Swan Dive

by Brenda Hasiuk

  Budgie said maybe there were too many people in that little apartment, which was only partly true. By grade nine Hana was barely there anymore because she was always at her sugar daddy’s, or at least that’s what Elle called him. Riel is actually only six years older than Hana and he’s her husband now and he isn’t exactly rich. He just has a steady job with Manitoba Public Insurance and drives a two-seater Mazda that’s nicer than anything Dajdža Drago ever had. Sara was usually working at the mall or going to college part-time to get some diploma for running a business, or staying at a friend’s.

  So it was mostly just Amina driving Mama and Tata crazy by saying that now that the siege had ended and the Serbs had turned their attention to their old territories in Kosovo and NATO was finally taking things seriously, she was going back to Sarajevo. She said she must bear witness to what happened to our nice flat, to our beloved cinema, to our poor old Nana Spaho. She wanted to defend what was rightfully still ours from the hucksters and opportunists out to profit from the spoils of war. She wanted to help rebuild her bruised, battered and embittered homeland.

  Mama told her that it was bad enough having her parents in Belgrade where the war-mongers in Kosovo were still in a fever that wouldn’t break. And if Amina didn’t stop talking about returning to that mess she would not only hide her passport but disown her as a daughter.

  Amina and Mama, at least, didn’t change.

  * * *

  —

  After Elle started getting skinny and before Ivan came, maybe that was CristElle’s swan song.

  Most weekends I would pick songs and do vocals and Elle would throw herself around the living room trying to work up a sweat. She only wanted to do stuff with a good aerobic beat and we did some straight-ahead forgettable pop like Backstreet Boys and Puff Daddy. Amina said we were still CristElle, only in its purest, most personal, most joyful form. We still laughed our heads off at the way Mindy’s poodle hair looked right after she woke up and the way Mama picked her nose when she thought no one was looking. We still rented movies and Elle still threw popcorn in the air and never managed to catch it in her mouth, only it was unbuttered instead of buttered.

  For Christmas Amina helped me buy Elle Susan Powter’s video, Burn Fat and Get Fit! and Elle got me Bass Fishing for the Sega with Mindy’s credit card. She said Tata and I could pretend we were fishing by some remote mountain stream that no one could pronounce. On New Year’s Day, Tata said, This crazy game, it’s got me hooked, and Mama said he should speak in English but she was laughing.

  At home when it was just the two of us Elle was her usual self, but around school it was different. She kept telling me what people were saying about her. Like Amanda-P had abandoned us for a lonely Brazilian exchange student named Hugo but thought Elle looked a bit like Alicia Silverstone. Or Ingrid Bloke, who thought she had the best soprano in the choir, had never noticed Elle had a heart-shaped face before. Or Izzie Troia, who did have the best soprano, wanted to go shopping with Elle when she bought her whole new size 6 wardrobe.

  And when she talked to any of them, it’s like she had one line that she rehearsed and repeated. I’m just sticking to the plan. Less fat in, less fat round.

  Budgie asked how I thought the girls made Elle feel and I said all I knew was that in the spring Elle took off to Jimmy’s and stayed there all of March and all of April and Ms. Gulliano nearly kicked her out of choir because how are you supposed to learn group pieces for an international engagement when you’re not there?

  Budgie wanted to know if it was hard for me while Elle was gone and I told her Mama got it in her head that I needed to get out of the house because it was getting lighter outside, spring was coming no matter how much snow was left, and I was sitting playing Bug! on the Sega like an invalid.

  Even Tata said, You’re still young, what are you doing in here with us old people? Once Amina joined in I didn’t stand a chance because she’d actually gone to the school and brought me sign-up forms for afterschool games club, intramural volleyball and guitar.

  Budgie said, Your family cares about you very much, and I told her caring about someone and knowing what’s best for them are not the same thing. Just because I could play Sega Worldwide Soccer forever didn’t mean I was cut out for sports. At least guitar was music, but I think my skin must be unusually soft because after the first two sessions the ends of my fingers were nothing but blisters. That left gaming club, or Role Play Rollers, which Ivan said if anyone ever called it that he was never coming back.

