Leaning, Leaning Over Water (10 page)

“The Whiffenpoof” was so complicated I could only bang out the top notes of the right hand. Father stood behind, filling in with “Baas” when I couldn’t go on. “The Midnight Fire Alarm” had no words, so with this we had to take our
chances. Father stomped his feet in marching order behind my back.
“Keep up the beat!”
He clapped his hands and drummed on the mahogany and it took two weekends to get past the first twelve bars. After one of our Saturday afternoon sessions, Eddie said, as if he were trying to spare me, “Your playing stinks, you know.” But he said it with pity because he and I knew that in our family we never gave up.

We had been checking the progress of the new school all summer and twice Lyd and I had walked the mile and a half to watch its angles and contours take shape. It was in a kind of no man’s land between village and country, hunkered in the middle of a long field. We would still have to take the orange bus, but now every Protestant child for miles around—village and country—would be brought to this place. We would study here until grade eight. After that, we would be transferred to the high school, in Hull.

Lyd and I were worried. Living beside the river as we did, we rarely saw our classmates during the summer. When it was time to go back to school we did not want anyone feeling sorry for us.

Workmen at the site warned us to stay away from the earth pit of the gym and auditorium, so we peered in along the front of the school through taped windows, and guessed which rooms would be ours. We’d heard that the grade eights would not have to share space and Lyd was certain that she’d be in the first room down the hall from the office.

Eventually, an announcement arrived in the mail to say that teachers had been hired and classrooms were finished. Inside work on the gym would not be complete until November. The
date had been set in that month for an opening ceremony.

I continued to practise at my piano. On Saturdays, Father was behind me, hands pressing down on my shoulders. I was skipping from one folder to another now, relying less and less on any ability to read notes and more and more on my own ear. At night, in my sleep, Mother looked on from the doorway by the mirror, while I pumped the pedals and pounded the keys.

It had been weeks since Lyd and I had spoken of Mother, though words sometimes flew out of our mouths:

You’re supposed to soak that for ten minutes to get the dirt out.

How do you know?

Mom said.

You’re not supposed to drink tea before bed. It keeps you awake.

Who said?

Mom.

Then we walked away to separate parts of the house, each avoiding the other’s face because it looked like one’s own—stricken.

At the end of summer, everything speeded up. My birthday came and went and I invited Mimi for supper. After we’d eaten the cake, I went to the river and cried.

“Don’t worry,” Mimi said. “It isn’t true that if you cry on your birthday, you cry all year.” She added, soberly, “It was like this when my father died, I remember. Come to my place and we’ll laugh,” she said. “You can practise French with Grand-mere. You can put your fingers around her little wrist.”

But I went back to my own house and stood in the closet, the blouses brushing my face in the dark.

In September we walked through the doors of our new school and I learned that I had not one but two new teachers, though the second was only temporary. My classroom teacher was Mr. Crawley—the first male teacher I’d ever met. He had a flabby face and a big behind and hair the colour of sand. He constantly took us by surprise because of his mood changes and I worried all the time I was in his class. He stalked us backwards between rows, his back to the blackboard, and tried to surprise us face to face. Very quickly, he earned the name Crawfish. What set me on edge was that no matter what I did to stay out of his way, he hovered around my desk. I would turn around and he’d be there; I’d step into the room and he’d be behind me, the hairs of a tiny moustache sprouting over his upper lip. I did not like looking at him because he had what Lyd and I called the sorrowful eye and he had picked me to fix it on.

My second teacher, but only on Friday afternoons, was Miss Tina. I never learned her last name. Miss Tina was as kind as Crawfish was unpredictable. At the beginning of the year, fourteen girls, aged twelve and thirteen, were rounded up and led to the unfinished gym through an outside door. Although the gym itself had not been completed, the stage at the end was ready for use. We walked across a row of planks and up a side flight of steps to reach its blond hardwood floor.

The reason the fourteen of us had been chosen was because, at the opening ceremony in November, we were to be part of the entertainment. We were told that we were going to learn a dance. To teach us, a real dance teacher had been found. The lessons were free. No one knew where Miss Tina
had come from but she told us it was her job to convince us that we could coordinate our limbs.

