Going Down Swinging

by Billie Livingston

  Christ, what the hell was she on? Bloody kids think they invented euphoria.

  Great, this is all you need, like you haven’t had enough trouble with Charlie popping her Black Beauties and smoking pot and god knows what else.

  You pull your brain like warm gum out of the book; Grace is still babbling about something or other, something about tin cans, and you interrupt, You are not reading this, you’re too young.

  What! I’m not too young. I am not! All the other kids read it already.

  Well, you can bet your boots their mothers didn’t know. It glorifies drugs and you’re too young to discern the difference between fantasy and reality. That makes two of you, but you say, Come on, time for bed.

  The next morning you’re in the kitchen making up a recipe for rice flour pancakes. Grace is lying on her stomach on the living-room floor watching Saturday morning cartoons. You’ve been reading about wheat allergies lately, how lots of people have them. Symptoms from hyperactivity to inability to concentrate and irritability—you’ve noticed Grace being irritable lately and she’s been doing this weird thing where she clenches her fists and eyes and teeth at once. She looks as if she’s going to have a fit. Then relaxes. You’ve walked in on her a couple times and caught her clenching everything so tight, her whole everything shook. Sometimes she forgets herself and does it when she’s watching TV with you. Asked her what she was doing and why. Making everything shut as tight as it can go as hard as I can till it hits the top—like that game thing you hit with a hammer and then the metal thing goes up and if you hit it really hard, it rings the bell. And why? Because she likes it.

  The way she looks, though, when it’s happening—like she’s out of her ever-lovin’ mind. You told her you were going to take her to see a doctor, that maybe she had some stuff she needed to talk about with somebody. You asked Doctor Peters about a referral. He told you not to work yourself into a tizzy; seen it before, just a stage, it’s normal.

  But maybe if you changed her diet. Maybe she has allergies. Maybe wheat. The phone rings.

  Grace jumps and runs for it. It’s Pavlovian; only thing that tears her brain away from a television. Last weekend you bellowed to make yourself heard and she had the gall to turn around and shh you. Shhed by an eight-year-old. She never used to behave like that, it’s that Sadie’s influence, her and her whole crazy family. Probably her on the phone now. Although it sounds like Grace is answering a survey. Yes, no, yeah, yeah. ’K, just a sec and yells, It’s George.

  You take the phone, Hello into it and hear Hello there, you lovely thing, what ya up to this mornin? He does have a bit of a Maritime accent, didn’t notice it as much when he was standing in front of you.

  Oh, not much, just puttering around. I’m attempting a new pancake recipe.

  Oh well, why don’t you save it for tomorrow and lemme take the two of you out for pancakes. Or bacon and eggs or whatever you like.

  Oh! Uh, well. That’s quite an offer. I guess I haven’t actually started mixing anything. Hang on—Hey Petunia, how’d you like to go out for breakfast and meet George?

  The Road Runners on and she was just about to get up and change the channel anyway, so she willingly turns her head, gives you a suspicious sort of look. When?

  I don’t know. Now. Just—when? you ask the receiver, almost giddy. Can’t remember the last time someone called on the weekend and said let’s go for breakfast.

  He says, How’s about forty-five minutes or an hour? Does that give you enough time?

  That’s sounds just fine—Grace: an hour! She nods. You palm the mouthpiece away from your head. So why don’t you go jump in the tub and get ready. She says yeah, doesn’t move. Bring the receiver back. OK then, we’ll see you soon. You hang up and attempt a cheerful whip-cracking.

  The three of you are in Denny’s, smiling into plates the waitress just set in front of you. Well, two of you are; Grace is busy separating food so that nothing touches. Fifteen minutes ago she gave the waitress very explicit instructions about her eggs so they would arrive the same as when you make them: Not scrambled, she doesn’t like them fluffy, or runny, not over-easy, definitely not poached—stirred, she wants. Do it like you’re going to do the reguhr fried kind with the yoke in the middle but then break it up with a fork and stir it around. And don’t add milk or anything. And cook it both sides, flip it over so that nothings raw or moving around still. Do you get it? You were slightly embarrassed: Oh for goodness sake, Grace, just order pancakes why don’t you. But George cut in, No, she’s doin good, let her go. And what would Her Royal Highness like to drink? and the waitress laughed and maybe you should just calm down. After she got it all down on her little pad, she went off to shuffle the chef’s brain to your child’s way of thinking.