  Budgie asked who Ivan was and I realized she really didn’t know. Mama and Tata wouldn’t have told her anything because they’d only seen him once for maybe five minutes and he was wearing a Halloween costume.

  It’s weird to think that my own parents could pass Ivan on the street and have no idea who he was or what he must think of me now.

  I told Budgie that when I met Ivan he’d only been at our school for a few weeks but was already running his own game. I walked into gaming club and he told me to sit down and he would work me into the adventure as a dwarf who’d been laid up with sleeping sickness and was just rejoining his party. I remember thinking he talked kind of the same as Amina, like everything that came out of his mouth was important — weapons and powers and monsters, except Ivan’s were all made up.

  That was the best day I had in a while because role playing was kind of like Sega’s Dragon Force except you played with other people so Mama and Tata and Amina could shut up and stop worrying about me.

  Budgie said, So you made a new friend.

  I told her every choir geek was friends with Ivan.

  I was the one who met Ivan first, before Elle even saw him in choir and said he reminded her of Johnny Depp. She didn’t even notice him that first day after she got back from Jimmy’s. She was rushing out of the choir room and I yelled to ask her if she was coming over and she said she needed to walk first and I asked if Mindy’s car was dead again and she said no she needed to walk and I asked where and she looked ready to hit me.

  Nowhere. Just walk.

  That’s when Ivan appeared out of nowhere, like he had the power of invisibility.

  Who’s that?

  Elle, I said. She’s been at her dad’s.

  You two an item?

  I wasn’t sure what this meant, so I took a guess. We’ve known each other forever.

  And he nodded slowly, like he was filing it away for future reference.

  I’ve been thinking about stars. We talked about them in science last year and Ivan knew everything about black dwarfs and red dwarfs and supernovas. But I was just thinking how stars are held together by their own gravity until things heat up too much, and then they collapse on themselves, and then boom.

  It’s like me and Mama and Tata and Sara and Amina and Hana were tight as a burning star until the siege. Then we closed in and collided, and the apartment in Winnipeg was the shockwave that sent us flying into space.

  Now we’re just rocky planets who might as well not be in the same galaxy.

  I know what Elle would say. She’d say stars give her the creeps because they make her feel like a pointless little ant who lives and dies in the blink of an eye.

  October 13, 1999

  Before we finished the session, Budgie asked about Fargo again and I told her there was nothing really to say because it was just a school trip. Spend four and a half hours on a bus, sing at the civic auditorium that looked like a concrete bunker, go back to the hotel, swim in the pool, go to bed, wake up, eat cold waffles from the breakfast buffet, spend four and a half hours on the bus again.

  But I’ve been thinking about that night in Fargo, how anyone with eyes could see that Elle was different. When she sat on Ivan’s shoulders in the pool, trying to knock Ingrid off Scottie Abrams and Izzie off Luke Chipeway, she looked just like any other girl. With their wet hair it was hard to tell who was who.

  But she wa
s acting like any other girl too. They kept yelling at me to come in, or saying they were going to throw me in, but I was pretty sure they didn’t really care if I was with them or not. It’s like they were a bunch of dolphins jumping around in the water playing some game I didn’t understand. And it’s like Elle was splashing ten feet away from me but I was a rocky planet all by myself.

  I’m doing this at the tailor shop because there’s nothing to do but listen to the drill of the sewing needles or watch the Filipino soaps they play on the VCR.

  I keep thinking about Hana’s wedding. I’m pretty sure once a dead star explodes, that’s it. There’s no going back together, not even for a special occasion, but Ivan said the supernova explosion can sometimes briefly outshine its entire home galaxy.

  I remember Elle said she didn’t believe in the paternalistic institution of marriage and that Frieda said it was an outdated custom invented for legal and financial reasons and was exclusionary toward gays and singles. I asked her why she wanted to come to Hana’s then and she said she’d never been to a wedding so it was an experience.

