Going Down Swinging

by Billie Livingston

  “Nope. It was just till January, till after Christmas.” I looked sideways at Sadie’s coat: fake fur with ear-sized black spots on top of silver-grey. Mine looked dull next to it now. Sadie’s coat. It just bugged me—I couldn’t believe she’d picked it when we were shopping in the Girls’ Department at Eaton’s with our mums. I tried on something black and belted; I thought it looked fancy and ladyish with the skinny waist. Then Sadie threw on this fat mountain of fur and spots. She looked like a dalmatian blob; it was the dumbest-looking thing I ever saw and there she’d gone and picked it on her own free will. I was so glad.

  But then something happened between the department store and the first day back at school, after Christmas vacation. Something changed that clown-thing into a movie star coat. The other kids stared at Sadie, all jealous, and touched her sleeves. Grownup ladies ran their fingers over her collar and wondered if they could find one in their own size. Sadie must’ve been praying for snow till summer.

  I peeled my eyes off her coat and looked back at my feet going along the sidewalk, then asked her, even though my mum’d told me not to, “What’d you get for Christmas again, you never said.”

  “Umm, I’m not supposed to tell you—my mum said not to talk about what we got for Christmas because you guys are on welfare and you don’t have a dad and your mum couldn’t afford to get you as much as us.”

  My mum had told me the same thing, only she said that being an only child I was bound to get more stuff than Sadie and Eddy, and that Alice wouldn’t be able to afford as much for both her kids. So I said, “Oh. Well, I got a brooch shaped like a dog with little green glass eyes. And I got a ring. Too.” I pulled my mitten off to show her the blue stone. “It’s sapphire,” I told her, and drooped my hand to look glamorous.

  Sadie glanced. “I got Spirograph.”

  I pulled my mitt back on. “And I got a black Barbie with an evening gown and high heels. And Monopoly—”

  “Holy crow, you just got Monopoly now? We’ve had it since we were little!”

  I was trying to think of another Christmas present worth bragging about when we got to the edge of Riley Park. There was snow and sticks on the bottom of the kiddy pool and three teenagers in red lumberman jackets on the other side of it. They had their backs turned and their shoulders scrunched into each other. “Glue Sniffers,” we said together. It seemed like we had to say what they were when we saw them, to keep them away. Riley Park was full of Glue Sniffers: big kids from school and The Projects. Guys as old as my sister filled up baggies with glue, shoved in their noses and breathed until they got dizzy. Glue Sniffers were like boogeymen almost. We kept going toward the community centre.

  When we got to the classroom, the clock on the wall was just hitting ten past ten. The rest of the girls sat cross-legged on the floor, all in leotards with white or pink tights. They sat super straight with their hands folded, listening to this skinny lady with a long neck that looked like a foot cuz of being all chicken-bone-stringy right down to her boobs practically. She had on a bodysuit and baggy drawstring pants. And ballet shoes. She looked up then at her watch. “Sorry we’re late,” we told her, talking all over each other.

  “That’s good, I hope you’re sorry enough not to let it happen again. I’m Miss Stickney. Have you got your leotards on underneath?” We did. We yanked off our slacks and sweaters and sat down to change into our slippers. Meanwhile Miss Stickney got the other girls up and made them do stretches. Sadie watched out of the corner of her eye and got the giggles. My other slipper wouldn’t go on and I got them too. I tried not to hear the squeaks in Sadie’s throat, but then she started a mouse-voice of Eddy’s Ethel Merman opera and we both shook from holding the laughs in. Sadie coughed to cover hers up and I bit my tongue to get the most pain without blood.

  Our teacher looked at us, breathing, slow in/slow out, with her arms bent all funny like my black Barbie. “Come along, ladies, giggling on the floor is not going to get you warm enough to keep you from pulling a hamstring.” We stood up, embarrassed, but then I got a picture of Sadie dragging a ham on a string and it was killing me. Sadie started stretching.