  Meanwhile, Grace has warmed up to George considerably. Not that she’s speaking to him yet, but you can tell by the curl at the corners of her mouth as she moves the edges of her stirred eggs as far as possible from the hash browns without touching bacon. And in her eyes. They rest on him now; before, they looked beside him, above him, into her hands when he spoke.

  So, Madam, your mum tells me you like horses. Do you ever get a chance to go riding or go out to the racetrack?

  He’s hit the nail on the head so hard she nearly falls off her chair. Yes. I mean no, but I want to. I watch them on TV sometimes and um, yeah. I watched the Kentucky Derby on TV when it was on.

  The Kentucky! You’re more up on things than I thought. Gees, a friend of mine put a bet on the horse who won that, what was his name? George squints, thinking. He’s got his forearms on either side of his plate, hunched a little across the table toward Grace.

  Foolish Pleasure, and she draws it out as if she’s doing an ad for something so decadent, it should be illegal.

  George chuckles. Gees, I think she’s right, that’s the name. And he shakes his head and picks up his coffee.

  I remember because I picked him, he was pretty and he had a big bum—I heard they go faster when they have big bums. And plus I liked his name. George is laughing and then you remember something about it yourself, telling Grace to stop being foolish and take out the garbage and her reply: It would be my foolish pleasure. Now you know where that came from; one down, ten thousand and four strange replies to go.

  Grace Six

  AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 1974

  AROUND WHEN she met George, Mum bought a twin-size bed and put it in the living room. I still fell asleep in her bed but usually I woke up in the living room. And then George moved in and from then on I slept always in the living room. At first it bugged me. Cuz mostly it seemed like they were friends, I mean not all kissy-kissy or anything, so I wondered what they were doing in there that they had to be alone and have the door be closed. But I suppose it was cuz of Mum’s thing about how adults need adult company like kids need kid company. And plus I didn’t want to not like George.

  George was different from most of the guys my mum knew —the ones I saw, anyway. He had a slow for-sure way of moving and talking. Kind of like a big old horse—like in Black Beauty, there was a big old horse who gave advice and didn’t shy away from bushes or dogs or stuff. And George was like that, like he wouldn’t just crumple up—you could climb on him and ask him anything you could think of and he always had a good answer. Even if it was a guess, he’d say that, and it’d be a good guess too, and you’d think, yeah, I bet that’s it. One time he said that Mum was a bird on a branch and he got that right too. She was, kind of, and every once in a while it seemed like she took a good peck at him just to get a rise. But George would just breathe his deep strong horse breaths and give her a deep old horse look until she gave up and flapped down the hall to the bedroom. I wondered sometimes if she didn’t think much of him, the way she’d get all tisky and snappy, as if he was a dopey kid or something. Or maybe it bugged her that he was right a lot and smart, about the things she wasn’t: people and money and the world and the kinds of stuff that twisted them all together. She could string together enough
sparkly words to cover a Christmas tree, but George was in the war.

  He worked on fishing boats—he’d go out to sea for a couple months, make a wad of dough then come home and do nothing for a while. After a couple or three months of living with us, he was making Mum nuts—always in her hair, she said, sitting around the living room with those creepy black-rimmed glasses, reading or watching TV. And for the first time, when it came to someone who wasn’t us, I wanted her to get lost; I liked it when he put on his glasses to read, they made him look like a professor or something. And besides, half the time the glasses were on, it was for me. I’d lie flopped on the couch with my head on his lap and he’d read me Paul Bunyan or The Black Stallion. Or he’d be at the kitchen table flipping through one of my math books. The school year was almost finished and I was having trouble with “New Math.” Mum got all pissed off just looking at it. “What the hell was wrong with the old math?” she kept saying, but George sat with me, squeaking the table every time he erased something, and explaining how come it didn’t work the way I was doing it.

