Children of the Day

by Sandra Birdsell

  Where were you? Katy asked, seeing Oliver retreating, walking smartly despite the mud and ruts.

  That’s the man I told you about, Sara said. The man who’d nearly run her down. The man she was fond of.

  He loves me, she said. Katy’s face twisted in anguish. She pressed her hands to her rib cage and said, For shame, Sara. Our dear father!

  SEVEN

  Ruby and the water man

  T LOOKS LIKE Mom’s going to be late coming down this morning, Alvina said, and took Patsy Anne from Ruby’s arms and plunked her into the highchair. Then she cajoled the baby to quickly spoon her porridge down. Moments later Alvina lingered in the doorway, tugging at her bottom lip as she glanced at the kitchen ceiling. I just can’t miss school, she said.

  Mom’s sick, Ruby said, remembering to deliver Sara’s message.

  I know, but she won’t be sick for long. She’ll be down soon, and if she isn’t, you go and poke her. With that, Alvina headed off for school and her typing exam.

  In a way, Sara’s absence seemed a less tumultuous event than her presence would have been. The Vandals’ flat line of give-and-take became a pyramid when Sara joined them in the kitchen. A person singled out by their mother for praise or recrimination, or favourable or unfavourable comparison, threatened to knock over a glass of milk, threatened to send a dish crashing to the floor. Their pyramid toppled and they went off, all in their own direction, wary, too anxious to please and full of contradiction.

  Ruby struggled to drag the playpen through the back porch and outdoors. The sun’s heat released the scent of herbs hanging in bunches from the rafters, and a broth of chemical fumes emanating from tins of shoe polish and pesticides lining the windowsill. Roll, roll, roll your boat, gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a scream. She mistakenly sang Manny’s made-up words, as she was preoccupied with the momentous task of moving the cumbersome playpen, pulling it while Sharon, the toddler, pushed. She was consumed by her monumental responsibility, and relief that the bump on the side of her head had stopped throbbing.

  Music played from the radio in the kitchen, while Patsy Anne struck the tin tray of the highchair with a spoon. The porch windows vibrated as a heavy vehicle approached in the street, and Ruby felt the buzz in the lump behind her ear. She was too late, the water man had come before she’d had a chance to prepare. Before she was able to assemble the pen and put Patsy Anne inside it, leaving her with no one to watch but Sharon, who might wander too near the cistern’s open lid. The vehicle went past the house and beyond it. It wasn’t the water truck, Ruby realized with relief.

  The water man doesn’t have eyes in the back of his head, Ruby said to herself, aloud. She, Sharon and Patsy Anne had to steer clear of the cistern until it was shut and locked. Kids could drown in three inches of water. In a rain barrel. Once upon a time, water went down the wrong hole when a man drank from a dipper and he died of pneumonia, which was the same thing as drowning.

  Ruby resumed the task of easing the playpen through the clutter of winter and spring footwear in the centre of the porch. She paused to catch her breath, and pointed to a grass-cutting whip that someone had left lying to one side of the heap. She warned Sharon, Don’t, don’t. That blade is sharp, stay away. That’s something you never want to fool with, she said, repeating what had become a common household phrase.

  The wooden playpen was as wide as it was tall, and as tall as Ruby, but she managed to pull it past the piano parked beneath the porch windows, veneer cracked and flaking from the elements of summer and winter. Whoever had last played it had failed to push the bench back into place, and it was piled with jackets and sweaters, which slid to the floor when Ruby squeezed by.

  Oof, she grunted, to gain strength, kicking aside the clothing, and then, in one swift movement, she pulled the playpen over to the door and outside, leaving Sharon empty-handed and stumbling across the sill. The door snapped shut behind them, the key to the water cistern padlock rattling on its hook.

  The two small girls pushed the playpen through the uncut grass of the yard, finally reaching their destination, a young ash tree whose branches provided a slender fan of shade. Ruby began unfolding the playpen the way she’d seen others do it, struggling to hold one side upright while she reached to lift another, to fit a notched latch onto a bolt. She pounded at the latch with her fist, but the pain was too much to endure and so she gave up. She stood for a moment, panting with exertion and listening. Patsy Anne was no longer beating the spoon against the tray.

