Children of the Day

by Sandra Birdsell

  He stood on the path leading down to the river, listening again for the call. He held his breath, and when the call didn’t come again he carried on, feeling that the air about him had become charged, and that static drew on the hair on his arms.

  THREE

  Emilie the opaque

  MILIE WATCHED as Manny and Simon latched on to Oliver’s hands, her older brothers slouching along on either side of him. Ida clomped on ahead of everyone in a pair of Sara’s shoes, the blue wedgies she’d dug out from a corner of the porch because her sandal strap had broken. The wedgies were Sara’s garden shoes, and although Ida had wiped them with a wet cloth before leaving the house, the shoes looked used up. Likely they pinched Ida’s toes, but the heels made her taller and so she felt older, or so Emilie judged from her sister’s self-important walk. When Ida thought no one was looking, she tilted her face to peer down the neck of her blouse, admiring her new freckled breasts. Barf city, disgusting, Emilie thought.

  Her family turned at the corner, their murmuring voices fading, while Emilie went towards the oldest residential street in Union Plains. Its grown-up trees formed a canopy of greenery that shaded the boy from Arizona as he straddled his bike in front of his grandmother’s prim-looking house. Emilie hurried towards him, the day expanding like a book opening flat against a table.

  He waved and dismounted, the tree branches reflecting in his eyeglasses; the wedge of sand-coloured hair lay against his forehead like a hand. A robin called out, its cheery sound suiting the June sky. The coronation coin was a spot of heat moving against her thigh, and she thought to tell him that the Queen of England had sent it to her in the mail, but she knew he wasn’t just any kid she could tease.

  Charlie was wearing a white T-shirt and jeans that looked to be new, and an expansion bracelet engraved with his initials. Something I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing, Sonny Boy had scoffed, when Emilie described it. The veranda curtains were drawn, as they always were, inviting the suspicion that Charlie’s grandmother spent most of her day spying on people. She turned the lights off on Halloween, too, as though the town kids didn’t already know to avoid her house. The clipped look of the yard and the lack of flower beds suggested stinginess. Sonny Boy said the woman was so tight, her ass squeaked when she walked.

  Look, the Queen of England sent this in the mail, Emilie said, despite herself. The coin was light in her palm, unlike a silver dollar.

  The Queen of England must have sent one to everyone then, because I’ve seen other kids with the same thing, Charlie said.

  The veranda door of the grandmother’s house opened, and Charlie’s older brother came down the stairs, a tall, ginger-haired young man who walked like a cat, and whom Emilie had seen only fleetingly, when he drove past her house in the car.

  So, where do you guys think you’re going? he called.

  What’s it to you? Charlie replied, and Emilie was surprised at the unpleasant tone of his voice. The brother wore grey-blue trousers flamboyantly wide at the knees, and a silver belt that looked like crinkled metal. He circled Emilie and Charlie as they stood on the street, the bicycle between them. Emilie felt shabby, her red checkered pedal-pushers worn at the knees; the tails of The Other One’s cast-off shirt were so long shed knotted them to hang like moth-eaten rabbit ears from her waist.

  The brother said to Charlie, So, how old is your girlfriend, anyway?

  None of your business, Ross, Charlie answered.

  Ross glanced back at the veranda before speaking. I was just wondering, see. Dad’s going to let me have the car for the day. We could drive to Winnipeg. Maybe Emilie here would like to show us around?

  Emilie felt Ross’s eyes pass across her body, glance away and then back again, and resisted the urge to cross her arms in front of her chest. She didn’t want to admit that she didn’t know Winnipeg, except for the several blocks on Portage Avenue between Eaton’s and Hudson Bay department stores. She might also be able to find her way to the zoo, but that was it. I’ll have to go to the hotel and ask my dad, she told Ross, confident that permission would not be granted.

  Ross can go sightseeing on his own, Charlie objected, and Emilie said, It’s okay. There’s nothing but art and phys ed at school today, anyway.

