Liberty Street (4 page)

The bedroom door was closed and I assumed Ian was behind it, asleep, so I lay down on the couch rather than disturb him. Half an hour later, I heard a key in the front door and he came in, drunk and stumbling, dishevelled in a way that I had never before seen him.

“Go to hell, Frances,” he said when he saw me on the couch, and then he went to the bedroom. But half an hour later, he came back and sat down on the couch by my feet and stared out into the dark room. He said, in a drunken voice, “Do you remember that I once asked you to marry me? No, that's not right. I didn't quite ask, because I was hedging my bets. I
suggested
we get married, and you did just what I
thought you would—you blew it off like dust, as though it wasn't worth discussing.”

Before I could speak, he got up, stumbled back to the bedroom, and closed the door.

I knew the time he was talking about. People he worked with had been getting married, having babies. People his age. He was right that I hadn't taken his suggestion seriously. I was over forty. And I was already married, which he now knew, but he hadn't then.

I heard sounds coming from the bedroom and realized that Ian was crying. I had never seen him cry. I was five years old the only other time I'd known a man to cry, when my mother briefly left my father and me, and I heard my father crying in the night. I'd woken up alone in my parents' bed and heard a strange, muffled noise coming from the living room, and when I figured out it was my father crying, I thought my mother must have died. In the morning I'd fished for information by saying, “I wonder what Mom is having for breakfast,” and my father had said, “I suppose she's having Cheerios, as usual,” and then everything seemed to be okay again, even though my mother was still not home.

I heard another sob coming from Ian in the bedroom, and then it was quiet.

If he hadn't told me to go to hell—if he hadn't left me on the couch the way he had—I might have gone to him, but I did not believe he wanted me to.

I lay down again. All night, pictures of the city kept coming back to me—not familiar places where Ian and I had been together, but mysterious places and dark streets filled with strangers I would never know, or never remember if we did meet in a brief exchange. I felt as though my entire adult life
here had been a series of brief exchanges. Even the people I worked with every day would remember me for only a short while if I left. “Remember Frances?” someone might say six months later. “She was difficult, aloof, not much interested in the rest of us.” I was surprised the thought had come to me so easily, that I would be remembered for being difficult, and so, I reasoned, it must be true. I could only hope that someone might jump in and say, in my defence, that I was smart, or right, or at least cared about public health and safe drinking water.

In the morning, early, I got up and emailed Mavis to let her know I was on my way to Elliot and I wanted to sell the house. Then I wrote a letter of resignation, and sealed it in an envelope along with my access fob. A short time later I heard the shower running, and then Ian came from the bedroom with his carry-on, wearing a crisp and fashionable suit. I asked him if he wanted a ride to the airport and he said no, he would drive himself and leave his car there. I found it hard to believe that he had been such a mess the night before.

He picked up my empty takeout coffee cup from the floor where I'd left it and threw it in the paper recycle bin. When he was on his way out the door, he turned and said, or rather asked, “You know that you are a person who resists happiness, right?”

“That's not true,” I said.

“It is true. You don't trust it.”

Then he closed the door and left.

I didn't want to think about what he'd said. I did not believe it. I retrieved my suitcase from the front hall, and emptied out the dirty clothes and packed clean ones. I took
only what I thought I would need for a brief stay at a time of year that could be either hot or cold: jeans, shorts, T-shirts, walking shoes, sandals. A rain jacket. A book and my laptop. Toiletries. I put the dirty clothes in the laundry, collected my suitcase, and left the house. On my way out of town, I stopped at city hall and dropped off the envelope containing my letter of resignation.

I hit only green lights as I drove out of the city. Once the lights were behind me, I called our home voicemail and left a message saying that I was on my way to Elliot to take care of some business regarding the rental house, and I would call again when I'd arrived. As I dropped the phone on the seat beside me, I realized that it should have been included in the package I'd left at city hall, and that it would be disabled when my account was cancelled, and then I'd be without one.