  “What’s your name, Miss?” Sadie told her. “And yours?” I looked to the other girls and copied their stretches so that my name would come out of someone who was trying her best and told her. “Well,” she said, and dropped forward so her palms were down flat against the floor, “the sooner you two find out this class won’t tolerate silliness, the better off you’ll be.” Miss Stickney told us we would be more flexible than she was in no time at all, that we were young and like rubber next to her. I thought she should know that I wasn’t anything like rubber. The back of my legs were burning like crazy and my fingers didn’t even dangle to my ankles and she yelled, “Knees straight!”

  Then she arranged us in a circle, put music on, and we hop-kicked our way around and round the circle in time to violins. It seemed like we were doing some kind of furry-hat Russian dance thing, not ballet. We weren’t doing anything that was going to make me more graceful, we weren’t leaping through the air, and we didn’t get tutus. We just kept kicking around the circle over and over until she clapped at us to stop and everybody fell back on their bums, panting. The class finished with more stretching.

  I pulled on my clothes afterward, tired and crabby. My throat hurt and I didn’t want to go back in the cold. The bones on the bottom of my feet hurt and I was mad at myself for getting a stupid short-sleeved leotard that made me look like a baby instead of the long-sleeved kind that made Sadie all long and tall and practically grown-up.

  The next two Sundays were pretty much the same: squat kicks around the room and long breathy stretches. Except after the second class, Sadie brought along this other girl on our walk home. Then the third next class, she went over to the girl’s house afterwards and I didn’t get invited. I was kind of upset, like I was going to cry on the way home. Sometimes it seemed dumb even being friends with people. They’d just go off and be friends with someone else. Even if you tried to be like them. Or else they’d move. Or else you’d move. Or else they had a whole family who did stuff together, like, had dinner at a certain time or did church stuff and you could never be in the family, even though sometimes you could be one of the place settings at dinner.

  When I got home, Mum was on a cleaning binge. I hardly ever saw her like that, moving so fast, so I stood outside the kitchen in my boots and coat and watched. Country music was blaring out of the radio on the counter and Mum rubbed a J Cloth on the floor on her hands and knees. She looked up. “Hey there, ballerina. How was it today?”

  “Mmm. Same.”

  “No good? Hey! Goofball, you wanna take your feet off, you’re slushing up my floor. I ain’t just a-killin’ time down here, ol’ thang.”

  “Sorry.” I backed up and took off my boots. “I hate these lessons. It’s not even ballet. Just this kicking stuff like—” and I squatted and tried to show her.

  She looked up, still wiping around herself. “Huh. Maybe she’s trying to strengthen your legs.”

  “No. She’s stupid.”

  “Well, you don’t have to keep going, just do whatcha feel, shlemiel.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  She kept wiping and said, “Your dad called today.”

  “He did? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I’m telling you now.”

  “Well, what’d he say? Did he say anything about me? Did you tell him about me doing ballet?”

  “Yes, of course he asked about you and how you were doing and I told him you were at ballet—he seemed to get a chuckle out of that.”

  “What do you mean, a chuckle?”

  “Well, I mean a kick, you know, he said, ‘Yeah? boy that’s real good, that’s real good for her,’ and I told him what they were going to cost and he didn’t offer to pay for them. You know. The usual.”

  “Oh. Is he coming here?”

  “Well, he said he might come in the spring. And pigs might fly, but they’re ver
y unlikely birds. He said Charlie’s out there again. She’s there with a guy, staying at some joint your father’s got on Bloor Street. Apparently he’s a pretty tough customer, the guy —his name’s Ian.”

  “Ian?”

  “Yeah. He’s an albino.”

  “Like a rat?”

  “Apparently.”

  Mum was right about Vancouver. By the end of March it was T-shirt time; kids were already getting tans on their faces. And I had a friend called Gabrielle. My sore throats ended up being the flu and I had to stay home from school for a whole week—it was Gabrielle who showed up at our door with a big envelope of get-well cards that the grade 3 class made. I knew our teacher made them do it and Gabrielle was just delivering them, but still, it was practically like she made them herself. Plus, it turned out to be that Darlene, my babysitter, was Gabrielle’s big sister.

  Gabrielle was like Pearl, kind of, but prettier. She lived a block and a half away, in The Projects, and she was one of hardly any kids from around there that my mum didn’t say was riff-raff. Sadie and Eddy were riff-raff.

