The Dancehall Years Read online

  Is that my Evvie? Harriet asks as Isabelle bends over her. I have to know whose hand this is. Is this Evvie’s hand? Please, someone, is this Evvie’s hand?

  Back at the cottage, crouching on the toilet, Isabelle stretches the crotch of her panties between her fingers, searching, smelling for a stain that isn’t there. Magazine cartoons her father pasted on the bathroom walls stare down at her. This is Watchbird watching you sweep dirt under the carpet instead of into the dustpan. This is a Watchbird watching you reading the paper when you’re supposed to be using it to light the fire. She climbs the attic stairs, sits on the cot where she and Takumi played birdsong, turns over the mattress and pounds out the dust. Under it, a yellowed magazine that the Varsity girls passed around the time they were up (in another life), featuring an article about an evil butcher who lives down a back lane and spends his time sharpening knives to scrape babies from the insides of unsuspecting teenagers. They’d laughed they’d laughed, gossiping about a girl who was supposed to come up for the pajama party but couldn’t because she was up the spout. She had to go someplace in Blaine and have the baby alone.

  If only her period would come, she’d clean the cottage, wash all the curtains, even the ones in the attic, chop enough wood to get them through next year. He’d gone, when? March. Okay, April, May, June… counting on her fingers. Dear God, it would be December. It can’t be December. What about Christmas?

  She’d take hot baths. Or was it cold baths? She steps into the galvanized tub with the enema hose draped over her arm. If she could flush herself out, maybe her little friend would let go the shore and swim out like an obliging fry. The second month passes with no period. She begins to be sick in the mornings. Her breasts hurt when the first salmonberry blossoms come out. She could go to town and ask a doctor to give her a pregnancy test, instead lies in bed in the back bedroom and watches an occasional bit of sunlight dapple the wall.

  She’ll have to leave before she shows, but she needs to cover her tracks until then, devise some ploy so nobody suspects. Still, she has to get up. She has to. The Sannie will be here any minute, the children here for the summer.

  At work the next day, the last thing she expects is a letter to herself. Standing behind the unopened wicket, she turns the foreign-looking envelope over and over as if cooling it.

  Later that night, she sits in bed, thigh bones socketed high in her hips. Who’s writing to her as if he knows her like this? No return address. She skips to the last page. Oh him.

  S S Inverness

  September, 1941.

  Dear Isabelle,

  I’m writing to apologize. I shouldn’t have taken my problems out on you that night in the pavilion, but the news about my job threw me for a loop. I’m not one who can stay stuck in the city. The obvious thing would have been for me to sign up, I know that, and that’s one reason I was on such a short fuse. I’ll take any other job but I don’t want to go to war.

  The long and short of it is, I’ve managed to land a job as a purser, working my way across the Pacific at least as far as Singapore. They told me I might find work in Malaysia. So that’s where I’m heading, in the opposite direction from where I want to be going. At least this way, I’m away from conscription if it should come along. If it wasn’t for that possibility, I’d head on up to the captain’s bridge and turn the wheel back toward your island, where I imagine you standing under the monkey tree in that blue dress of yours looking like a million dollars.

  I have to tell you this, Isabelle. I love you. The way you move, the way you talk, the set of your mouth, your stubbornness. The way you wanted to listen to the music from outside the pavilion. I know there’s no place I belong except at your side. I could pick you out of a crowd of a thousand if I had to. All you’d have to do is move. Don’t ever forget that.

  Your loving,

  Jack.

  Oh for goodness sake. Imagine him going way over there to get away from the war and then Pearl Harbour coming along. She holds the envelope by the corner and taps it on the side table. Somehow, it’s taken nearly a year for this letter to get here. The way he’d run up to her on the causeway bridge, she knew he was the kind of man who’d trot from picnic ground to picnic ground splitting cords of wood when all anyone needed was enough hot water for tea. It’ll be a long time before he gets back to this side of the Pacific.

  Alright, it’s a harebrained idea but she has to do something. A week later, she takes the Sannie to Horseshoe Bay, then the bus to town where she gets off in the pawnshop area at Hastings and Princess and sees what she’s looking for in a store window by the bus stop: a silver engagement ring that takes all her savings to buy. That way, people will be looking at her ring, not her waist. On the street, she pushes the ring grimly onto her engagement finger, stuffs her thin wrists deep into her pockets, and, back at work, she makes a point of handing out all the letters with her left hand.

