Small Beneath the Sky (10 page)

MOM WAS
loved at the pool. She was the only mother on our block who had a job, so at first I was embarrassed, but it didn't take long before I appreciated my “in” at one of the most popular hangouts in town. All the kids knew her name, and she knew theirs. She found them funny in their little bathing suits, and as they grew older, progressing from beginners' swimming lessons to juniors', intermediates' and seniors', she enjoyed watching their flirtations, including mine. The boys cannonballed the shrieking girls as we sat around the edge, pretending to read movie magazines instead of watching them.

When I was twelve, I started work at the pool myself. I checked baskets while Mom filled in as cashier or when the pool was madly busy and a person was needed to work each side. I loved the job, because it gave me money to splurge on clothes for school. I bought good things Mom couldn't afford, like a white cardigan with pearl buttons and a small bottle of Evening in Paris perfume from the Pioneer Co-op store that had replaced Cooper's at the end of Central Avenue. By the time I was fifteen, and a lifeguard, all the corners of the pool were as familiar to me as the nooks in our house. Once I got hired to paint the girls' dressing room before the pool's opening in the spring. The new paint made the dressing room look cleaner, but nothing could help the smell. Chlorine and pee, or chlorine and Pine-Sol: I didn't know which was worse. Though the floor was swept often, it was yucky to walk across, with its swamp-like puddles of stagnant water. In the toilet stalls, soggy bits of tissue stuck to the bottom of your feet, and everywhere you trod on trails of grit brought into the changing room on people's shoes.

Perhaps because of the tricks it played on the senses, the pool was a place that deceived you into thinking no one cared where you came from. Kids from both high schools—Beatty, the school I went to at the bottom of the hill, and Irwin, the one at the top—came together in its waters, tumbled and thrashed about, then lay on the concrete, bodies glistening with the baby oil mixed with iodine we'd slathered on our skin so we'd tan the deepest brown. The hierarchy depended on how well you could swim or dive and how good you looked in a bathing suit. There, I did okay. In grades 10 and 11, one of the first girls who dared to wear a braless Speedo, I strutted around the water's edge with a lifeguard's whistle around my neck, trying to look as if I could save the drowning. Only once was I called upon to prove my worth, and luckily he was a little kid, easy to pull out. Though I'd been taught how to come at a drowning person from behind and how to break a chokehold, I wasn't sure how successful I'd be with a grown man.

There was nothing beautiful about the pool itself: it was a fenced-in concrete rectangle surrounded by a wide concrete shore, with not a tree, not a blade of grass, not a picnic table in sight. But those summers at the swimming pool were bright with parity and promise. Rich or poor, you had to put your personal belongings in a mesh basket anyone could see into, tucking your hopefully clean underwear at the bottom. You had to walk across the slimy floor of the dressing room, smell its smell, spread out your towel on bare grey cement. You basked in the sun, despaired at the screams and splashes of the little kids, walked down the apron towards the soft-drink machine as if it were a fashion runway, standing tall, holding in your stomach, hoping your ribs would show. You looked at the other girls and wished for longer legs or bigger breasts or a belly that sank as if weighed down with a stone. No one who didn't know you could have guessed the kind of house you went to after you'd retrieved your basket, donned your street clothes and walked out the dressing room door to the street, your skin reeking of chlorine.

Some nights in August, when the sun set early and the pool had closed for the evening, I'd climb the tall wire fence, drop down on the other side, remove the clothes that hid my bathing suit and slip into the eerily calm water. It was a dangerous thing to do. I'd be fired as a lifeguard if I was caught, but nothing pleased me more. Light gone from the sky, the water gleaming like a new skin, I was born again, the only swimmer in the world. I was a body in the body of the water, nameless, perfectly in place, origin unknown. I glided in a breaststroke from one end of the pool to the other and back again, barely disturbing the surface. The city around me went about its nightly business; no one knew I was there. I was on another planet, one made of a silky, liquid darkness I somehow never feared. I knew its language of lapping and languid hush, and the water, without parting, took me in.

as good as
 
anyone

T
HE YEAR I
started grade 9, we moved out of our house on Fourth West because our landlady refused to fix the furnace. I wasn't happy to go. Though derelict and cold, our old place had its charms: its two storeys, its worn hardwood floors, the leaded-glass panes above the big window at the front, the oak sliding door that separated my parents' bedroom from the spacious front hall. Ever since my brother had left to play hockey—he'd been scouted by a coach for the Estevan Bruins—I'd had a bedroom of my own upstairs.

