The Gravesavers (3 page)

And her shoes. Carolina that new girl who moved in next door had black patent-leather shoes with bows in the middle and never, not even for special, was I allowed shoes like that. On account of my flat feet. Instead, I had to wear brown lace-up lock-your-feet-in shoes—Oxfords is what they were called. Ugly is what they were.

“So go on over there after breakfast, just go over there, dear, and make friends,” said my mother. Just like that.

The houses on our street are exactly the same, like shoeboxes made of brick. The veranda railings almost touch, so I didn’t have to go next door to meet her. I just plunked myself down on our back steps and started peeling the paint, getting warm yellow slivers underneath my nails, sticky as gum. Carolina was sitting on her back steps playing with dolls. We were almost in spitting distance of each other.

“Take a picture why don’t you?” she yelled and stuck out her tongue. I was just about to go back inside when her back door wheezed open. A boy, her brother I supposed it was, came out and thumped her a good one on the head. She ran after him, tackled him like a pro wrestler, jumped up and down on him
and threw him around like he was some old sack of potatoes. Then an upstairs window scritched open and a voice sharp as thistles cut through everything.

“You two hooligans stop that this minute! I leave you alone for two minutes and look what happens! Git in here, I said
git
in here, this minute!”

Carolina looked over at me. “I said take a picture, fart face,” she said. Then stuck out her tongue.

I skedaddled into our house to tell my mother what happened, especially about the swearing I heard. The f-word.

My mother acted as if it was no big deal. In fact, I am sure I caught her trying to smother a laugh. Later that afternoon we baked chocolate chip cookies and invited the Jenkinses over for tea. Carolina was putting on her best manners for my mother.

“Thank you, Mrs. Hotchkiss,” she said, and then when my mother’s back was turned she made a face at me. I made one back—my best face, the one where I can cross my eyes and stick my tongue almost to the tip of my nose. She liked it, I guess, because she laughed. I told her I liked her shoes. “Wanna try them on?” she asked. That was all it took. Friends forever!

Our mother’s never did become too chummy. I guess they had too many differences. For example, my mother wears a terrycloth housecoat with bacon
grease always spattered on the collar and Carolina’s mother wears a pink see-through thingy that reminds me of cotton candy. My mother’s a scruba-holic. Carolina’s mother lets her keep rabbits in the living room. She never mentions the rabbit turds scattered like raisins over their carpet.

After I complained to Carolina about being shipped off to Boulder Basin, she stood in my bedroom, with her hands on her hips. She takes being three months older than me very seriously.

“So then, here’s what you’re going to do. One: you’re going to go practise running so you can come back here and be track star extraordinaire in the August meet. Two: you are going to do detective work. Find out if Hardly Whynot really does have a summer home in Boulder Basin and is living incognito. That means in disguise. You can get his autograph and cheer up your depressing—I mean depressed mother. Three: you can write me letters. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll miss you loads, but you’re going to be fine just fine.”

“But you don’t know my grandmother!”

She squeezed my hand. “Maybe you don’t either,” she said.

“What’s with you?” I snarled.

“I can’t believe she’s as witchy as you say.”

“She is! A sour old Vinegar Witch.”

“Least you have a grandmother—I don’t. Maybe I could come down for a visit. In the meantime,” she giggled, “I’ll try to keep the other girls away from Gavin.”

She poked me in the ribs and started chanting, “Gavin and Minn, up in a tree …” Made me furious.

Gavin is not important to my story. Gavin Williamson was a long-distance runner. I was a sprinter. We trained together all spring. When he smiled his teeth were as polished as Chiclets. His skin was the colour of coffee with double cream. He smelled like herbal shampoo. When I told him I was leaving for most of the summer all he said was, “Bummer.”

“It’s a sign,” said Carolina, “that the feeling between you two is mutual.”

“I couldn’t care less,” I said.

“That’s a double negative and a lie as big as Australia,” she replied.

“I have other more important things to think about,” I said to her.

She giggled. “What’s more important than l-u-v?”