  She sent Sharon to fetch a rock from the back of the yard, while she returned to the house to investigate the lack of noise. But when she entered the kitchen, she paused on the doormat and wondered, why had she come? A hand seemed to press against the bump at the side of her head, a steady warm pressure that felt like a caress. Then, as quickly as it had descended, the hand lifted and the release of pressure made Ruby feel weightless. She felt that if she jumped, she’d float to the ceiling. The cherries on the wallpaper jiggled and steadied. The fruit plaques marched across the wall with their usual vigour.

  The kitchen brightened with the fullness of Patsy Anne’s grin. Bee Bee, she called, and Ruby remembered why she’d come. Patsy swivelled her hands in anticipation of being freed from the belt securing her to the highchair, just as all the Vandals squirmed and strained to be free of what held them down. Wanting to run before they could crawl, and winding up with bruises and chipped teeth and nightmares of wolves and bears.

  Just as Emilie had squirmed against the stricture of a tie binding her to a chair in the cellar. Bound and left in the dark so that she might contemplate, without being distracted, the reason for the energy that propelled her through the rooms of the house, leaping from one piece of furniture to another for an entire day, or why she had cut apart a pair of curtains to make a costume, or had been sent to the store to purchase puffed wheat cereal and had returned with a bag of marsh-mallow Easter eggs, or had filched slices of cold cuts from a parcel of meat so that, at mealtime, there wasn’t enough to go around. Emilie had learned how to breathe in abject darkness, to enjoy the sweetish musty odour of last year’s potatoes going to mush in the vegetable bin.

  Bee Bee, Patsy Anne called once again. Her face had been wiped clean of oatmeal smears, hair dampened and teased with a soft brush into a wave cresting the length of her head. Ruby pronounced her own name, loudly, so that Patsy Anne would realize she was trying to teach her something. Not Bee Bee. Say, Roobee. Patsy tried, the word coming out as Booby, and Ruby laughed. Then she assured the baby, Yah, yah, Ruby’s going to take you outside to play now.

  Ruby didn’t recognize that when she said, Yah, yah, she was mimicking her aunt Katy. Because Katy’s voice was soft, Ruby believed that her ja, ja expressed a desire to comfort. She was too young to interpret the nuances in her aunt’s voice. Ja, ja could be a chastisement, expressing a sadness that had the power to make a grown listener cringe with guilt. Ja, ja could be spoken with an undertow of anger. Uttered as a threat.

  Alvina had cleared away the breakfast dishes and put them into the sink before rushing off to her typing test. The countertop was free of toast crumbs and butter smears. But she hadn’t turned off the radio. Ruby silenced it, then listened for a creak in the ceiling that would mean that Sara was up and moving about. But there was no sound. Either she was sleeping or she had died, as people were sometimes known to do.

  The kitchen darkened suddenly, the water truck having arrived and going past the window, backing slowly along the driveway. Then the room lightened, the sun illuminating the plaster plaques, the lime-green tiles again reflecting the legs of chairs set around the table.

  When Ruby stepped outside with Patsy Anne, the truck was already backed up to the cistern. She went round it and saw the water man folded into the grass beside Sharon, fastening the last of the playpen’s sides into place. He got up slowly and stood looking down at Ruby, his length and angularity reminding her of a grasshopper. Or a woodcutter come to res
cue a gobbled-up grandmother. The creases and folds on either side of his face were like ropes of pull-taffy. He took off his cap and scratched at several strands of hair on his otherwise bald head.

  I’m Ruby, which was what Ruby usually told the water man, when he asked. And that one? He’d point and she’d say, Well, that one is Sharon. Same as the last time.

  Patsy Anne is the baby, she’d tell him, but without hope that he’d remember. She would recite, Alvina, Norbert (Sonny Boy), George (The Other One), Ida, Emilie, Simon, Manny, Ruby, Sharon, and the baby of the show—Patsy Anne! Diddle-diddle dumpling, my son John, went to school with his pants undone.