  I didn’t know you were engaged, Isabelle.

  Well, I am. I met him at the dance. You know. That saxophone player. He’ll be home when the war’s over.

  Aren’t you the lucky one?

  I certainly am.

  8.

  July, 1942

  Gwen sits at the kitchen table in their cottage watching her mother wrap a small disc. How could anyone in her right mind be wrapping wax paper around a stupid nickel when it’s not even anyone’s birthday? The next time they send her for ice cream so the grown-ups can have their coffee in peace, she’ll fling the ice cream container in the bushes and sleep under the dancehall porch. Stuff lambswool into the points of her toe shoes, prop them legless in the corner of the dancehall. It’s not worth it, though, because her mother will pull that blind down over her face that stays fastened all week. It’ll be days before she even looks at you, let alone likes you. Nothing else for this mother-may-I girl to do but sit endlessly on the concrete staircase above Sandy again.

  I’m bored. I’ve got nothing to do.

  Don’t tell me you’re bored, Gwen. I’ll give you a job.

  Can’t I swim by myself if the lifeguard is standing right there?

  No, you cannot. Not until you get your Intermediates.

  In two minutes flat, her mother’s going to find herself changed into a shriveled woodbug crawling out of the rotting log under the dogwood tree. She flicks a towel at her legs.

  All right for you, Gwen. You’re beyond the pale. Wait until your father gets here.

  She’d rather not. Percy and Grandpa Gallagher patrol this place day and night, arms raised, waiting to give you something to really cry about. Her mother’s the one who’s beyond the pail. I have had it up to here, she says. Wonders will never cease, though, because here’s Aunt Evvie and her gang from the shipbuilding plant marching down the resting rock hill in squadron formation, singing It’s a Long Way to Tipperary, even if it’s a song from a different war. People came up. People went down. They sang through the brass-trimmed portholes on the steamer. One thing about the war, it sure brought people together.

  Standing so straight her shoulders bend back, keeping her chin steady no matter who’s teasing her, Aunt Evvie poses by the sink in her pleated tennis dress. No, Leo, you’re not going out, says Mother. You have to stay in the house until that fever’s down. Get back to bed, and I don’t mean perhaps. It sounds stupid her saying that. Only dads and granddads say that so you have to do what you’re told.

  Now when Gwen slips the foxglove blossoms on her fingers and crouches down outside the window of the kitchen nook, Auntie sees the hoochie coochie puppets all right, but all they make her do is squeeze her thin mouth in and out as if trying to get it around a straw and lean toward the radio as if it’s telling her what to do with the rest of her life.

  When they came up that time when it wasn’t even summer, a tufted toilet seat cover lay on the floor in the bathroom instead of a rug. A curl of black pubic hair on the bathtub. A leaf scrap stuck in a spider web. What are spiders supposed to hang onto if their webs are flicked away? The toilet w
ouldn’t flush.

  For heaven’s sake, you haven’t gone and let the pipes freeze, have you, Isabelle?

  I’ll go get a bucket of sea water, Auntie’d said, so sadly that Gwen had wanted to run after her. What’s wrong? What’s wrong?

  Why were they having to sit around on the beach, shifting dried up crabs in their palms like hopscotches? The ovoids within ovoids in the water that switched from green to blue and back again in the summer weren’t there, only a staccato shimmer. It’d been so awkward getting her snow pants down in the pretend bathroom in her cave on the beach, she’d had to go up to the real bathroom on the back porch and listen to her mother’s voice hammering away at her beloved aunt as if Isabelle had turned wild like a cat that’d been left on its own too long after it was born.

  You can’t stay here by yourself all winter, Issie. You know that as well as I do.

  I’m all right.

  You’re not all right.

  She sure didn’t sound all right.

