Mennonites Don't Dance

by Darcie Friesen Hossack

  “You’ll have a real papa now,” Ani’s grandfather said, reluctantly, as though he himself had only been a bookmark, keeping the place where a dad belonged. Her own father, who lived a province away in Edmonton, was too far away to fill the role more than a couple of times a year. Ani didn’t see her grandfather as much after the wedding.

  “Why can’t you come live with us in our house?” Ani said to Clive one day, a few weeks before the ceremony. She and her mother had dropped by to visit him at work after buying new shoes to go with Ani’s flower girl dress. Ani liked a pair of white sandals, but because the wedding was going to be in October — an unpredictable month for weather — Ani agreed to a pair of patent leather Mary Janes with embroidered butterflies on the toes.

  “Come with me,” he said and led Ani from the front of the shop, down the long, dark hallway towards the ice house, pushing aside a hanging pig carcass to let her by. “Hear that?” he said when they stopped in front of the big door that led inside the giant freezer.

  “Uh huh,” Ani said, although she didn’t know what she was meant to listen to.

  “I have to live here so I can tell if the motors in the ice house go off in the middle of the night. Otherwise I might come to work in the morning and find everything melted. Understand?” He opened the door and disappeared inside for a few moments before coming back out with a pair of popsicles. One for Ani and one to give to her mother.

  At the time, although Ani knew the food in their freezer at home didn’t thaw all that quickly during a power outage as long as the lid was left closed, she hadn’t questioned Clive. And when she and her mother went home that day, she continued to quietly pack her things — plush animals into pillow cases; books and clothes into boxes and suitcases — and helped her mother throw away their old garden tools — the hoe and rake her grandfather had used, and the old kitchen utensils that Ani kept for making mud pies. They were too old and rusted to be of use to anyone else.

  “You would have stopped playing with them soon, anyway,” her mother said, as though it were a good thing. “Clive says his daughter, Caroline, used to spend all of her time painting with watercolours when she and her mother still lived with him.”

  Ani thought she’d like to meet Caroline. She imagined them painting together, going out to her grandparents’ farm, Clive taking them for ice cream.

  When Ani first met Clive, she was eight years old and it was the afternoon before she left to spend Christmas with her father’s vegetarian family. Clive was a not-quite-tall man with black hair, and crinkles around his eyes that made him look as though he liked to laugh.

  “Hey there, kiddo,” he said, smiling so wide she could see his fillings. He put out his hand for Ani to shake. When she stepped forward to take it, his skin smelled smoky and warm, like bacon on Sunday mornings. Her mother later told her that he made his own bacon and sausages in his butcher shop.

  “How’d you and your mom like to have Christmas dinner today?” Clive said. “Can’t have you going without turkey this time of year now, can we?” He folded his arms across his chest and leaned back slightly in a way that made him look as though he knew all the best secrets.

  “It’s not Christmas yet,” Ani said. She felt tingly, as though tiny bubbles were rising through her body, and knew this was what her father meant when he told her she was prone to reckless happiness — ready to give her heart away to anyone bringing presents.

  “Just wait here a minute,” Clive said.

  Ani couldn’t wait, and followed him into the winter air without a coat and mittens. The cold nipped at her fingers. In another month or so, the weather would become severe. In December though, it was still possible to rush outside and quickly back into the house before getting frostbitten.

  While Ani danced back and forth to keep warm, Clive opened the trunk of his car — a large, square boat of a vehicle — and disappeared halfway inside. “Here, you can carry these,” he said as he plopped a box full of brightly papered gifts into her arms. He reached back inside the trunk and came out with a plastic bin full of food and bottles of pink cream soda. On top he balanced an enormous turkey in a speckled black roasting pan. The turkey, its skin buttered and salted all over, wobbled in the pan. And carrying it, Clive looked like a character in a black-and-white movie — the kind that always finished with meaningful, cheery music that meant things had ended happily despite the possibility they might not have. The two of them laughed together when he nearly slipped, which would have sent the bird sledding down the icy sidewalk. For months afterwards, it was their inside joke. When Ani’s mother told them she’d nearly fallen when the heel of her shoe broke, Ani would say, “At least you weren’t carrying a turkey!”