  But today the water man didn’t ask Ruby who she was. Today, just when she knew the total of their years, he didn’t ask. The total of the Vandal kids’ years amounted to ninety-seven. She’d figured it out before hoisting Patsy Anne out of the highchair. Then, when she looked at the clock, the clock said to her, Ruby, it’s 9:39. And she said, What? And looked about the room, because the voice was old, like her uncle Ulysse’s, and she expected he might have come into the house without her hearing. But of course he hadn’t. Then the clock said, It’s 9:40. Ulysse wasn’t in the living room or dining room, or in the pantry closet, where Sara kept the flour barrel, the floor polisher and a dough-kneading pan. When Ruby returned to the kitchen the clock didn’t speak, but just the same she knew that it was saying that the time was 9:42.

  Where’s your mother? Stevenson asked.

  Ruby shrugged. I don’t know, she said, because she knew there was no money in the sugar bowl.

  Here girl, he said, and reached for Patsy Anne, who whimpered with objection when he peeled her out of Ruby’s arms and put her into the playpen.

  Okay now, you kids stay clear, he said. He had to connect the hose and then put it down the hatch.

  The key’s where it usually is, Ruby told him.

  How come you know that, and you don’t know where your mother is? he asked, a soft smile playing at his mouth.

  He didn’t want an answer, she knew, as he went over to the cistern and began clearing away the clutter of roller skates.

  Ruby gave Patsy Anne a basket of clothes pegs, a bracelet of rubber sealer rings to play with, and led Sharon over to the sandbox adjacent to the house.

  Then she returned to the kitchen, the clock saying that it was now 9:55. She intended to fetch a book and a chair, which she would set beside the playpen. She intended to look at pictures and at the same time watch over Patsy Anne, see to it that she didn’t ingest a bug, or the ribbons on her sun bonnet, while Sharon played in the sandbox and sang a made-up tune. She sat down at the play table, her thick braids shifting across the smocking of her yellow dress. She felt the vibration of the refrigerator as it hummed, saw the hands move across the face of the clock, while outside in the yard the slender shade of the elm tree shortened, and the entire yard filled up with sun.

  EIGHT

  Alvina’s examinations

  HE TEACHER’S FOOTSTEPS receded as she went down the stairs, taking with her Alvina’s speed test, the addressed envelopes and correspondence she’d been required to type. Dear Sir, The price of steel has increased so much during the last six months, that we believe we ourselves shall soon be forced to increase the price of almost all of our products. Gentlemen, I am the owner of the house at 211 Ottawa Street, which is covered by fire insurance that you wrote last year.

  She had managed to stop quavering like a stray dog and had gathered speed as she went along, shutting out the distraction of an entire class in the room below chanting, Tiger! tiger! burning bright in the forests of the night, … What the hammer? what the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? Their droning pace was about thirty words per minute, which made Alvina want to scream and get it over with, as Sonny Boy had earlier suggested. She had barely begun to type, it seemed, when the bell dinged and Miss White called, Time.

  Now the room felt chilly and about as welcoming as an impending ice storm. The blackboards were worn to a sheen that reflected the cold light shining in the windows; above the boards, depressing and ghostly shapes paraded across the wall where pictures, graphs and maps had once been. So, what’s up with your sister Emilie this morning? Has she been kept home today? Miss White had hesitated before speaking, as though having second thoughts about inquiring.

  Search me, Alvina said, and shrugged, affecting a nonchalance that her pleated skirt and cardigan sweater denied. She preferred that people didn’t assume she was her sisters’ and brothers’ keeper. But of course they did, and of course she was. The teacher’s query was about to bring on stomach cramps.

  That Emilie! Alvina scrolled a sheet of paper into the Underwood and typed her sister’s name, prefixing it, as usual, with the word that. And then she notice a misspelled word, juztaposition, imprinted on the ribbon. She resisted the urge to scroll out a carbon loop of sentences and look for other errors. The Underwood had been threaded with a new typewriter ribbon and she didn’t wish to chance carbon smears on her fingers. A virgin ribbon for a virgin who, barring a kibosh, was about to embark on her virgin voyage as junior secretary for Monarch Industries, the General Hospital or one of several law firms currently advertising in the Winnipeg Tribune. Alvina didn’t know that, despite the distractions, juztaposition was the only error she’d made, and she’d just earned her one-hundred-words-per-minute speed pin.