  One night after dinner he was trying to get long division in my head. Looking out the bottom half of his bifocals, he wrote down number after number, under and on top of each other, splitting them, carrying them, bringing them down, and then suddenly he said, “Here, try it this way,” and started with short division. It was making me feel stupid and scared that George wasn’t going to think I was that great. And anyway, it was his fault for expecting me to know stuff we weren’t even learning yet. So I said, “I haven’t even figured out the first thing—we’re not supposed to do it that way.”

  “Well, that’s OK, give this a shot, just try it and see if it makes any more sense.”

  “It doesn’t and I can’t do it that way. You’re doing it wrong, just show me what they want me to do.”

  “Don’t get yourself all worked up, now, just take a look at wh—”

  “No! I can’t. I can’t do it. I don’t even understand how come in the minussing part with the subtraction before, you crossed that out and it’s a nine; it was a zero before and now it’s a nine.”

  He turned back pages and grabbed the scrap we were just working on. “Because you’ve borrowed from the number …” and blah blah blah, then “You see?”

  “No! I don’t see nothing—”

  “Grace!” Mum came stomping into the kitchen from the living room. “Look, if you can’t just listen to what he’s trying to show you, instead of contradicting every word, then maybe you should just go in the bedroom and do it by yourself!”

  “Oh, go drink your Fresca,” George told her, and squeaked the table again, erasing stuff. Mum’s lips went tight and then opened and smacked shut again. She turned around and stomped back in the living room. George and I looked at each other; she wasn’t speechless that often. I stared at the stuff he was scribbling and tried not to make any smirky noises; I could feel Mum crackling around the corner on the couch.

  “Do you wanna take a tea break?” he said. “We can have a cuppa tea and take a look at tonight’s racing form; a few of ’em’ll probably be racing on Saturday too. Did you ask Josh? Do you wanna bring him along?”

  I didn’t. Well I did, but it was just that this would be my second time at the track with George—I never went to one before George came along and he was teaching me things: how to bet, how to read a racing form, what it meant when the odds were five to two or four to three. And I was getting it—I was becoming a horse-racing expert, and if Josh came we’d have to start right from the beginning again. And plus, what if they liked each other better? Maybe Josh would be smarter and make better bets and George would like having him around. Mum told me after we came to Vancouver that my dad wanted a boy before I was born and he said if I was a boy he’d teach me to be a thief or get me into acting. She told me that after she already let the cat out of the bag: I caught her on the phone saying, “When Danny was in jail those years …” Jail! And all that time she made me go around thinking he was at camp. Whenever Mum said camp, I used to picture the army, like the army camps on TV, and figured that must’ve been where he was. She said he was working there. He never wrote, though, or called us from camp and he never talked about it afterwards. I asked him once, in Toronto, when he was digging a hole in the backyard (to build me the swing that never got built), how camp was. He said, “Camp? Oh. Oh, it was fun. We went swim-min’ and fishin’ and all kindsa stuff,” and he grinned and kept digging his hole. No wonder he didn’t want to hang around me if I was that dumb.

  Then I find out it was Jail. I made Mum tell me everything afterward and made her say she was sorry—cuz the whole thing about her and me was how we didn’t lie to each other and then she went and broke the code of honour. I didn’t even care about him being in jail; it sounded better than camp. Jail could be kind of cool; cowboys and cat burglars got jailed. I imagined my dad in a super-tall skyscraper, all in black, prowling down hallways in soft unsqueaky shoes, in and out of windows, diamonds glistening in the palm of his leather glove. She told me he’d said he got framed or they got the wrong guy or something and he knew who the real guy was but as part of honours around thieves he did the time. Either way, he was like the movies all the sudden. Except for what I found out later about being a boy; if I was a boy he would’ve taught me stuff. If I was a boy, he would’ve called more probably or visited me. He might not have let me go to Vancouver in the first place.