My father says that Carolina is boy crazy. He hopes I’ll always be able to keep my head on straight when it comes to boys. I’m embarrassed for him whenever he tries to talk about stuff like that. It’s as if it’s a foreign language or something. He stutters and
stammers and can’t quite put a sentence together. Still, I have to admit, he was better than my mother, who still wasn’t even trying to talk to me at that time, in any language.

My mother wasn’t the only one with problems. I noticed that the world was suddenly filled with sisters. There they were, holding hands in line at the supermarket, dressed in matching outfits. There they were, shopping in the mall. Hand in hand, sisters walked to school together. I saw them on TV brushing each other’s hair and trading beauty secrets. In one show, two sisters had a huge fight over some boy but hugged and made up in the end.

Sisters ate from the same box of large fries at McDonald’s. They cheered for each other at basketball games. Sisters were maids of honour at weddings and fairy godmother aunts. Sisters were also Catholic nuns.

The word
sister
echoed in other words: transistor, persister, resister. It rhymed with mister and blister and twister. And that’s how I felt. As if I’d been burned and blistered. Everything was twisted upside down and backwards. We were supposed to
have had a birth in our family. Instead we had death. My parents were ghosts of the people they used to be.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. That’s all my mother did. Dust her china cabinet and play sucky songs by Hardly Whynot. Hardly? Hardly my mother. And there I was, doing my homework and the laundry and the dishes. Night after night. All this after trying to swallow Corporal Ray’s nightly concoctions. His so-called suppers were more disastrous than mine.

“It tastes worse than dog food,” I told Carolina.

“Yuck.” She didn’t ask how would you know unless you’ve eaten dog food—like a normal person might. That’s because we tried some once when we were seven. “Really yuck,” she repeated.

I love it when someone understands.

That’s the best, the shortest and the only poem I ever wrote. It summed up how I felt exactly.

“Good use of graphic detail and evocative use of simile,” wrote Miss Armstrong-Blanchett on my final test. Although her name is half French she was my English teacher. In winter, she wore a calf-length navy blue skirt with different coloured turtlenecks that matched her tights. Every spring she blossomed into a flower. She wore gauzy dresses that flowed to her ankles. She didn’t walk, she glided across the room like a ballerina, saying things like
that was a cliché, I know you can be more original, think deeper. Her
hair was super short and never the same colour more than a month. Her earrings were miniature mobiles.

When Miss Armstrong-Blanchett talked, words danced from her lips. Ono-mat-o-pee-a. Sir Charles
G.D.
Roberts. I think she knew we all said the G.D. stood for God dam because it was a bonus question on the exam. I wrote in George Douglas and got my A plus.

Miss Armstrong-Blanchett called me in to her class just before school was out and asked me if there was anything I needed to talk about.

“No, but thanks for asking,” I said. I squirmed. She had a stare that could burn right through to the inside of me.

“I was intrigued by the metaphors on your exam,” she continued. Just as I thought. She liked the throwing up one, so I knew which one she meant. “‘My mother is a bleached-out dishrag full of holes’? I wouldn’t read too much into it.”

“So your mother’s okay?”

I was very close to saying no, she’s not, in fact she’s gone missing and doesn’t seem to know or care I am alive. But I just looked at the floor. It was stifling hot in the room. Someone down the hall started pounding on the piano.

“And the other one. The extended metaphor?” she said finally.

I frowned as if I couldn’t recall it.

“‘The heart has four chambers: isolation chamber, torture chamber, chamber of horrors and chamber of ghosts.’” She had it memorized?

“I was under pressure,” I said. “I just wrote the first thing that popped into my head.”

“I know. That’s why we’re talking.”

“I’ve got what my folks call an overactive imagination.”

“Overactive? I don’t know about that. Compared to whom? Maybe it’s just
your
imagination. A poetic imagination.”

I think it was supposed to be a compliment but I wasn’t sure. Especially when she said what she did next.

“When you were little, did you ever have an imaginary friend?”

I gawked at her. “No!” I tried to sound insulted. It was also a big lie. I had Orangey. Orangey was a teeny-tiny elephant who went everywhere with me. Orangey listened when I talked and often talked while I listened. Of course I’d outgrown Orangey. Years ago.