  The following October, wearing her new flower girl shoes and a soft-blue dress, Ani met Clive’s daughter for the first time. He had picked up Caroline at the bus depot in the morning and taken her out for pancakes before driving her to the house on Seventh, where all the women and girls in the wedding party were getting ready to go to the church.

  Caroline wasn’t as Ani had imagined. She was neither shy nor friendly. Didn’t have bouncy brunette curls and clothes that Ani could borrow. She didn’t wear glasses, which Ani secretly wished they’d have in common. And, two years older, Caroline no longer played with dolls. When Ani asked her whether she had ordered blueberries on her pancakes, she rolled her eyes in a way that let Ani know she was exactly the way Caroline had expected her to be. A bumpkin with butterflies on her shoes.

  “What does it matter?” she said. “It was just breakfast. Not like my dad hasn’t taken me for pancakes before.”

  “I guess it doesn’t matter,” Ani said, drawing a curve in the carpet with the toe of her shoe. Until then, she had held a present for Caroline — a tiny silver heart on a chain that her mother helped her buy. Now she set it on her dresser next to a stack of moving boxes. Maybe someday when we’re sisters, she thought. But later, although she looked everywhere, Ani couldn’t find the necklace.

  At the reception in the church basement, while Ani’s mother surveyed the dessert table, and her uncles congratulated Clive, Ani wound her way through the chattering guests towards him. The guests were old ladies, mostly, who smelled like baby powder and wanted to pinch and kiss her cheeks. When she reached Clive, Ani slipped her hand into his, expecting his face to crinkle into a smile. She had been sure all day that he would want to give her something special, like at Christmas when he’d bought her a pair of hair combs studded with blue and green crystals and said they made her look as pretty as her mother. She had worn them every day for weeks, until one of the teeth broke and her mother said she should put them away.

  “I’m happy you married my mom,” she said and lowered her head shyly to look up at him through her bangs. “Dad.”

  Clive was quiet for a moment, his eyes skipping over her to where Caroline was holding a plate of fruitcake, distractedly pushing crumbs around with her finger. Ani watched him look at his daughter. He swallowed hard a few times.

  “How are you and Caroline getting along?” he finally said.

  “Okay. I mean, I think maybe she’s tired from the bus.” Ani tried to sound cheerful but wanted to tell him she didn’t think Caroline wanted to be friends. While she tried to think of what else to say, he let go of her hand and turned away towards another conversation. Ani slipped through the guests and didn’t see Clive again until he and her mother returned from their honeymoon in Saskatoon.

  When they came home early one morning, Ani and the aunt who had stayed with her met them at the door. Clive’s face creased but he didn’t smile the way he used to. He handed her a gold-coloured pen with a digital clock beside the pocket clip, the kind of pen a salesman might carry.

  “He just doesn’t know what girls your age like,” her mother said quietly when he had left the room. Ani thought of the hair combs and knew it wasn’t true. “I didn’t want to discourage him by saying so. Maybe you can go thank him, and then you and I can run out to the Dairy
Queen later to get treats for all of us.”

  That same day Ani and her mother moved into Clive’s apartment. Ani’s new bedroom had red carpeting and, after a few days, pink-painted walls. She and her mother had gone to the hardware store across the street together and picked out the colour. They rolled it over the existing wallpaper while Clive was downstairs at the butcher shop. The paint covered up the colours in the paper, but hadn’t been able to disguise the little embossed girls carrying baskets of flowers. They were still there as shadows in the paint.

  Later, while Ani’s mother was shopping for supper, Clive came upstairs and found Ani sitting in her room, admiring the fresh pink.

  “Caroline chose that wallpaper,” Clive said slowly. He crossed his arms. “I put it up for her. Damn it, kid.” He turned his back to her and left the room. He closed the door behind him, tightly. An hour later, Ani still didn’t know whether she should come out.

