level, arms outstretched at our sides, horseshoe ripples forming around our bodies as we leaned over the surface of the water and thrust ourselves one step, another and another. Recovering and recovering and recovering. Always having to regain balance before the next step, catching the rhythm that would keep us moving against current until either the water was too deep, or until we fatigued and had to dog-paddle back, or let the current sweep us down until the skin of our legs scraped bottom. Then, back to the starting point again. I knew that Lyd was right.

  Ahead of us now, I could see iron spikes twisting up out of the ruins. We stopped abruptly and stared into a gap of about thirty feet. A chunk of wall was down, a huge chunk.

  The wide ledge from which Eddie and I had tossed worms pressed to hooks was gone. The section upon which Mimi and I had sat staring down into rapids was gone. Fallen into fast water. Three massive sections now lay in the rapids where waves were rushing around their angular concrete shapes. One enormous chunk, dull and mottled, rested on its side, a blanket wave smooth across its surface. The bank, a gaping mixture of loose dirt and embedded rock, was laid bare as if the huge mass had skidded down on its way to whirlpools below. Water swirled as it gathered, rippled and broke into smaller eddies. The colour had changed; new light splashed over new surfaces. There was movement, continuous movement. That was all. Water spilling from one shelf to another and another, joining in steady downward flow. What remained of the wall—no longer an unbroken line—tilted heavily over rapids.

  The path came to an end. There was nothing more to see. Only down below. I thought of Mimi’s house at the end of the rapids. I thought of Mimi’s weak grin as she had been wheeled away. I knew I would never tell Lyd about holding the basin between Mimi’s legs. It was another secret to be kept inside while all of us, separately and together, were trying to make our way.

  “We have to tell Father,” Lyd said. “About the wall. He always said it would fall.”

  But it didn’t matter to me now.

  “Look,” said Lyd. “The water’s so clear, I can see my reflection.”

  I leaned forward and looked down and, as I did, I felt the sound, the roar of rapids, as it took hold inside my head. I knew that I would not be back here for a long time.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “There are shadows.” And I thought: Sometimes we see our reflection, sometimes we don’t. It depends on how dark is the sky.

  Acknowledgements

  I wish to thank the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council for support during the writing of this book.

  Thanks also to my friends and colleagues at Traill and Champlain colleges, Trent University, for providing retreat space when it was needed.

  And I thank my mother, Frances Hill, who never flinched when I phoned day or night, asking for one more detail as I researched the forties and fifties.

  The following stories have been published in slightly different versions:

  “A Long Narrow Bungalow” in Canadian Fiction Magazine; “New Year, 1953” in The Ottawa Citizen; “Spirit Spiders” in Grain; “Bolero,” winner of the 1995 Tilden/CBC Literary Award, in Saturday Night; and “Miracles” in Ottawa City Magazine.

  More Praise for Leaning, Leaning Over Water

  “Leaning, Leaning Over Water… [stands] its own in the company of some of Canada’s finest short story collections.”

  Quill & Quire

  “The book has great passages of lucid, emotionally stirring writing about ordinary life and childhood discoveries. Frances Itani is an award-winning short-story writer, and there is enough piquant prose here—and more than enough sustained storytelling strength—to make this a striking first novel.”

  The Globe and Mail

  “The stories reveal, slowly and with a sureness of touch, the cluttered cares of childhood, the confusion that accompanies the coming of adulthood and stolid acceptance of unavoidable sorrow.”

  London Free Press

  “Itani’s writing is consistently strong, polished and refined in the best sense of the word. Her work is reminiscent of Margaret Laurence’s—Itani has a real gift for showing the world through an articulate, intelligent, curious, and observant girl’s eyes.”


  The Edmonton Journal

  Other Books By Frances Itani

  SHORT STORIES

  Truth or Lies

  Pack Ice

  Man Without Face

  POETRY

  No Other Lodgings

  Rentee Bay

  A Season of Mourning

  CHILDREN’S

  Linger by the Sea

  EDITED,

  WITH SUSAN ZETTELL

  One of the Chosen by Danuta Gleed

  Copyright

  Leaning, Leaning Over Water: A Novel in Ten Stories

  Copyright © 1998 by Frances Itani.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub Edition © JUNE 2010 ISBN: 978-1-443-40251-4

  www.harpercanada.com

  First HarperPerennial Canada edition 2003

  National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Itani, Frances, 1942-

  Leaning, leaning over water : a novel in ten stories / Frances Itani.

  “A Phyllis Bruce book”.