  That Emilie, she thought. The words embodying all that Emilie was—a cause for both vexation and envy. During the war, Emilie had thrown Sara’s entire ration of clothes pegs down a hole in the privy, and she’d required special dispensation in order to purchase more. On a dare Emilie had come to school barefoot in minus-twenty-degree weather. Had wandered off at a Sunday school picnic at the Winnipeg Zoo and had been found half a day later at the bear pit, unaware that she was lost. But she hadn’t been absent from school before, without Alvina knowing why.

  Fart. Something, someone, would put the kibosh on her future. There was news of polio on the radio this morning. Stay out of the sun, away from public swimming pools. Hah. As if she’d ever get near a swimming pool. But still, think of her friend Edward, his leg withered to a stick by polio last summer, and he hadn’t been to a public pool. Holy. Think of one of the kids becoming feverish, a headache, stiff muscles. Poliomyelitis, infantile paralysis. How would she get her siblings to agree to play only in the shade this summer? She’d have to come up with something to keep them quietly occupied, so they wouldn’t get overheated and susceptible, and wind up with iron lungs.

  At recess Miss White would return and dictate the shorthand exam. Why not read while you wait? she’d suggested, and with a snort of laughter had indicated the magazines Alvina had wedged under the desk to give her a level surface. Miss White wasn’t much older than Alvina, her study of science at the University of Manitoba interrupted by a need to earn money. Like most teachers who passed through Alvina’s dreary life, she was on her way to something larger than teaching. The chemise dress she wore, and the flamingo-pink nail polish, made Alvina feel as fashionable as a chopping block.

  The Underwood belonged to the teacher, as did the magazine shims Alvina had borrowed from a stack of various periodicals on a shelf beneath a window, which Miss White had brought to school to be sorted and placed in classrooms to make up for the lack of a library. The young woman had also arranged for a classroom to be made available to Alvina three mornings a week, so that she might have relative peace and quiet to study English composition, literature and commercial by correspondence.

  Alvina’s too sensitive, her nerves are bad. No one’s going to hire her, Alvina had heard Sara say to Florence Dressler. Alvina had recognized the truth. If she wasn’t running for a bathroom, she was coming out of one. When her stomach wasn’t babbling, her head was. Babbling throughout the long and dark forests of the night: make the shitty beds, fold the shitty laundry, be sure they wash behind their shitty ears. Scrape the diapers. Don’t chew your nails. Please, please, don’t overflow your cornflakes. />
  Now she breathed, Please don’t let Emilie be throwing herself down the tubes. Emilie was a bee buzzing at a window to get inside a house and then frantically buzzing to get back outside. Alvina got up and went over to the window, thinking that perhaps Emilie had followed the creek to the monastery and was now returning, on the run, her socks harbouring a field day of wood ticks. She prayed to see that girl, her feet skimming across the ground as she came flying through Zinn’s field. Please God, just once, please, Alvina would like to feel her feet leave the ground in the way Emilie’s seemed to do.

  The stretch of land near the horizon was yellow with sunlight, and interrupted by bold strokes of trees concealing the presence of the monastery and its collection of buff stone buildings. From a distance the monastery brought to mind a holy city, but up close the air stank of pigs and cattle like any farm; blowflies buzzed over manure piles, the geese came hissing and running at her if they got a chance. Below the window, the west-facing schoolyard looked rainy-day dismal in the shadow of the building.

  The new grass in Zinn’s field, beyond the baseball diamond, was as yet unbent by a wind or flattened to a path where someone had come tramping through it. The grass sometimes grew thigh-tall, could conceal a person fallen to the ground. Tipped into a gopher hole, suffering from a burst vermiform appendix or an exploded bladder. Alvina knew from Oliver about a woman who’d been a fool to hold back her water out of embarrassment. She didn’t want to interrupt the square dance, to tell her partner, and so she died on the dance floor when her bladder couldn’t take the load. Never hold back, Oliver had instructed. This is something you shouldn’t fool around with. You got to pee, you go pee.