We could hear sawing noises above the ceiling at the far end of the gym. During that first lesson, fourteen of us leaned into the wall of bricks and stared. Miss Tina was the first adult woman we’d ever seen who had no breasts. Not only did she have no breasts, she wore no bra. What she did wear was a skimpy black leotard that accentuated the flat board of her chest.

Tap tap tap, shuffle shuffle.
Miss Tina darted, relaxed and let go. She called to us, “In out, in out, tap tap tap.” So busy were her lower limbs she did not seem to notice that she had no breasts.

To my astonishment, my own feet, after an hour of awkward tries, began to shuffle in time with the feet of the other girls. Miss Tina opened a portable record player on stage and set and reset a record she’d brought with her while she coaxed us step by step. We would not be required to buy tap shoes, she explained, because that would mean unnecessary expense for our parents. “What we’re learning are shuffle-taps,” she said. “We just keep time to the music and point our toes.”

The top-hat piece we were working on was “Pretty Baby.” I knew the song because Mother used to sing it, but it was one I’d never tried to play at home on my piano. By the end of the lesson, we’d begun to like Miss Tina. And she actually liked us, we could tell.

We walked back across the planks as slowly as we could so we wouldn’t have to return to our home rooms before taking the bus. Most of us in the dance group were in Crawfish’s sixseven class. Lyd would be waiting for me outside the door of her room, the grade eights. We tried to stay together to ward off the pitying glances thrown our way by our classmates. We
knew that tragedy had happened in our family but we wanted to be treated the same as everyone else. Mrs. Perry, who had the grade twos now in the new school, stopped me in the hall and, in front of everyone, hugged me close and said how sorry she was about my mother. In the lunchroom the same day, a grade eight girl named Gladys carried over half a sardine sandwich and put it on my lap. I had my own sandwich and hated the crunch of spines in sardines but I didn’t know what else to do but eat it.

The most surprising thing of all was that we were expected to carry on. Make our lunches at night, go to school the next morning. Come home, do our homework. Go to bed and back to school in the morning again. I could not, though I tried, remember the last time Mother had touched me—to put her hand to my cheek, or to stand me in front of her knees while she sat and brushed my hair.

At the end of the third lesson, Miss Tina told our little dance troupe that we were beginning to perform like real dancers. We were able to swish along in an even line and seemed to be getting the hang of it. While she was packing up, three of us went over to the old piano that had been moved in from Brick and hoisted up to the new stage. We had ten minutes till bus time and began to take turns showing each other chords. When it was my turn, I played from memory “The Pride of Kildare.” It was the song I sang to my mother silently when I believed she was standing by the mirror, and I knew the whole thing by heart.

Miss Tina, her body curved over the record player, straightened to listen. She asked me to play again and, on the spot,
decided to reduce our dance line to thirteen so that I could play accompaniment. She went to her dance bag and pulled out the sheet music for “Pretty Baby.”

“Take it home with you,” she said. “Just try it out and see what happens. “You have a lovely touch on the keyboard.”

I did not want attention drawn to myself but I could see that Miss Tina thought this an honour. My mind flashed to Dallas, Texas, and I panicked. Since school had started, I’d paid little attention to
Eighty Easy Lessons.
I explained to Miss Tina that I didn’t know how to read sheet music—not properly. First, I would have to learn the piece by ear. Even then, it would be pretty skimpy.

“Then take the record home, too,” she said. “See what you can do, and bring everything back to me next Friday.”

I wanted to push it all back at her but I didn’t know how. I began my descent from the stage and my shoe caught in a layer of cardboard that had been set down to protect the platform next to the stairs. I heard my voice shout, “Jesus Poêle,” and I landed on the planks below, unhurt. I grabbed the record and the sheet music from the floor and looked up to stare straight into Miss Tina’s absent chest. It was all I could do to keep from crying when she rushed down to help.

“Live music will add so much to the opening number,” she said. She smiled at me. It was very hard not to like Miss Tina.