As I looked at the city skyline in the rear-view mirror, I began to wish that I hadn't left Ian the message I had. There was an assumption built into it—that is, that he would be relieved to know where I had gone. Perhaps it wasn't true. Perhaps I was a stranger to him now. I thought back to the moment when the marriage and the baby had slipped from their hiding places. I was like one of those women who commits a bank robbery and then goes into hiding as someone else, marries a doctor, becomes a soccer mom, and does volunteer work with the Girl Guides or the Humane Society, until it all comes tumbling apart when she is recognized from an old newspaper photograph by a neighbour in the suburbs.

Only I hadn't been recognized by anyone. I had done this to myself.

When a number of semi-trailers passed me in the left-hand lane, I realized I was driving too slow. I stepped on the gas and turned my attention to the road ahead, to where I was going, or rather from where I had come.

I
T
'
S
N
OVEMBER
,
A
cold day. Five-year-old Frances Mary Moon, wearing new blue mitts and a matching toque her mother knit for her, sits on an old tractor tire filled with sand and surveys the yard around her: the white house that used to be just a log house but now has a modern addition on the back; the red barn with its hayloft on top and Kaw-Liga, the wooden Indian, standing guard by the side door, the one you can use to avoid walking through the cow muck; the bins and sheds and machinery, all lined up neatly along the fence; the caragana hedges and poplars that surround the yard and line the approach from the road. Everything is in its proper place, ready for winter. The sky is grey, as though today is the day winter might come, and even Kaw-Liga looks cold. The cows out in the pasture are all standing in one direction, facing away from the wind. Frances doesn't like cows. She's allergic to milk (which her father says is tragic for a dairy farmer's daughter), plus she doesn't trust them not to kick in that sneaky way they have, out to the side. She doesn't like her mother's chickens either, because of the time the rooster escaped and came at her, talons bared and wings flapping, and her mother materialized out of nowhere and grabbed it and strangled it right there, and then later made soup. Ha. So much for that rooster,
but Frances hadn't known which was more fierce: the rooster or her mother. She decides it's a good thing to have a mother who can win a fight with, say, a nasty rooster or an ornery cow.

Frances shifts herself around on the tractor tire so she can better see any cars or trucks that might come up the road, besides the milk truck, which has already been. She examines her new mitts and wishes they were pink, but her mother says blue looks better with red hair. Frances loves pink, and she's decided red is a terrible hair colour to have if it doesn't go with pink. Besides having terrible hair, she has no front teeth—none at all—because the orthodontist in Yellowhead pulled them. Frances had thought he was going to give her new ones, but her mother has since explained that she has to wait for them to grow in, and when they do she will have to wear a retainer to make sure they grow straight and not crooked like the old ones. It's been months since they went to Yellowhead and stayed with her mother's friend Doreen (who is called a war bride), and still no new teeth. Doreen isn't there anymore. She and her son, Joey—the one her mother thought was such a nice boy; the one who tried to put his hand in Frances's underpants, but she ran away and her mother didn't believe her when Frances told her later—moved back to England, without Joey's dad. Frances didn't know a mother could do that. She hopes
her
mother is planning to come back from wherever she's gone, which is probably not England but might be almost as far away—a place called Nashville, where people go when they want to be famous singers. She also hopes that she will have new teeth by Christmas. Her father has assured her she will, but her mother says she won't and her teeth will arrive in their own good time. This is not unusual, for the two of them to
have different opinions. Her mother always says, “What kind of world would it be if everyone agreed? Pretty boring.” Her father says, “Well, maybe just once in a while.”