  Later that afternoon, it’d been so cold and rainy Leo was commandeered to keep his sisters entertained in the attic. His idea of entertainment was to make extra boards for Monopoly so they had to go around New York, Montreal and Vancouver before they got back to the original Go square. His concentration doling out the starter money and rolling the dice was so serious and grown-up, you couldn’t help wanting to bug him. She held up a magazine with a picture of a horrible-looking man with a small black moustache and eyes like hot coals, yelling his head off on the cover.

  Who’s he when he’s at home?

  Hitler. He’s the head of the German army. He’s coming over here to kill us.

  No, he’s not, she said. The captain wouldn’t let him on the boat.

  At least on Sunday mornings, it’s her nice dad who pokes his head up the attic stairwell to let her know it’s time to shimmy into her still wet bathing suit so they can walk to Sandy and swim together in the sweet early morning. Her nice dad is the one kids visit to get their baby teeth pulled out. It’s almost ready, he’ll say, wiggling it gently. Come back in a few days. When they do come back and their teeth appear on his hand, he pretends to be as surprised as they are. At the beach, he climbs to the high board, dives off, bends in half to touch his toes, shoots his legs behind him, then swims back to the beach as if he hasn’t done a thing. Puts his shoes on without socks. On weekends, dads don’t have to wear socks. Once, he says, he dove from a cliff that was higher than the funnel on the Lady Alex. It was so high he had to take a breath on the way down. If it weren’t for you kids, he says, I’d start walking. Start with Siberia, cross the Russian steppes. He doesn’t mean he wishes he didn’t have kids. That’s just what he’d do.

  At the concrete stairs, the tide is on its way in so Takumi’s rowboat has to be pulled way further up the beach than that! Otherwise, he’s going to be down there yarding it up every five minutes. If you’re a beach monitor and have to go home for lunch, someone else can take your place, but if that person forgets to keep their eyes on the boat and it comes adrift, everyone has to push and pull until the boat sucks itself out of the sand and practically carries itself back up the beach.

  Takumi isn’t allowed to talk to people in the afternoon when the beach is busy. He has to be out in the rowboat making sure that every single person’s head that goes down comes back up. But he’s not there today. Instead, outside his shack, there’s a sturdy-looking woman wearing a nubbly red bathing suit with a tiny girl in an identical bathing suit diving down her hip bone. Standing in Takumi’s place, she rakes sea lettuce around the incinerator drum, the edge of her bathing suit sits along her thighs at the exact place that would peel back at her tan mark. Whoever she is, what does she think she’s doing letting the smoke from the fire chase her around the pit? A gull that was invisible a moment ago flashes into a feathered white streak against the Millers hill. Her thick short hair is greased up from behind in a point. The distance from the corner of her eye to her ear is wider than most peoples.

  Fist in her beach jacket pocket, Gwen heel toes along the top of the beach backboard, knuckles stopping up against a small hard disc the size of a nickel. It’s her Juniors swimming pin. So that’s what her mother was wrapping. She offers it to the new lady on the flat of her hand.

  You have your Juniors, do you?

  Is this Takumi’s day off?

  Takumi? Oh, my predecessor. Takumi won’t be with us this year I’m afraid. I’m Francis Sinclair. Don’t worry. We’ll still have swimming lessons. People with their Juniors are allowed in the boat. Can you row?

  Of course she can row, she’s eight years old, but she’s not allowed in the boats of people she doesn’t know. The teacher said. Taking off in the substitute lifeguard’s boat (their own rowboat is gone—Isabelle says not to tell their father, lucky he doesn’t often go down to Miss Fenn’s Rocky) is like flapping a towel at a wasp until it finds an open door. The oar keeps turning flat. If this Frances person is supposed to be a lifeguard, what’s she doing standing up in the boat? The sun burns a flash in the hotel window that she can’t stop looking at; the bow almost collides with the pier, and suddenly the substitute lifeguard is out of the boat, walking up the slope to the hotel so fast there’s nothing for Gwen to do but row back across the bay.

  9.