  Charlie gave Emilie a ride downtown, his shoulder blades see-sawing with effort beneath his white T-shirt. Who are you? he’d wanted to know days earlier, when he appeared out of nowhere, coming up behind her on his bicycle. He hadn’t asked, Which one are you? Or stated matter-of-factly, You’reone of the Vandals, as though there were nothing more to be said or learned. She was Emilie, she told him. He introduced himself as Charlie, from Arizona. He’d driven up with his parents and brother to help their grandmother pack up her house and move to an apartment in Winnipeg.

  He dismounted from his bicycle to walk beside her that first day, and when she spoke, he crooked his head to look into her face. His arms were downy with sun-bleached hair and his skin deeply tanned for early spring. No, she hadn’t heard of Arizona, she replied to his next question, although of course she had. She was rewarded by a flare of pleasure in his face as he went on to recite the various statistics about Arizona, ending by saying that when he returned to Phoenix, he’d send her a horned toad in the mail to prove they existed.

  Charlie had since talked about guided intercontinental ballistic missiles whose trajectories would one day carry them beyond the atmosphere and back to earth, where they’d obliterate an entire city in Soviet Russia. Push of a button, he said. Emilie didn’t mention that Russia was the country of her mother’s birth. Aunt Katy received letters from relatives and friends still living there, and brought them with her when she came on a visit. Letters crying out with requests for prayer, for clothing, for rescue. Katy replied to those letters, although she said she had nightmares of being kidnapped and spirited out of Canada. Of being sent into forced labour in a Siberian gulag.

  That’s what happens to people over there who believe in God, Aunt Katy declared. Which Emilie thought was stupid—they should just say they didn’t believe, and everything would be copacetic. That doesn’t mean God stops believing in them, she said, voicing her opinion in Sara’s presence and being reminded swiftly to watch her mouth, as there was such a thing as an unpardonable sin. The entreaties Aunt Katy translated from the soft grey paper hung around like weary ghosts, and often sent Emilie to a field beside the schoolyard, a large open space where she could practise running. She wondered what could be more unpardonable than a cleverly concealed gopher hole, the possibility of breaking an ankle.

  What she appreciated the most about Charlie was that he ignored the fact that theback of her hand was never without a bandage of some sort, and she didn’t need to explain that there was a colony of warts underneath it. He didn’t seem to notice that she was female, either, and that left her free to take him in. To grow to love the flashes of pleasure in his caramel eyes, the wetness of his small mouth, the light beaming in his face when she told him something he didn’t already know.

  They rode past two girls who were going to school, one of them being June, Emilie’s best friend. See you later, Emilie called, and was rewarded by June’s eyes going large. Since Charlie had come to town, Emilie hadn’t gone to June’s house after school to hang out in the lean-to they’d built by nailing boards to a fence.

  The sign on the hotel vestibule door was turned to OPEN, and the poolroom blinds were drawn wide to let in the morning sun. Emilie went up the steps, imagining herself returning to Charlie moments later with an appropriate hangdog expression and saying, My dad said I can’t miss school. She went into the poolroom calling for Oliver, and heard the sound of coughing coming from the parlour.

  She entered the dingy, ill-lit room and found Cecil, the youngest of the three elderly boarders, the decrepits, Emilie called them, seated at a table. Cecil had the gout, Oliver said, which meant that his bunions were painful and he swore a lot. His red hair was going grey, and pouches of pebbly skin hung under his eyes. He hacked phl
egm into an already stiff handkerchief, his rheumy eyes peering at her.

  Where’s that Christly daddy of yours? Cecil asked. I thought I heard him putting on the coffee, but when I came down, damned if he wasn’t here. My pump needs priming.

  Sometimes, when Emilie came looking for Oliver, Cecil or one of the other decrepits would tell her that Oliver had gone to see a man about a dog. He’s gone to see ABC the Goldfish, they sometimes said, a joke they had between them, which she took to mean that Oliver had stepped out on business. Or he was on the toilet reading the newspaper. But now, of course, she knew what it really meant. She knew ABC the Goldfish stood for the French lady in Aubigny, Alice Bouchard.