Here are some other things Frances Mary Moon knows about her parents, gathered in equal measure from stories they've told her and from conversations not meant for little pitchers and their ears. Her father is Basie, short for Basil, and her mother's name is Alice. Her mother comes from a family of tossers in England, which is not a good kind of family, and she might be the only mother in Elliot—and who knows, maybe all of Canada now that Doreen is gone—who speaks the way she does, that is, with an accent. She used to work in a cheese-and-curio shop in London, but it was bombed to smithereens one night during the war, which meant she didn't have a job anymore. The nice people who owned the shop gave her a gift of expensive cheese and an antique mahogany tea caddy, so it wasn't all for naught. She met Frances's father—who also has an accent, but people say he's easier to understand—in London. He couldn't be a soldier because of his poor eyesight, but he served the war effort by working in a government office. After they were married, they made a plan to move to Canada so that any children they had would not be in danger of turning out like Alice's family (this fully admitted to by her), and also because Basie had grown up reading Hopalong Cassidy books and secretly longed for a frontier life (not admitted to by him).

In 1955—a year Frances does not remember because she hadn't yet been born—they bought a farm in western Canada with some money they got when Basie's father died, and they crossed the ocean on a boat with their two steamer trunks, two suitcases, and some taped-up cardboard boxes. Once they
got to Montreal, Basie bought them each a cowboy hat for the train trip west, assuming that everyone beyond the Ontario border wore a Stetson (this also not admitted to by him, but reported to Doreen anyway). There's a picture taken by a coloured train conductor (
what does “coloured” mean
?) of the two of them standing on a platform with their belongings, wearing their new hats. Alice told Doreen that she took hers off as soon as the picture was snapped because she was already certain there would be no cowboys or hitching posts on the high street in Elliot, Saskatchewan. She had done her reading. Even after they were settled on their new farm (dairy, not beef) and Basie had traded his own hat for a cap like the ones the other men wore, he went to an auction sale and purchased a sofa-and-chair set with wagon-wheel arms, two table lamps with western scenes on the shades, and an old cigar store Indian that he thought Alice would welcome into the house, but she did not. The sofa set and lamps stayed, but the wooden Indian ended up outside by the barn door. He got named poor old Kaw-Liga after Hank Williams's famous song on the radio. While Frances waits to see which of her parents will come home first, she studies Kaw-Liga across the yard and wonders if he can feel the cold. She wonders if Hank Williams can feel the cold now that he's dead. He fell asleep in the back of a car and didn't wake up. (
What? Can that happen?
)

Snow begins to fall. Frances looks at her hands and sees that it is clinging to her mitts. She can feel it on her eyelashes. She looks up at the falling flakes—growing bigger and bigger as they drift down toward her—and sticks out her tongue. She wonders how far her mother has got on her way to being a singer, and whether she is singing right now, driving south, as the crow flies. Her mother sings when she thinks no one is
listening: along with the radio, when she's in the bathtub with the door locked, when she's cooking, or sterilizing, or doing barn chores. Skeeter Davis is her favourite singer, and in fact, Frances is named after her. Mary Frances Skeeter Davis. Frances Mary Moon. (Her father hadn't liked the Skeeter part.) Frances believes her mother could be a famous singer like Skeeter Davis or maybe Kitty Wells, who both live in Nashville, which is where you go if you want to be on the radio.

“Where's Nashville?” Frances once asked.

“Straight south, as the crow flies.”

Which is why Frances is sitting in the tire by herself, wondering whether her mother will get famous and end up on TV, or change her mind about the Grand Ole Opry and come back. She's thinking that she can't feel her fingers in her mittens. She's hoping her mother is driving carefully now, because she'd spun gravel from the whitewalls of her pride-and-joy Ford when she left.

She hears a car coming up the road, but she can't see it yet. Not a car, a truck. Her father's truck turns onto the approach and appears through the bare branches of the trees. He parks down by the barn as he always does and walks back toward Frances.

“I think your sandbox is done for until spring,” he says to her. Then he notices that Alice's car isn't in its usual spot by the house and he says, “Where's your mother?”

Frances shrugs. “Nashville, I guess.” She gets up and slaps her mitts together to get the snow off.

“You come up with the darnedest things,” her father says as she follows him into the house. He takes off his coat and looks around for a note. “Are you sure you don't know where she's gone?” he says. “That's not like her to leave you alone.”

“We're not supposed to worry,” Frances says.

“Nashville, eh?” he says. “Well, no reason to worry about that.” Then he washes up and turns on the television, and waits for Alice to come home and put his tea on the table.