I didn't mind sharing the second floor with renters. The Andrews were gone by then, and a middle-aged couple named Mr. and Mrs. MacDonald occupied the other three rooms. They'd set up a hot plate, fridge, and chrome table and chairs in one bedroom, their bed and dresser in another, and a
TV
and couch in the third. Sometimes I'd check to see what they were having for supper, and if it sounded better than what my mother was cooking, I'd stay if they asked me to. The only thing I didn't like about my room was the mice I was sure I heard in the night, their paws pattering across the linoleum. Mom said there was no reason to worry: mice couldn't climb stairs. The sounds I heard must be in my head.

Our new house, half of a duplex, squatted on the corner of Herbert Street and Second Avenue East. The landlords, the Crawfords, lived across the street in a gracious two-storey painted white with green trim and shutters. He was an accountant at W.W. Smith Insurance, and ours was one of a number of rundown houses he and his wife owned and rented out. Shortly after we moved in, Mrs. Crawford invited my mother and me over for tea. She treated me like a grown-up, telling me in her thick German accent to call her Berta. Only the youngest of her three daughters joined us. The other two were at a friend's, Mrs. Crawford said, who lived on North Hill.

Everything in the room was so tidy and pretty. We each had a white napkin the size of a handkerchief, embroidered around the edge with a string of yellow daisies. While we sipped our tea and ate the ginger cookies Mrs. Crawford had made, her little girl climbed the oak frame of the living room archway with the skill and quickness of a monkey. I was impressed, but she and her sisters were too young for me to bother with.

I still had my own room, but in our new house it shared a wall with my parents' bedroom. At night, I could hear them fighting. The bathroom was below, in a dank, earth-walled cellar with low ceilings and a hanging bulb you turned on by pulling a string. A sheet of plywood that didn't reach the ceiling separated the toilet from the deep enamel tub. Alkali grew out of the cellar walls like a crystalline mould and broke through the cement on the floor that the scrap of linoleum didn't cover. Mom promised me, a fourteen-year-old sulky with the ugliness of it all, that we'd move to something better as soon as we could. Until then, I'd just have to put up with it. I snapped that I'd never invite a friend over—I'd die if anyone saw where we lived. “Tough luck,” she said, and went about her tasks.

By now, my mother had a winter job too, selling tickets at the Junior A Bronco hockey games. The rink was on the outskirts of town, a couple of miles from our house. She didn't have a driver's licence and couldn't rely on my dad to show up sober or on time, so she walked through the dark and cold to the evening games. Sometimes she'd get a ride home with a fellow worker; if not, she'd make the trek on foot back again. Her small bundled figure trudged through the snow, the icy wind whipping around her. Waiting for her to arrive, I imagined watching her from high above, the only moving thing in all that white.

She and I had set off on similar walks together when I was little. Once, after we'd waited an hour for Dad to pick us up from the Eagles' Christmas party, a brown bag of hard, striped candy clutched in my hand, we plodded down the snowy streets alone. The temperature had fallen to thirty below. Halfway home, because I was shivering, she undid the big buttons on her old muskrat coat and pulled me inside, the back of my head pressing into the rise of her belly, the satin lining slipping across my forehead and nose. What strange tracks we must have printed in the snow as I blindly shuffled my feet between hers.

Besides the few bottles of beer my father kept in the garage or by the basement potato bin, there was no booze in the house. Dad did his drinking at the Legion, though he hadn't been a soldier in any war; at the Eagles' Lounge on Sunday afternoons, and at the three downtown hotels. He'd get home from work, wash his face and hands and change into a shirt and tie, then leave for a few drinks before the bars closed between five and seven. He'd return to the house to eat supper, then head out again until last call. Twice in three years he lost his driver's licence, a penalty that meant one of his fellow workers had to pick him up in the morning and drop him off at the end of their shift. Both times the judge had allowed him dispensation to drive a backhoe in the oil fields. Otherwise, he would have lost his job.