  After supper though, Ani found Clive looking through the pages of his family picture albums. She went into her room, dug through a box and found one of her own. She brought it to the living room and sat next to Clive on the couch.

  In her stepfather’s pictures, Caroline was often seen dabbing a paintbrush on a canvas in the room that used to be hers and was clean and tidy for every picture. Ani’s pictures were mostly of her in rubber boots, tromping through her grandfather’s barn, or in the kitchen with a careless mess of flour and batter spilled on the counter.

  “I’m sorry,” Ani said, although she still didn’t understand why he was so upset with her.

  Clive pointed to a picture of Caroline in which nothing around her was out of place. “I think we’ll make putting things away a rule around here, eh, kiddo?” He clapped her on the shoulder, as though they’d thought of a good plan together. “Everyone does their part so the place doesn’t go to hell in our sleep?” He laughed and Ani tried to laugh, too, as if there was something funny about what he’d said. Afterwards, she took her photo album back to her room.

  A few days later Ani came home from school to find her favourite doll, Susie, stuffed in the kitchen garbage and Clive sitting across at the table. He’d been waiting for her.

  “Why do you think I did that?” he said.

  Ani licked her lips and pressed them together. Blood was rushing through her ears.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Where did you leave it this morning?”

  “In the kitchen? Next to my cereal bowl?” It was a guess, but she hoped if she guessed right, he’d let her have her doll back.

  “Right. You left the bowl for your mother or me to clean up, and you and I both know that you know better than that.”

  “But, she — ” Ani gestured at the doll, its dress already dirtied with potato peelings and wet coffee grounds. Ani longed to rescue her, wash her up and put her back in her room. She’d promise to never leave her lying around again.

  “You’re getting too old for dolls, anyway,” Clive said. He stood up and patted Ani, in a reassuring way, on the shoulder before pushing the lid down on top of the garbage. “Now don’t let me see you trying to get that thing out of there.”

  Later, when Ani’s mother found her crying on her bed, Ani tried to explain what had happened. But it came out sounding childish.

  “Susie will think I let her get thrown out.” Ani said. “She won’t understand.”

  Ani buried her head in her knees and sobbed. The next day was garbage day, and she felt sick to her stomach imagining what would happen to her doll. Susie would be covered in other people’s garbage and compressed before being taken to the nuisance grounds.

  “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing we can do about it now, honey. That was one of Clive’s rules,” her mother said. “Maybe we’ll both have to be more careful and considerate.” She squeezed Ani into a hug. “I’m sure he didn’t intend to be mean. Just remember how well the two of you got along last Christmas.”

  Ani could no longer sleep. Clive insisted she become accustomed to noise at night, and to light from the television that flickered from the living room to the frenetic rhythm of old western shoot-outs. And if it wasn’t the TV, the scratchy sounds of old country and western records whined in her ears. Even after Clive finally turned them off and he and her mother went to bed, the motors from the ice house droned on and off all night. They flicked a switch in her mind every time they powered up.

  “It’s something you’re just going to have to get used to,” Clive told her the first time she crept out of her room and asked if he could turn down the record player.

  “Just a little?” She looked to her mother, who was reading a magazine. “I can’t get to sleep.”

  “Well, it won’t happen with you standing here. Just put it out of your mind,” Clive said.

  Ani wanted to tell him that it was stupid to think anyone could sleep through all that horrible honky-tonk. Although the words were climbing up her throat, she didn’t let them out. After she went back to bed, she heard her mother and Clive talking.

  “It’s not her fault,” her mother said. “I always made sure it was quiet for her at night.”

  “Sure you did, and now she expects it. You didn’t do her any favours by spoiling her, you know.”

  “I just think it’s a lot to adjust to — a new home along with everything else.”

  Clive disagreed and that was the end of it.

  By the time Ani was ten, a year after her mother married Clive, it became harder and harder at school to hide her fatigue. After math one day, her teacher, Mr. Buchanan, told her to stay in her seat. When all the other students were gone, he came and leaned over her.