  The first couple times I brought Gabrielle home after school, we had the place to ourself. We drank milk with Strawberry Quik and played cards at the kitchen table until she had to go home for dinner. The third time she came over, Gabrielle taught me snap. Gabrielle won every practice round and I made sure she knew they didn’t count. I cracked my knuckles while she dealt our first real game. I planned on being one of those pool shark guys who stomped everybody when they played for real. I slowly turned cards off my hand until she waggled her finger at me, like Gladys Kravitz on Bewitched, cuz she said I was holding back, trying to see her card before she saw mine. Then she yelled, “Snap!” and grabbed both our twos and the piles underneath them. And “Snap!” again and the next time and the next. I was down to around eight cards and the sound of her voice was starting to bug me, that word—if she said it one more time. “Snap!” I snapped, but it was a four and an ace. Gabrielle giggled and snapped at the next pair. I was getting bored when my mother came home.

  Mum was in a good mood; she was coming home from General Brock, our school, where she got a job doing volunteer work with the first- and second-graders. She tried to do teaching in Vancouver when we first moved here and found out she wasn’t allowed to in B.C. unless she went back to school and did more classes. She said forget-it to that and then got this idea to do volunteer work, cuz maybe it’d be an in.

  Gabrielle gave my mother one of her shiny blonde smiles, said hello and held out her hand. I never saw a kid shake hands with a grown-up before that. My mother looked all impressed and said, “Gabrielle,” and rolled her r like she was French or something, “tu parles français?”

  “No. Not really. My dad does. My sister and I were born in Montreal, but we’ve been here since I was really little.”

  Mum sat in the chair on the other side of her. “Oh, Montreal, I used to love Montreal; the way the women dressed—just fantastic! The French women really do have a way—I used to want to stay there forever just so it would rub off on me a little.” Gabrielle was still smiling at my mother, glinting her with her glasses. Her glasses were too big and Mum’s reflection practically took up Gabrielle’s whole face, one of her on each side. “You have such pretty hair, Gabrielle, the colour of butter,” and then she touched it. She put her hand on Gabrielle’s hair and ran it all the way down to the middle of her back. She touched it the way she touched blouses she couldn’t afford in department stores. “Goodness, it’s like velvet!”

  Gabrielle got even shinier the more my mum paid attention to her; all teeth and glasses. She said that her mother bought her a special conditioner that smelled like apples. Mum hmmed and went to the fridge to pour herself a Fresca. I asked what conditioner was. Gabrielle giggled and said you put it in your hair after rinsing out the shampoo. I fanned out the four cards I had left in my hands—kids were putting stuff in their hair that made it soft and I never even heard of it. Mum didn’t say anything, just put the Fresca bottle back in the fridge. We didn’t even use shampoo.

  “What kind of conditioner do you use?” Gabrielle asked me.

  “I don’t know, let’s just play.”

  Mum leaned against the counter and sipped her green bubbles. “Grace and I use good ol’ soap and water. I never really believed in that racket, shampoo and conditioner and all that.”

  Gabrielle laid a card down. I laid mine slowly across from hers. “Snap!” She picked up both cards and cackled. “Grace isn’t getting the hang of this that good.”

  “I am so.”

  “Well, you’re not that fast, I mean. You keep losing.”

  “So you lost crazy eights, y’lez.” The word fell on the table like dog poo.

  Mum coughed on her Fresca. “What? What kind of talk is that? That sounded like a Sadie if you ask me.”

  Gabrielle blinked under her glass plates. “What’s a lez?”

  “People who put conditioner in their hair.”

  “Grace! for goodness sake. Sorry, Gabrielle, I think your friend took too many crabby pills today.” Mum gave me the look. I wished she’d quit saying Gabrielle’s name or quit saying it that way, the way people say cream or caramel. She changed the subject. “So I had a nice interview with your principal, he’s really lovely. We had a terrific little chat—actually, he’s kind of handsome, well, maybe more cute than handsome. And I start coming in a couple hours a day next Monday! Isn’t that great!”