  Emilie wasn’t aware that sometimes, if her father saw her coming, he’d step into the broom-closet office and hold his breath while she rapped on its door. Or that he stood listening at the back door as the old gentlemen put Emilie off the track.

  Oliver stayed out of sight because Emilie always wanted something, and Oliver found it hard to say no to her. She wanted money for Band-Aids to plaster over her warts, or she’d been sent on someone else’s behalf. Alvina needed a box of cornflakes, which was how Alvina instructed Emilie to ask for money to buy the monthly box of Kotex. Now Ida needed a monthly box of cornflakes too. Emilie’s sisters sent her to ask for money to purchase socks, school supplies, a mother-of-pearl compact Ida had seen in the grocery store window. The boys sent Emilie to beg for advances on their allowance. Sara sent Emilie when her grocery money ran out and there was no meat in the refrigerator for their supper meal. She sent Emilie with the kids’ shoes when they wore through at the soles, and Oliver would be required to walk to the highway and flag down a southbound bus and have the driver drop the shoes at the depot in Alexander Morris, where Otto, the shoemaker, would retrieve them.

  Or perhaps the sharp-boned and see-through Emilie came to lodge a complaint, rattling and loose like a half-full sack of marbles, her eyes glittering and casting about for something in the room to fix her attention on while she delivered it. The buffalo staring into the past, its beard hoary with dust and worn from being tugged and patted. Yes, that. The multiple reflections of Oliver in the gilded mirrors on opposite walls, head and shoulders turning towards her and at the same time turning away.

  She might be coming to complain that Sara had smacked her across the face, pinched her arms, switched her legs with a belt. Sara had been known to turn on her suddenly, her arms swinging about Emilie’s head. The thing is, Dad, Emilie said, winding up her complaints with a question that the constriction in her throat made difficult to pose. The thing is, the thing is, Dad, why doesn’t Mom like me? Of course your mother likes you, Oliver would tell her, knowing that the words were as satisfying as a warm beer on a hot Saturday afternoon. Most of the time it was better to hide when he saw Emilie coming, as there was nothing in his experience that he could draw on to ease her hurt. Sara could not abide this girl, and for the life of him, Oliver didn’t understand why.

  Emilie and Charlie left the hotel and went rattling through the streets of town in search of Oliver. Now, as they rode down the access road towards the highway, she saw him. She watched her father glide effortlessly along the river path, as though drawn by a magnet. His shoulders were equal to the height of the treetops, a fringe of greening bur oak, poplar and the Manitoba maples that marked the river’s presence below the path.

  There’s my dad, Emilie shouted into Charlie’s neck, not understanding her reluctance to call out to Oliver while he was still within earshot. Charlie swerved to avoid a pothole and they stopped, but she kept her arms about his ribs. He smelled like a dog, the odour a pleasant twist in her nostrils that made her want to sneeze.

  I’ve seen that guy before. That’s your dad? Charlie asked, in an incredulous tone of voice.

  What was he implying? Did he think Oliver should be taller or shorter? Was that admiration she detected in Charlie’s voice? She decided that he was amazed they were so dissimilar in appearance, not knowing that Charlie’s grandmother had pointed Oliver out to him one day. You see that man? He’s a half-breed, she’d said, the word dripping with the implication that Oliver was a mongrel.

  If Emilie had called out to Oliver then, he might have put his hands at his hips and watched for approaching vehicles while she and Charlie crossed over the highway. He would have been peeved that she’d tracked him down, but only mildly. He would have sent Charlie packing and marched Emilie back to school, and himself to the hotel. In doing so, Oliver might have stopped the onward flow of that bright onward-flowing day, which wound up with Emilie finally learning what people were saying about them.

  Oliver was nearing the place where the path forked, one narrow trail leading through the trees while the other continued on south along Stage Coach Road, as far as a person was inclined to walk. To Alexander Morris, to St. Jean Baptiste and Pembina, as far as Kansas City and the Gulf of Mexico. Moments later Oliver turned towards the trees and the river, his back to them now, only his shoulders visible as the trail descended. And then he was out of sight.