  For the reception Amina wanted me to sing “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” except the Elvis Presley version. But it didn’t feel right, maybe because it felt like CristElle’s song and because lightning pretty much never strikes twice.

  I looked into “As Long as You Love Me” by the Backstreet Boys, but Elle said it was the processed cheese of love songs and I could never listen to it again without thinking about that. She played Depeche Mode’s “Somebody” for Hana, who actually liked it because she remembered the band from the clubs back in Sarajevo. I asked them if they were serious because those guys looked like zombies with their powder white faces and light-socket hair, and Elle said they were what Ivan called mid-80s New Wave retro. She said Ivan had a CD music collection that took up two walls of his bedroom.

  But I still thought that song was just as lame as the Backstreet Boys. We’d done The Beatles “I Will” as part of our pop repertoire in jazz choir and I prepared that for a few weeks until Hana finally said Riel was a big fan of Bryan Adams, the Canadian with the blotchy skin, and I ended up with his okay hit, “Everything I Do, I Do It for You.”

  Riel was from a French Catholic family so Hana had to take marriage preparation classes for three months and learn about the Pope and stuff, which actually seemed to fire up Tata for a while. He grumbled in Bosnian whenever the wedding mass or the priest came up.

  This is what Yugoslavia worked so hard to end. All the pomp and superstitions and to-do. You couldn’t have dragged me into that Orthodox gold-leaf monstrosity to marry your mother and I never would have asked her to pledge her love to me in my mother’s mosque.

  In the end it was so sticky hot in the church and there was so much sitting down and getting up that Amina fainted and Sara said she was just mad about not being in the wedding party and trying to steal Hana’s show. I thought Elle would find the whole thing completely hilarious, but instead she looked like she was going to cry.

  Mindy had bought her a yellow dress from the mall and her silver sandals had skinny heels that made her walk funny. When I asked her what was up, she said she just couldn’t stand it when everyone was trying so hard and everything still went to shit, and I almost said this is nothing when it comes to trying hard and things still being shit.

  Instead I told her that the party was the real thing and it would be tight, and she said, Ivan always says tight, and I said, Everyone says tight, and she said, Only because Ivan says it.

  At the reception the room was smaller than I thought it would be and a hundred people looked like fewer than I imagined. Dajdža Drago and Sharon had bought all the flowers, these towering red birds of paradise that looked like they were trying to eat you, and it was hard to see the person across the table. Mama said they were very sophisticated and modern and Tata spent a lot of time outside smoking. Elle kept asking me who people were and I had to keep saying I had no idea because the whole place was pretty much the groom’s side.

  After dinner, though, Tata actually made a toast in English, and he told everyone how much it meant to him to have his first child settled in Canada with a fine young man and dreams for the future and everyone cried except for me and Amina, who kept her face blank and her eyes in her lap, probably thinking about the terrible things the Serbs were doing to Muslims in Kosovo right then. After Hana and Riel danced to Shania Twain’s “From This Moment On,” the DJ played “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” the Elvis Presley version, and Amina kept poking Elle and me until we got up.

  And the funny thing is, I couldn’t even count the times Elle and I danced together in our lives, danced like we didn’t give two shits what anybody thought, but it was never like this, so close that we could feel each other breathing. It’s different when you’re not just touching someone but holding them, and your fingers are resting on that super soft place right under their hairline.

  It wasn’t like hugging Mama and the girls with their thick hair and square shoulders. Elle’s hair was pulled up in a braid that Sara did for her and that just left the baby hairs at the bottom of her neck. I don’t know if I ever felt anything so soft, even on a kitten, and I started thinking about Elle’s eyes for the first time, because that afternoon, coming out of the steamy church into the burning sun, I noticed they were not brown, not green, but hazel — like one of Winnipeg’s mud-bottom rivers on a clear day. It’s like I was suddenly noticing stupid little things like the sound of her high heels clicking on the dance floor or the bump of her knee against the inside of my leg or the cinnamon smell of her breathing because she’d splurged and eaten the whole apple tart for dessert.