“Too bad,” she went on. “I did. I had a fairy named Flower.”

How cliché, I know you can be more original, I wanted to say. Instead, I smiled at her as if she were a silly child. I so did not want to know the secret fantasy life of my English teacher.

She handed me a blue spiral book with a happy-faced moon on it.

“It’s not more homework.” She smiled. A rare occurrence. “It’s the best kind of book for someone like
you. It’s filled with blank pages. You can always talk to the page.” I didn’t know what to say. Thanks, Miss Armstrong-Blanchett, I’ll miss your lime-green outfit the most? And what did she mean,
someone like me?

“I appreciate this,” I said as I got up to leave. “Have a good summer,” I added over my shoulder.

Truth is, Miss Armstrong-Blanchett read me like … well, yes, like an open book. The thoughts of toodling off to Boulder Basin to spend the summer with my grandmother did make me almost sick to my stomach.

My father’s mother is a bow-legged stubborn witch with chin hairs that sprout from a mole the colour and shape of a kidney bean. That’s for starters. Our problematic history goes back a long way.

First off, my father’s father, Emerson Hotchkiss, died long before I was born, and the witch remarried a man by the name of Hennigar. He died before I was born too, but she had taken his name. I could never say Hennigar, so I called her Nana Vinegar. That never pleased her, as you can imagine. But it fit her perfectly, she was such a sour old thing.

Things really came to a head between us during what I call the Night of the Jellied Tongue. I was eight. My grandmother cooked tongue of beef and made me eat it. That’s right,
tongue
of beef. There it was, one big pink tongue on a platter in the middle of
the dining-room table. Now, if you have ever seen tongue of beef, you would know that you could see the ridges and furrows and little spongy thingamajig-gies just like when you look at your own tongue in the mirror. It’s disgusting. I pictured some cow, one who could no longer moo, who could no longer chew its cud, wandering around the pasture, tongueless. I was ready for the tongue to spring from the table and go looking for its owner.

“I won’t eat that!” I screamed, surprising myself at how loud and screechy my voice was, like someone playing bad violin.

“Now, Minn, dear, your nana’s gone to a lot of trouble,” my mother said, smiling through clenched teeth at the witch. Then she hissed to me under her breath, like some ventriloquist not even moving her lips. “Puhleeze, Minn,
not
the very first night?”

My grandmother gave me one of her ferocious shaggy-eyebrowed frowns. So I tried. Really, I tried.

I put that tongue on my tongue.

I chewed.

I spit it out into my napkin.

Worse than looking at tongue of beef is looking at half-chewed tongue of beef.

My grandmother sent me to bed without supper.

This is really the reason I did what I did the next day, which is really the reason I knew from that day
onwards that my grandmother no longer loved me, if she ever had at all.

In the evening, when I was sure all the relatives were having their tea after supper, I took an old mop, braided the strands into pigtails and tied them with my red ribbons. Then I padded it with pillows, tied it with stockings and dressed it in my clothes. I climbed up the outside steps to the balcony at the back of the house. The balcony is directly above the dining room and the dining room has a picture window overlooking the sea. Looking out at the sunset, after supper with tea, is an evening ritual.

So when I knew they’d all be gazing out the window oohing and aahing and saying one more time how the colour was like the inside of a cantaloupe or they’d never seen a sky so purple, I threw the mop over the balcony and screamed an impressively believable bloodcurdling scream.

They saw what looked like my body whiz by to her death on the rocks below. I watched from the balcony as they rushed outside and ran to the rocks. I was lying on my bed reading my grandmother’s Bible when Corporal Ray burst in.

“You could have given your grandmother a heart attack!” my father said to me, and more than his voice was shaking. He pulled me off the bed.

“You are coming down to apologize right now.” He steered me by my collar all the way to the dining room.

“Look what you did to your poor mother!”

Someone was putting a cloth on my mother’s forehead and giving her whisky.

All my grandmother said to me that night, her face so close to mine I could have bitten off those three chin hairs, was this: “I have never ever known a child to harbour such hatred in her heart.” This was much worse than “Pugwash!” One of her favourites when she was displeased.