The Dancehall Years Read online

  When he’s hungry enough, he forces himself to go down to the docks to look for a job. Even manages to check the post office on the off chance their box might still be in service, but of course it’s not. Climbing over the decks of two gillnetters to reach a third, he sloshes around in muddy plankton and talks himself into being hired. Again and again the net gets spooled out; again and again it gets spooled in, slotted with so many sockeye the hold is filled to capacity in a few settings, and they have to wait for the packer to pick up the catch before they set the nets again. Those first days, he’s assigned to crawl around with a spiked stick stabbing fish that have slipped from reach. He learns how to lift the net between the uprights so it spreads evenly back over the roller. In the late afternoon, they rest for half an hour while the tide changes. At night he sleeps in a small shelf lined with carpet behind an electrical panel that smells of diesel and bilge and to him is luxury.

  The hard work on board leaves him so tired he sleeps long hours when he comes ashore. When he wakes up, he sits on the porch, reaching endlessly for where he belongs, the way a tongue searches for a missing tooth. The houses of White Rock slope up the eastern hill on the other side of the border, and low mountains far away on Vancouver Island band the sky. Occasional trains pass along a ridge below him. He writes to the National Japanese Canadian Citizens Association trying to find information about his parents but the return letter tells him they may have gone back to Japan after the war. Does he know which camp they were detained in. He doesn’t. Why hadn’t he paid more attention when his mother talked about her village in the old country; he can’t remember its name or he’d inquire there.

  He’s been in Blaine nearly a month and must be lonelier than he thought because, in the general store one day, he sees a woman on her way out the door who, from the back, reminds him of Lottie Fenn.

  He spends one of his days off walking up the streets in the small town, admiring the cupolas and turrets on the houses. Inside the front door of a gabled house on an oak-treed lot, he hears a light popping as if someone’s making popcorn. Then a voice. You want to step forward with the bat, Shima. Take a step forward dear, not back. I have to stop now.

  It’s Miss Fenn’s voice. He’d know it anywhere. A little girl with a ping-pong bat in her hand opens the door. This is the red side, she says holding it in front of her face. Turns it over. Green.

  She’s always looking for someone to play with, Lottie says softly as if she knows he feels he’s been sleepwalking from the time he rowed away from the island until now. How wonderful to see you, Takumi.

  You too. I made it, thanks to you, he says.

  Come in. What happened to you? How did you get here?

  Well, I rowed. And rowed. Ended up settling way up an inlet. Lucky for me the guys who made those early logging camps left a lot of gear behind. I’ll tell you about it one day, it’s a long story. Did you know our house was sold? The Killams bought it. The Killams bought it! Mr. Killam’s mother is living there.

  I didn’t know. I’ve been here a while. I’m so sorry.

  All the time Takumi’s talking, he keeps glancing at Shima. I’m fishing out of this town, Miss Fenn. It’s the closest place I can be to my own city these days.

  Lottie takes his face in her hands. I’m so glad to see you, Takumi. He sits on the edge of the sofa while Shima, Lottie says her name is, drops a ring of pick-up sticks straight from her fist. When she looks up, her smile is like his and Isabelle’s combined in the cracked looking glass in the cottage when they played circus mirrors. When Lottie asks Shima to go out and play, she climbs on the swing between the oaks, straightening her legs and bending them again.

  I had no idea, says Takumi. Did Isabelle comes here to have her? Is she all right? She was here, she was all alone? Where is she now?

  I’m not sure where she is. Takumi, it wasn’t like you think.

  Right. An unmarried mother with a Jap kid, he says bitterly. I don’t understand why our daughter is with you. He keeps looking out the window as if afraid she’ll disappear.

  The first time I came to Blaine to enquire about the mailbox, she says, they gave me the bum’s rush. It being war and no payment arriving, they’d closed the boxes. At Christmas it seemed such a misery I’d have nothing to report to you, I came back to try again. Had they saved the contents, I asked, stored them somewhere? Not the faintest idea where any of it was, they told me. And then later that day, of all people, I saw Ada Killam sitting in a coffee shop. You’re a sight for sore eyes, she said when I went in. I can’t tell anyone in the family. I don’t know what to do. It’s Isabelle. She’s at a home down here. She’s having a baby.