  Then the song was over and we were back at the table and Sara was saying, Nice shambling, Cris. And what’s funny is I barely remember singing that stupid Bryan Adams song I’d worked so hard on. A bunch of Riel’s relatives came up afterwards and said nice stuff but mostly I just remember Elle. I remember coming back from the mic at the front and her sitting with the edge of the white tablecloth bunched in her fist, very unladylike, and saying, That song is so whatever. But I’m still crying. What the hell? And I remember not knowing what to say and having to go outside where Tata was smoking and him saying in English, This things, they are so bremenit, church or mosque or no. This times a man just needs some air, son.

  He didn’t know the English for bremenit, and when I looked it up later, the closest word was fraught.

  October 14, 1999

  Mama just told me Budgie called and her mom died last night and she’s going to Toronto, which means no sessions for maybe a week. I didn’t know her mom was even sick.

  I guess I don’t know much about Budgie except she has a little hatchling that carries germs home from the daycare. Maybe talking about her daughter is Budgie’s way of promoting birth control to a teenager only there isn’t much chance of me gettin’ busy, as Elle would say, any time soon. There’s no chance of anything, really, so maybe I might as well be a ghost.

  In all the movies ghosts come back because they have some kind of unfinished business, but what about during a war? I mean, shouldn’t there be nothing but ghosts wandering around after a war?

  I was thinking about how I know almost nothing about Budgie and she knows so much about me because she is the professional and I am the patient, but this kind of thing happens in real life all the time. Like I know way more about Amina, who pretty much says whatever she thinks, than Sara, who sits painting her nails and I have no idea if she’s thinking about Nana Spaho’s syrupy tulumba or some serial killer she’s started writing to in prison.

  For a long time I thought I knew Elle pretty much as well as I knew myself but turns out I barely knew either one of us.

  Ivan told us that his uncle, who lives in California and used to write for a sitcom called Who’s the Boss, told him a definition for comedy. Tragedy is when I stub my toe. Comedy is when you fall in an open manhole and
die.

  I didn’t get it until just now, on my bed in my underwear, feeling kind of relieved that I’m off the hook for a few days because someone’s mom died.

  When we left Sarajevo through the tunnel, I wasn’t really scared because we were all together and I was too happy to be doing something other than sitting around pretending I wasn’t jealous of Arman, who maybe only had one leg left but at least escaped the four walls of his apartment.

  The only thing that freaked me out was the moths around the overhead lights. I mean, how did they get down there?

  I’ve been thinking that Ivan’s like a light bulb dangling from a ceiling at night and all the rest of us are bugs. Mama said once that Elle tried way too hard to be drugačiji all the time and Amina said she made it sound like being different was a lifestyle choice, but even Elle was like the rest of us with Ivan. Which when I think about Elle and Ivan, is kind of rich — as in Elle saying, Ms. Boehm thinks I might have anorexia? Now that is rich coming from pancake butt — because I was really friends with Ivan first.

  Probably the only reason I kept going to gaming club was because I had to know what Ivan the Dungeon Master would come up with next. Some people said he had to be a genius to create his own game and keep track of the rules without even a manual, but Elle claimed it was all about his tripping tight imagination. Which was rich, considering she’d never even played with us and whenever I tried to explain it to her she’d be yadda-yadda-yadda, whatever, because coming from me it sounded like a total a waste of time.

  Which it kind of was, because at least with CristElle we were working toward something. We had a goal, we had real dreams. After a couple months into the game I said to Ivan that in the real world you could be the smartest and the strongest, with a cloak of invisibility, even, and still get taken out by some a-hole with bad aim and a Russian howitzer. He just laughed and told me, Don’t overthink it, dude, and I laughed too, even though I still think I had a point.