  “Umm, nah, I don’t know if Josh likes horse racing. He likes music and drawing and stuff. It’s probably not his thing, I bet. Let’s just us go, ’K?”

  The whistle on the kettle squealed. “OK. It’ll probably be more fun anyway. Do you wanna bring …” He poured water into our cups and nodded his head toward my mum on the other side of the wall. I didn’t. Lately, I liked hanging around with George better, sort of. I mean, you could count on him to be there for sure and also not to have to go pee every five minutes and complain about his back, sitting up in the stands. That’s how it would be with Mum. And every time someone lost two bucks she’d start talking about money down the drain. I shrugged at first so I wouldn’t seem too mean, then made my shrug into a head shake and mouthed nahh.

  The next day after school, I went down to Josh’s place. When I started grade 4, I switched schools to the same one as Josh, General Wolfe, cuz Josh said there wasn’t so many tough kids at General Wolfe—and I was super-sick of tough kids. But we still never walked home from school together or stuff because Josh was in grade 5 and I hated those grade 5er boys he hung around with. They always made fun of me and Josh like we were boyfriend/girlfriend and all that junk, so I said forget-it to them. Sometimes I got home first, so I’d go hang around with Josh’s mum and wait for him. They were on welfare too, so she was home most of the time. She was there when I knocked on the door; Josh wasn’t. His mum was Sheryl. Their last name was Sugarman. I said her whole name whenever I could just for the fun of all that shhing. She brought me in and offered me a cup of tea.

  And then she said, “You just caught me, I was about to go to the supermarket.”

  “Oh. Should I go? I can come back later.”

  “Nah, sit, you’ve got tea coming. I’ll wait with you till Josh gets home.” She turned on the burner under the kettle and went to the fridge for milk. She made it the way Mum wanted me to drink it: half milk to give me more protein. “So, Miss Gracey, where’s your mum today?”

  “School maybe, or else she might’ve gone downtown to the AA club with George. I don’t know. Was Josh painting this morning?” There were tubes and brushes all over the place on the living-room floor. A big square of Josh’s art paper was taped on a foam board beside them, the top part all swirly with reds and oranges.

  “Yeah. I refuse to put his junk away for him, so I left it. He’s doing some autumn painting for his art teacher. He wants a girl in the middle of the woods with a horse—actually, I think he wants you to model for him. I guess because you like horses so much.” I was all flattered. Josh could d
raw and paint better than any grown-up I knew. I asked her who was going to be the horse. She laughed. “Actually, he was thinking that maybe when you and George go to the racetrack again, he could come and do some sketches of the horses and you together.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Can you look at these math things? George was trying to help me last night, I mostly needed help with the subtraction stuff, and then he got into this other dividing thing and I got all confused and then my mum started getting mad and then —oh, it was just dumb. Here—these ones here, I just want someone to explain this stuff about carrying the number. See how come you can just take a one from this one and suddenly it’s a ten or whatever?”

  Sheryl Sugarman went into a thing about digits and numerical values and decimals and then I started hearing them again. The voices. She didn’t know about them; I never told anyone. But they were yapping in my brain, in the background, kind of, so I couldn’t pay that good of attention to stuff. My teeth clenched. It helped, kind of, if I clenched. Josh came in around then and they were quiet. They kept quiet around Josh. He said, “Hey, what’re you doing here?”

  “I live here.”

  He tisked at Sheryl and rolled his eyes. “Not you.”

  “I came to see you and to ask your mum about these math things. I think I get it now.” I didn’t get anything. I just didn’t want to talk about it any more.

  “Well, I’m gonna go for a bike ride, some of my friends are meeting up at Riley Park to ride around. You wanna go? I’ll double you.”

  “Yeah, ’K.” I slapped my book shut and left it on the table. I could feel Sheryl Sugarman watching me. She told Josh she might not be there when he got back, so make sure he had his key.

  My head started getting more clear when we got onto Main Street. Josh was on his bike with his feet on the ground, stepping himself along with me walking beside him. “I’ll double you as soon as we get down on the side streets, there’s too many curbs and lights and stuff here.”