  And it’s due quite soon?

  How would you know that?

  I was the only one on the point last winter.

  No one can know this has happened to Isabelle, she’d said. The baby will have to be adopted.

  I’ll do what I can about adoption arrangements, Ada. I’ll be in touch. You take care of Isabelle.

  I’ll do that.

  So in the end, Lottie’d left her job, collected what she needed from her cottage at Bowen and returned to Blaine, where she began volunteering at the local hospital. Was there the morning after Shima was born and the nurses were calling the phone number that didn’t connect anywhere. Was there when the staff realized the baby had been abandoned. Was the one who offered to look after the little girl until her mother could be found.

  But it being war…, she says.

  And the baby being a Jap…, says Takumi.

  The paperwork didn’t get done. The authorities were prepared to look the other way if I was willing to provide foster care. To wait for you is what I didn’t say. Your mother once told me if she ever had a daughter, she’d call her Shima… I’ve felt that she’s too young to understand that her parents are…

  Dead, he says. Well, I’m not.

  I’m so glad.

  When he’s leaving, she stands at the door and takes his hand. You’ll give her a while to get used to you before you tell her you’re her father?

  Of course I will.

  Back in his room, he lies on his bed and stares at the ceiling. Maybe you go on paying for your chance at love for the rest of your life. But here, when he thought nothing would ever belong to him, is this precious child.

  The next day, he finds a warehouse for rent that would double as a studio. He moves in and, after a few weeks of visiting, makes a bunk for Shima. On the beach, he picks up a sea urchin to show his daughter how it rotates off his hand on its spikes. They dig up clams and periwinkles. Back in the studio, she shapes clay into an urchin shell and inserts her pick-up sticks.

  The first night she sleeps over, there’s an eclipse of the moon. The disc rises unsuspecting above the sea only to be blotted out an hour later.

  Shima sits up straight in the bunk. I can’t see, she calls out.

  That’s because it’s the middle of the night, he says. Go to sleep now.

  The next day, she sits on a stool and says, You’re my daddy.

  I am, Shima. Yes, I am.

  She smiles and goes on working. Neither of them can know that it will be another half decade before legislation passes that will allow him to take Shima home to British Columbia.

  29.

  August, 1945

  At Bowen, Leo and Gwen are sitting on the bench in the honeysuckle arbour holding their legs side by side comparing tans (Gwen’s is darker), when all of a sudden the bay is filled with bells. Someone on the bluff is ringing the school bell. The church bell at Collins clangs behind the hotel. Mr. McConnecky steps onto the hotel porch and chimes the dinner gong. Bells would ring when the war’s over, their Mother said. Monkey tree no pinches back. Leo and Gwen are on their feet racing over the lagoon causeway, stopping only once for a chin-up at the back of the dancehall where a single curled maple leaf whisks along the floor.

  They ignore the resting rock, rush through the back porch tunnel, across the living room and onto the verandah where the
ir mother is ringing a white china bell.

  The war’s over, she says, laughing and crying at the same time.

  Who won? says Leo.

  Astonishingly, there’s a young man they’ve never seen before standing beside their mother. This is Derek, says Ada.

  What were they supposed to do with this pale young man? Take him to the tree fort? Offer him a comic? When Mother puts him in their dad’s place in the kitchen nook and tells him that lunch is green pea soup, he says jolly good, I love green pea soup. So do I, says Gwen, and Mother pulls her chin back and raises her eyebrows because she knows Gwen hates green pea soup.

  The war’s over, says Gwen.

  For me it was over in May on VE day, Derek says sadly. Why hasn’t he gone home then? Does he miss his mother?.