Somehow, somewhere, after I’d been forced to announce my coming performance, Father found a blind man to tune my piano. None of us had ever met a blind man, though Father had, lots of times, he said. He went into a long drawn-out story about when he was nineteen and walking on the road
near the farm outside Darley. A man a hundred feet ahead of him was struck by a speeding car.

“The car came out of the night without warning,” Father said. “He never knew what hit him. The sonofabitch behind the wheel didn’t have the guts to stop. And the head—the poor bugger was decapitated—rolled right down the centre of the road.”

“Was the man blind?” I asked, wondering at the connection.

“How the hell should I know? When I got to the head, its eyes were wide open. They were looking right through me.”

So. My idea of what a blind person looked like was considerably distorted by the staring head rolling down the road.

Father usually took the bus to Hull Saturday mornings to order groceries that would be delivered the same afternoon. This day, he delayed the trip because the piano tuner was coming. Lyd and Eddie and I took up position on the front steps.

“When the blind man comes,” said Father, as if he’d thought this through carefully, “I’m asking you not to stare.” He looked weary and helpless, which surprised us and added weight to the blind man’s visit. “Can’t you go round to the backyard?” he said. But we would not be dislodged. Finally, he joined us on the steps, binoculars hanging from his neck.

A battered yellow convertible with the top down was sighted across the field. It was a sunny October day and the convertible turned at the river and approached along our dirt road. Eddie, awed by its arrival, was moved to stand on the grass.

There were two occupants: the blind man in a broad-shouldered three-piece suit, a bowler hat pressed to his forehead; and his wife, the driver. The blind man did not carry a white cane but looked jovial enough when his wife pushed him, with practised firm shoves, and got him stumbling up the steps and
through the front door. We scattered to both sides of the porch as Father waved his hands behind the blind man’s back and then we followed, hovering in the doorway between the dining room and living room.

Father spoke to the blind man and his wife as if they were hard of hearing but they nodded and smiled as if that were just fine. The blind man, a head taller than his wife, had a watch-chain that dipped across the front of his vest. Eddie and I looked at each other in disbelief: how did he tell time?

Inside the house the bowler hat came off and was placed on the back of the chesterfield. The blind man’s wife rolled up her sleeves and pushed her husband towards the piano. Before they got down to business he turned to the place each of us was standing and said in a low rumble, “Howarya.” He then proceeded, board by board, to take my piano apart. Even the lid to the keyboard lifted off, and at this, his wife cried out as if she couldn’t help herself, “Oh darling, if you could only see these ivories.” She was an experienced assistant, for she stayed and helped prop the boards and opened the black toolcase so he could get started on the inside work. Then she left him and went outside to sit with Father on the front steps so she could watch the view.

Lyd and Eddie and I made an excessively loud departure for the piano tuner’s benefit, and escaped through the back door. We looked at one another. The real blind man could not compete with the head rolling down the road, the eyes that for all time had penetrated Father. None of us had had a close look at his eyes. Lyd had expected him to be wearing dark glasses. Eddie thought the eyeballs were loose, rolling around and hitting the inside of his head.

“He’s probably fake,” I said. “He can probably see.”

“Then why would he let his wife push him around?” said Lyd, and we couldn’t answer that.

“Oh, for Cripes’ sake,” Lyd said, “he’s only blind.” She left and went around the side of the house, heading for the front. I decided to tiptoe back inside and when I reached the entrance to the living room I could see Lyd and Eddie staring in through the window.

I had paused in front of Duffy’s full-length mirror and now I stood watching the blind man’s fingers as they moved rapidly in and around pegs and hammers, fastening ribbonlike strips to wire hooks. Every few minutes his large hands came down heavily on the keys,
bang bang.

I stood like that for a long time. The longer I stood the more I was afraid to move because the blind man would hear me and think I’d been spying. My legs began to cramp. I could see Lyd through the window, beckoning me to come out, but I might as well have been frozen in Statue Tag. I stared at my own unhappy face, my pins-and-needles body, in the mirror. Just as I was about to bolt, two blind eyes rolled in my direction and the mouth said, “You can’t be comfortable all cramped like that.”