  Playing Redeemers, everyone has to put their forfeited objects in a pile in front of the It person who kneels with her eyes on the ground. One player holds an item over her head, and the others chant Heavy heavy hangs over thy head, what shall the owner do to redeem it? To get their shoe or pocket knife back, the owner has to do their redeemers which is whatever the It person tells them to do. Knock on the kitchen window, say, and tell whoever’s listening to the war there’s a boat with a man in it stuck on Miss Fenn’s island. Then say April Fool. That’s crying wolf. They’re not allowed. Yesterday, when Auntie’s redeemers were to swim from their side of the beach around the Point Point to Miss Fenn’s Rocky and back, what did she go and do but swim the old-fashioned overarm sidestroke, elbowing her arm above her head over and over like an orca fin. Now it’s Auntie’s turn to be It, and she announces that the owner of the forfeit has to go down to Sandy and borrow the new lifeguard’s whistle. (If you haven’t done your redeemers yet, your shoe is kept in a pile in the back bedroom until next time they play. The only reason they have shoes in the first place is because their father works his fingers to the bone for them.)

  Down at Sandy, the new lifeguard lies on her beach blanket, turning her head slowly from side to side like the beacon on a lighthouse. As the tide laps the shore, she picks up handfuls of sand and lets them run between her fingers like an hourglass. When the sand’s finished running, she shuts her lazy iguana eyes, turns the hourglass over so the sand can stream the other way. Sits perfectly still to stop the newest coat of tan on her legs from marring. Her gaze stretches further each day until it’s as if she can see which swimmers are above water and which below. On hot days, she smears a triangle of white Noxzema on her nose. Out in her boat in the afternoons, she pulls Takumi’s pith helmet over her forehead and leans on the oars. The kids hang onto the sides. Take us to Bowyer. Take us to Anvil. No, take us to Jericho. Back on the beach, when she’s lying on her stomach with her chin propped on her hands, you could climb all over her and she wouldn’t notice.

  After work, Frances says that what she really wants to do is swim home to the hotel float instead of walk. (She boards with the waitresses up in the Girls’ Dorm back of the apple orchard.) But even if everyone’s gone home and there’s no one left to guard, she’s still not allowed to swim alone. But if Gwen, say, walked along the shore beside her, and Frances swam in close where it wasn’t over her head, she wouldn’t be swimming alone. As soon as she hears the idea, the new lifeguard smiles as if that’s what she’d been thinking all along. Before you can say Jack Robinson, she’s handed over the pith helmet, pooled the whistle and chain into Gwen’s hands, pulled on her bathing cap, adjusted her goggles, rotated her powerful should
ers and begun her masterful crawl toward the hotel.

  The cuffs on the adult sweatshirt hang like paws from a skin. The pith helmet bounces; the stubby whistle dangles, and the sweatshirt band drags. When Gwen nears the honeysuckle arbour on the trail above the golden loaf of the hotel sandbar, Frances is already down on the hotel wharf climbing the ladder between the two tire bumpers. She gazes at the dining room window, her body glistening, her hand waving Gwen away as if to say don’t bother coming the rest of the way.

  Gwen’s redeemers are in her hand before she even noticed. It’s more fun to be lucky than smart, her dad says. Even. When she gets home, Auntie and her mother and father stop talking as she comes in, the way Mother says some friends of hers did once when they were planning a surprise birthday party for her and the confusion wasn’t worth it. Auntie’s pretty ears flatten against the sides of her head. Small girls dance the Highland fling on the oilcloth tablecloth.

  What do you need that kind of money for, Isabelle? We’re just getting on our feet. Are you in trouble? Maybe this is something you ladies want to talk about alone.

  Of course I’m not in trouble, Auntie says. As I said, I want to buy the Yoshitos’ house from them for four hundred dollars. They made me an offer before they were taken away. That way, we can hang onto it, and they’ll buy it back after the war. Then I can pay you back. I’ll find a way to send them the money wherever they are.

  When Gwen splats the whistle in front of her, Auntie looks at it like a mouse a cat brought in.

  What’s that for?

  My redeemers.

  Oh right, she says, scything the whistle and chain into her lap like a round of jacks.

  You still have my shoe, says Gwen.

  I do?

  Of course she does. Why’s she pretending she doesn’t?

  They’re bending over some kind of new ring Auntie’s wearing, a sharp edge of questioning in the air, as if the ring were one of the forfeits. Of course they remember Isabelle’s fiancé, that nice longshoreman who came to lunch? He’s overseas, but he’s managed to send her this ring, and when the war’s over, she’s going to marry him.