  It’s raining so hard after lunch mother says they should go and play in the attic. Not until Gwen’s been up ahead of the boys, they’re not. She has to rescue her paper dolls from the baseboard where they’re lined up waiting to get asked to dance. Girls go one way, boys the other like in P.E. Right two three, left two three, all of them shuffling along in a line. Her teacher raised the thick twisted arm and dropped the needle on the record. Feel the music boys and girls The other kids kept their arms at their sides, and followed the line of dance but Gwen couldn’t because her hands kept lifting, fingers hanging loose. Next thing you knew, the principal passed Gwen on the inside of the circle, turned back to lead her to the centre. Lifted his chin to show that, if she put her left hand on his shoulder, he could step into the dance the right way. From now on, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could run away with whomever they like. Even if she’s never been in that wide open place before, that was where she’d been trying to get back to the whole time. Everyone else could go on with whatever they were doing; whatever they were doing was fine with her.

  Going to buy a paper doll that I can call my own, her dad sings. A doll that other fellows cannot steal. She’s way too old for paper dolls, but it’s rained all summer, and except for synchronized, there’s been nothing to do except make cocktail outfits and formals for the cardboard girls to wear while they wait. It’s so damp they’ve slid down the wall on their backs and rolled themselves up like wood shavings. When Derek and her brother come up, she’s backed into her dresser, pressing the cutouts into the drawers.

  Leo pours a jar of pickled tickets into Derek’s hands as if rewarding him for single-handedly winning every Allied Victory in the war.

  Are these ration coupons? asks Derek. His parents were the Sycamores, who’d come to the hotel in the old days. They’d sent him to Canada to be safe during the war. They’d written to Mr. McConnecky who thought that since Frances was living across the street from Lord Kitchener Elementary, Derek might be able to stay with her. Frances has to guard the beach, so he’s come over to play with them.

  No, they’re tickets for the treats they’ll be giving away at races they have in the dancehall. Because it’s raining.

  Derek pulls a parcel from his knapsack. I’m supposed to give you this, Gwen.

  She unwraps a bathing suit with silver stars on a black modesty panel, the back and sides black stars on a silver background. Frances told her—what did Jeanette say meanly, her protégé—that she’s ready to go in the solos at the Canadian Championships at Crystal in town in the winter. Frances’s the only one who’s listened when she said she wants to swim to Stardust.

  At the dancehall, Derek goes in the sack race, jumping sadly around the dance floor with his burlap sack pulled up to his chin. When they hand him fifty cents as a prize, he says he’ll have it changed to English money to take home.

  At home in the attic, when she should be in bed, Gwen sits in the moonlight repairing the hem on the starry bathing suit. Derek comes out of her brother’s sectioned-off room to go down to the bathroom. Use sticky tape instead, Derek says, and she laughs like anything. After he goes back to bed, she strokes her own neck; when she slips her fingers down her side and touches herself down there, she feels a rush of pleasure that she knows is something she’s supposed to wait for her husband to give her on their marriage night of nights o holy.

  The next day at dry practice, Frances draws an arched stick woman in the sand and tells them that if they keep their backs in that position in the feet-first layout, scoop upwards with their cupped hands and hold their feet steady, they’ll come right around feet-first until their toes break the surface. When Gwen arches too much and finishes a few inches below the surface, Frances leans over from the wharf, reaches under her waist and hauls her up. The second time, she propels as hard as she can, still comes up feet-first under the surface, opens her eyes underwater to see a wavering Frances who must be demonstrating the front neck rescue they learned at bronze medallion class because Jeanette’s arms are up around her neck as if Frances is about to turn her backwards by the chin and frog kick her to shore, except that from under water it looks like she’s kissing her on the mouth. It must be the water making, what do they call it, an optical illusion?

  At least Leo’s pesky earache is better, and he’s allowed out on the small wharf where he’s lolling around with Derek. Leo’s going on about a spider who only understands length and width. If you put that spider on a line that circumnavigates a balloon, if the spider only understands two dimensions the way we only understand three, it’d think it was going in a straight line and be astonished when it came back to the original dot. Which goes to show that we probably don’t understand the fourth dimension, which might be time. Derek looks baffled.