  Emilie said to Charlie, My mother’s sick and so I can’t ask her, either. His heart beat against her palm; she imagined that she felt him fizzing, that he was effervescent with the ideas and information he’d gained from reading, and from the discussions he carried on with his scientist father. Emilie hadn’t met anyone like Charlie, someone so intensely pleased just to be breathing, so pleased with himself.

  Should I take you to school? Charlie asked. He jabbed the bridge of his brown-rimmed glasses with a finger, the movement releasing another wave of wet-dog odour.

  The school bell began to ring, a brittle clang that echoed.

  I’ll walk to school, Emilie said, and watched as Charlie rode away. He stood on the pedals and leaned over the handlebars, raising a smoke of dust that lingered along the road. And that was the last she ever saw of Charlie, that smoke, a silence settling between them.

  Florence Dressler had once remarked to Sara that Emilie reminded her of a flower that had been pressed between the pages of a book. The girl’s washed-out blue eyes and pale skin, hair so blonde that it was near to being silver, were like the flower’s petals when they became opaque enough to read through.

  There was no reason to suspect that Emilie’s extreme thinness was caused by anything more than a cranked-up metabolism. The flick of a finger against an arm was enough to raise a bruise. Emilie read the story of the princess and the pea, and thought she might be a descendant of royalty, Russian perhaps. Then a teacher drew her attention to the tale of the ugly duckling and Emilie perceived that, if the teacher thought she was in need of encouragement, there must be something wrong with her. And indeed, not long afterwards, the first wart appeared on her hand.

  It’s like she’s Swedish, her uncle Romeo said, when his wife, Claudette, suggested Emilie’s paleness might be caused by anemia. They’d come for a weekend visit without their five children, their oldest being twin sons older than Alvina who were employed at the meat-packing house and able to hold down the fort. Throughout their weekend visit Romeo referred to Emilie as Sonja, but the nickname refused to stick.

  That Emilie, she’s too slapdash. She’s mouthy, too careless, Sara complained in Romeo’s presence. It’s no wonder people don’t like the girl, Sara said, as though this were a proven fact, as though people had drawn up a list of Emilie’s deficiencies and presented the results to her mother.

  I like that girl fine, Romeo said. When Sara left the room, he winked and gave Emilie two bits. Then he raised a mug of beer in a mock salute and drained it.

  Romeo was responsible for Sonny Boy being called Sonny Boy and not Norbert, Oliver’s father’s name, which Sara had bestowed on her first-born son out of a sense of obligation. Beer talk, Sara said, when Romeo became expansive and gregarious, caught the children on the run and swung them to his shoulders. Yes, yes. He’s a barrel of fun, Sara said. It’s the drink. It’s the beer talking. But she was secretly pleased and beholden to Romeo
for the name Sonny Boy. He had been the most beautiful of all her babies. His presence in her sphere was perpetual sunshine. That Romeo recognized this tempered Sara’s judgment of him, and she quietly endured his and Claudette’s periodic weekend visits.

  Romeo was also responsible for George being known as The Other One. It was simply a forgetfulness on his part but the name had taken. As a small boy, George had crawled into a culvert to avoid speaking to an adult approaching in the street. He hated having to answer lame questions, he said. By calling George The Other One, his uncle had afforded him a degree of anonymity, and if he ever objected he never made it known.

  On another visit, Romeo called Emilie Angelique, but that name didn’t stick either. The wan and see-through Emilie was as near to being angelic and ethereal as a wood tick. She vibrated with an energy that threatened to mow people down. But as she watched Charlie going away down the road, a lethargy set in that made her limbs feel stretched and useless.

  A stillness hovered above the town and she knew that its streets were empty. She was already late for school, and would find herself on the periphery of activity and instruction for the remainder of the day. Even her best friend, June of the perfume breath, would ignore her for a time.

  She told herself there was no point in hurrying. She could have taken the fire escape and entered the school from the emptied second floor, and claimed that she’d been present all along but hadn’t heard the bell. But to do that she’d have to get past Alvina, parked in a classroom, seated at the typewriter, the words-per-minute speed pins she’d already earned lined up across her cardigan breast.