  “I’d like to know why you’re always so tired in my class, Ani,” he said. “Do you have a proper bed time?”

  Ani was quiet and didn’t look at him, but she could feel pressure building in her chest as though her heart was a balloon, ready to burst.

  “Do you have an answer for me?” Mr. Buchanan said.

  Still looking down, Ani said the only thing she knew that would get him off her case. “It’s just PMS.” She got up out of her desk and left the room. After that, Mr. Buchanan left her alone, and Ani knew it was because ever since Janelle Klassen had gotten her period when she was nine and a half, and told him so, he let her get out of anything she wanted. “Can I sit out of gym class because I have cramps?” became Janelle’s favourite way to be excused from a hated sport. Mr. Buchanan’s face would turn beet red and he’d let her get away with anything.

  There were times over those first years when Ani thought Clive was finally getting used to having her around, that he might decide to like her again. He took her fishing once, but when Ani couldn’t think of what to talk about between casting her line, he told her she didn’t know how to appreciate anything and if she wasn’t careful she was going to become a gloomy girl. “Nobody likes gloomy girls.”

  “Yeah, well nobody likes being called gloomy, either,” Ani said. It was the first time she had ever answered him that way. Afterwards, she began to avoid Clive whenever possible. A hard thing to do in an apartment.

  One morning he came upstairs from the butcher shop and found Ani brushing her hair in front of the bathroom mirror, getting ready for the first day of the seventh grade. He stopped in front of the door and stepped into the bathroom behind her. He stared at Ani’s reflection until she was forced to look back at him.

  “I’m going to give you some advice,” he said. “My life hasn’t always been a hayride, but every morning I look at myself in the mirror and grin or make a funny face. I decide to be happy and that’s that.”

  Ani rolled her eyes. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “You know what your problem is, right? You take yourself too seriously. Just try it once.”

  “This is dumb,” she said. But when he didn’t leave, she stuck her tongue out at herself.

  “You can do better than that. Try again.”

  Ani studied her own face, her forehead that was breaking
out in a fresh crop of pimples, the dark circles under her eyes. She stuck out her tongue again and looked at Clive in the mirror to see if their little exercise was over and she could go.

  “Again,” he said.

  But when Ani forced her face into a smile, it was like drawing electricity from a pickle — an experiment from her sixth grade science class. It didn’t last, and you had to use a different pickle every time.

  “I’m going to be late,” she said.

  “Never mind that. Watch.” Clive said and his face crinkled, his eyes lighting up as though the movement of his mouth had turned on a bulb. The twinkle Ani still remembered from when she first knew him appeared. But now she knew it was nothing more than a bare bulb in an empty room, and the switch could be turned off without warning.

  Nevertheless, for weeks afterwards, Ani forced herself to look happy around Clive, even though it made her feel fake. She spread an artificial smile across her face when he gave her the job of packing ice after school.

  She wore the smile as she shoved her arm, shoulder deep into the ice machines with an aluminum scoop, piled the cubes into plastic bags printed with cartoon polar bears and loaded them into the grocer’s cart.

  She didn’t show on her face when her fingers froze, became clumsy and slipped off the handle into the sharp ice that cut her skin. Just little nicks, like paper cuts, but when there were enough of them, they stung like crazy.

  Most of the time Ani worked as fast as she could so she’d only have to make one trip into the back. It was hard to keep the first bags she’d filled from melting before she could finish tying up the last. But she dreaded pushing the loaded cart down the narrow hallway because along the way hung the carcasses of pigs brought in through the back door. Suspended from a track in the ceiling by hooks slipped between the bones and tendons of their hind feet, the pigs were heavy and stiff, hard to push aside to make room for the cart. No matter how many times she did it, she never got used to their raw, porky smell, or having to touch their lardy hides with her bare hands.

  One day, as she pushed the cart into the hallway and began to make her way past the first carcass, she nearly bumped into Clive coming from the smoke house.