  The chartreuse water glows under the pier as Derek leaps up and dives in. He’s a fast swimmer, could zap through her Catalina weavings like a lion through a paper hoop, but halfway to the diving tower end, he jerks to a stop as if hitting up against the net she’d shuttled. He knows. He stopped there because he felt it. Later, when she starts her breaststroke lengths, there he is below her, swimming elementary backstroke to mirror her breaststroke. She loves it when he comes up, throwing the water off his hair.

  What were you doing down there? she says.

  How can I see your breaststroke if I don’t go under water?

  A plain wedding announcement card arrives with a note from Auntie. Jack Long is home from overseas and they’ve been married by a justice of the peace in Birch Bay where they’ve opened a grocery store.

  In Birch Bay? says Mother in alarmed tones. Isn’t that right beside Blaine?

  I believe it is, says Dad.

  On the beach the next day, Gwen leans back on her elbows the way Frances does, the brim of her visor tilted at the same angle as the lifeguard’s safari helmet. Jeanette arrives beside their blanket, giving out the same grim smile that ladies do in the dancehall when they don’t want people to see their real smiles. She has a new kinked hairdo widening in a wedge along her chin line.

  I’ve never been so humiliated in my life, she says. I was practising my synchronized at the hotel wharf but I forgot my nose plugs, When I came back to serve lunch, I leaned over to give a guest his soup and I still had water up my nose and it poured straight into his bowl.

  You poor thing, says Frances, standing up and leading her into the lifeguard shack. Will you watch the beach for me for a minute, Gwen? Yell if anyone’s in trouble.

  Will she watch the beach? She’s been waiting for months for someone to ask her to watch the beach. And Derek’s looking at her from her parents’ blanket, yay. The tide’s too low for anyone much to be in the water, but Leo’s still splayed out on the small float like a sea lion. The helmet Frances left on the blanket is too big for her, but this time she finds a headband inside that tightens. Once she puts it on, she scans her head slowly from left to right and back again the way she’s supposed to, but the next time her head swings back, Leo isn’t there. She clutches at her chest, but there’s no whistle. Leaps up and races to the water’s edge, but Percy’s already on his way out to the spot where Leo’s disappeared. He dives down and pulls him up sputtering.

>   What kind of lifeguard would let a twelve-year-old watch the beach? Who am I supposed to report this to?

  Don’t, Dad. It was just for a few minutes. She won’t let me watch the beach again.

  Good. What on Earth were you doing, Leo?

  The water was over my head so I thought the best thing to do would be to stand on the bottom and wait for my dad.

  After they’re all asleep that night, a bat gets into the attic and causes such a flap Gwen’s afraid it’ll fly under her nightie and start a ruckus like something unborn. Her mother gets up and hands up a tea towel for Derek to wrap the bat in before he lets it out the window.

  30.

  January, 1946

  Turn off that music, Gwen. Enough is enough. Her mother’s shaking, the knives and forks she’s washing rattling in her hand. She’s started grinding her teeth at night; the dentist is making her wear a plastic biting pad. Her dad takes her gently by the shoulders and sits her down. I don’t understand what’s wrong, Ada. You have three wonderful children. You have the house you always wanted. We’re doing well at the plant. What is it?

  Gwen’s dry practising around the living room trying to extend her back strokes far enough to cover the full area of Crystal Pool. Turning the music up enough to drown her parents’ argument, she spreads newspaper on the dining room table and glues tin foil stars onto a tiara she’s cut from cardboard.

  Is that girl responsible enough for us to be sending Gwen to train with her? I mean. It’s one thing at Bowen when she’s ten minutes away from home. As long as you pick her up on your way home after work, Percy.

  Of course I’ll pick her up.

  No matter how shot her mother’s nerves are, her dad’s shirt still has to be pressed every night, the dickeys she and Lily wear with their sweaters curved and smoothed. On his way home from the plant, her dad has to stop by the nursing home to see Grandpa Lyndon before coming to the west end to get her at Crystal. Three afternoons a week, she turns in her locker key and climbs in her dad’s Dodge.