  I said uh huh. The phone rang and she went off to the bedroom. I watched Gabrielle’s cards and wondered how I’d look with glasses. “Snap!”—my first victory. I grabbed the cards over to my side: four of her cards. Four captured cards. I wondered out loud about the glasses thing. She smiled and pushed hers up.

  “I don’t know, you kinda have a nose like Fred Flintstone; they might look funny.” I rubbed a finger along my nose bone. She explained, “Well, your nose kinda goes down and then boing, kinda there, boings out in a round part on the end and glasses might maybe make you look more like you’re from Bedrock.”

  I looked at the clock. Gabrielle cranked her head around too. She had to go, her aunt was coming over for dinner and Gabrielle had to help, had to do things like set the table and stir stuff in pots just in time for it all to be laid out at once. Probably things like stew and mashed things, cabbage rolls; reasons I was too afraid to go to other kids’ for dinner. Mum came back in the kitchen as Gabrielle was getting ready to go and told her goodbye, said how nice it was to have met her, then touched the little blue flowers on her cuffs and said, “What an adorable sweater,” and asked if someone in the family’d made it. She told Gabrielle how my nanna knitted too, that I had nighties and slippers she made. I wished they’d shut up.

  When the door closed, Mum folded her arms and smirked, “Boy oh boy, somebody’s a green-eyed monster today,” and she started into a song she sang all the time that went, “Jealousy, it’s crawling all over me,” and didn’t knock it off until I left the room. She called after me, “Come here, you monstrosity, I have to tell you something. Come ‘ere—come ’ere … we have to talk about something.” I stayed in the kitchen and looked in the fridge like I was hungry. She came in behind me and said, “Charlie called last night.”

  “What—why didn’t you let me talk to her?”

  “Because you weren’t here, you were at the bookmobile.” Every Tuesday night, a bus with a library on it came around and stopped for two hours on Main Street, two blocks from our building.

  “Well, why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Just hold your horses. She’s pregnant. And her son-of-a-bitch boyfriend’s been knocking her around. And—just wait, don’t get yourself all in a knot—she’s OK, but she was talking about coming to Vancouver. She wanted to know if she could stay with us for a little while and I told her she could but to give it some thought and call me today. I didn’t want to tell you until I knew for sure—you know how she is; changes her mind every mi—”

  “So is
she coming or not?”

  “Keep your shirt on; that was just her on the phone now, she’s coming. I don’t know how she got the money, but she’s catching a plane tomorrow. And I don’t know what kind of shape she’s in, but it’s probably pretty bad if it’s enough to make her leave this goon and come out here. So don’t be shocked if you see her and she doesn’t look too hot.”

  Grace Five

  MARCH/APRIL 1974

  SHE DIDN’T LOOK too hot. My sister’s face was still puffy with bruises. Her left eye was half shut, rock blue and purple down to her cheekbone. There were cuts across her nose and lip and stitches through her eyebrow.

  Charlie sat at the kitchen table while Mum tilted her chin up and looked and sighed. I stood beside Mum and asked why he hit her and Charlie said, “Because he’s an asshole. He’s a fuckin lunatic,” and told us how Ian put her head through a wall, that he just kept hitting her and hitting her, and how screams had started coming out of her that she didn’t even think were hers and she could see blood all over the place and it looked like poster paint. When the cops showed up, they separated her from Ian; one stood in front of him and the other kneeled beside her and asked what happened. She could still see Ian’s eyes and they had the same look as the night when he held a gun to her head and asked her if she loved him. So Charlie told the cop that she fell down the fire escape. The one beside her was young with smooth chocolate-coloured skin, she said, and he kept talking softly, telling her she could press charges and have the guy put away She could feel the blood crusting on her chin and hear the leather squeak on his holster and she thought how the good guy was the one in black and the bad guy was in white. And it didn’t matter what she did, the bad guy had her by the throat. The cops finally gave up and took her to the hospital to get stitches in her eyebrow.

  I wished I could wipe off the cuts and bruises, like they were dirt—give her one of Mum’s spitbaths. My mother took a deep breath and growled it out, saying, “So where is he now?”