All year through, my mother did three hours a week of day work for a lawyer who lived at the top of North Hill. Taking on that job was the smartest thing she'd ever done, she said, because it showed her how the other half lived. “Let me tell you, they're no better than we are.” Though she relied on her dollar-an-hour wages to buy our groceries, sometimes the lawyer's wife forgot to get money from her husband, and Mom would have to wait a week or two for her to settle up. As if to make up for this, the woman would send home clothes for me, things she'd grown tired of. Some of them were nice, more expensive than anything I owned, but they didn't suit me. I wore one of her dresses anyway, a mustard jersey shirtwaist with flat gold buttons down the front, paired with a short jacket with three-quarter-length sleeves. Though the colour wasn't flattering, I thought the outfit made me look classy.

There was one good feature of our new house—my high school was only two blocks away. That meant I could come home for lunch and wouldn't have to eat with the kids who lived south of the railroad tracks or came in from the country on buses. The school's lunchroom was nowhere you'd want to hang out, just a few rows of metal chairs in the cold, too brightly lit gymnasium.

On Friday nights, my girlfriends and boys our own age gathered at the new Country Club Café near the Lyric Theatre, where we'd order Cokes and chips with gravy. Some nights a boy would walk me home, and we'd kiss on the top step at my front door. I was too anxious to enjoy it, afraid my dad would drive up before I got inside. For a few months in grade 10, I went out with the son of a doctor. He'd already graduated from the other high school, Irwin, and was in university. His mother ran a clothing store, and he gave me a beautiful pink angora sweater for my birthday in May. It wasn't right for the season—it must have been at the bottom of the sale bin—but I couldn't wait to wear it to school in the fall. When I told Mom he'd invited me to his house for dinner, she was nervous for me. “Imagine,” she said, “my daughter going to a doctor's house. Remember, you're just as good as they are.” I was so uneasy at their table, trying to figure out the cutlery, that I dropped a boiled potato I was lifting from the bowl with a fork and it fell on the carpet and rolled. All of us ignored it.

High school wasn't about learning geo-trig or chemistry or Shakespeare's plays. It was about learning how to belong, how to fit in, a desperate and hopeless task. The most popular kids at Beatty weren't the smart ones but the athletes. Like my brother before me, I didn't want to be called a brain. I'd do enough cramming before tests to get good marks, but not stellar ones like Bonita Stark and Barbara Ashford, who never got asked out on a date.

Unlike my brother, I wasn't good at sports. Even if girls had played hockey, I wouldn't have been among the graceful, bladed furies streaking across the ice. I wasn't good enough for the basketball, volleyball, baseball or track teams, either. Yet I wanted to be part of something bound for glory. I wanted to go to practice and get drenched with sweat and pour water over my head to cool off. The only thing left was the cheerleading squad. Though I couldn't turn a cartwheel, I got chosen at the tryouts, maybe because the teacher advisor, Miss Bly, was also my science teacher. A few nights a week, I'd stay after school to feed the three caged gerbils and two rabbits in her classroom. Once I'd helped her lay out frogs and scalpels on the front counter for the grade 11 biology class. I couldn't wait to take that class myself and cut a frog open. Gutting the chickens on my grandparents' farm had made me hugely curious about the wonders you could find inside a body.

Dressed in a short top and flippy little skirt, I shook my pompoms with the other cheerleaders in the gym that smelled of green sawdust and sweat. We dyed our running shoes in my mother's canner to match our uniform's royal blue; she was the only mother who'd let us do that in her kitchen. Three Beach Party movies had recently played at the Lyric Theatre, with Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon crooning and rocking in the California sun. Our skin shone fish-belly pale by the time the basketball season began in the fall, but we wanted to be as brown as Annette. Our knees and elbows flashed orange from the Quick Tan we smeared on our skin.