When six o'clock rolls around and her mother still hasn't returned, Frances goes to the fridge and gets out a plate of sliced ham and the butter dish and a jar of mustard, and puts them on the table along with a loaf of bread and two plates out of the cupboard. The old mahogany tea caddy from England is on the table next to the salt and pepper. It used to have a lock, because at one time tea was precious. (“Imagine,” her mother said. “So precious people used to lock it up as though it were gold.”) Frances thinks about making tea for her father, but she's not allowed to use the gas stove, so she gets a pitcher of Tang from the fridge instead.

“What's this, then?” Frances's father asks when she calls him to the table and tells him she's going to make him a sandwich.

“Our tea,” she says.

“Oh, I think your mother will be home soon to fix us something better than ham sandwiches.”

Clearly, he hadn't believed Frances about Nashville, but then he hadn't heard her mother that time in the car on the way to Yellowhead, singing about honky-tonk angels and saying to Frances, after the song was over, “I could be on the radio, don't you think?” Then later, in the orthodontist's office, when Frances had asked about the woman with sunglasses and blonde hair on a magazine cover, her mother told her it was Marilyn Monroe. “People hound Marilyn for autographs everywhere she goes,” she'd said. “Of course, that's partly because she's a sexpot, and don't ask me what that means.”

“So would you want to be a movie star?” Frances asked.

“If I had my druthers, I'd rather be a famous singer. But neither milks cows or shovels manure, that's for sure.”

“How do you get to be a singing star?”

“You go to Nashville,” her mother said. “If you want to be a movie star, you go to Hollywood, but singers go to Nashville.”

So that was it. When she left the house with her white overnight case, saying, “No, you can't come with me,” and “Oh, don't look at me like that, and tell your father not to worry,” Frances knew where she was headed.

She pours two glasses of Tang from the pitcher and then pulls out one of the chrome chairs—carefully, because they're tippy—and says, “I'm too hungry to wait.”

“Frances,” her father says, getting up from his chair in the living room, “is there something you're not telling me?”

So then she has to tell him again, and she adds the fact that her mother took her overnight case, the one from the Eaton's catalogue.

He looks concerned. He scratches his chin. “You're sure?” he asks. “She took her little suitcase? The white one?”

Frances nods. “But we're not supposed to worry,” she says again, although she
is
beginning to worry. She's thinking about the way her mother drove out of the yard without stopping to look. A truck could have T-boned her and that would have been that. How was she supposed to not worry? She gets a bad feeling in her stomach.

Then her father sits at the table and makes himself a sandwich, and Frances takes that as a sign that
he
isn't worried, that everything is all right, but he eats only half of it. He throws the remaining half in the slop bucket, and then he
puts the ham and mustard and Tang back in the fridge.

Frances is still sitting at the table. He turns her chair toward him and kneels in front of her and says, “Now, Frances, I want you to remember everything. What exactly did your mother say? Don't tell me anything that she didn't say right out loud. Nothing that might have been just in your head. I want to know only what she said.”

“Don't look at me like that,” Frances says.

“I'm not,” he says.

“That's what she said. Don't look at me like that. And don't worry.”

“That's it?”

Frances nods.

“And all she took was the overnight case?”

“Yes, that's all. And her sunglasses. Are they a clue?”

“They're a clue that the sun was shining,” her father says, even though it hadn't been. “All right, then. Your mother has gone to Yellowhead for a holiday. The overnight case is just that, for overnight. She'll be back tomorrow.”

Then he sends Frances to bed, but he forgets to run the bath for her, so she doesn't have one. In the middle of the night she leaves her own bed and crawls in with him, and he doesn't send her back to her room. She knows he's awake. He's lying on his back and staring at the ceiling. There's enough light in the room that she can see that.

When Frances wakes up in the morning, she can hear her father on the phone. She knows what he's doing. Calling people. When he gets off the phone, he sits and twirls his cap on his index finger the way he does when he's thinking, then he puts on his coat and tells Frances not to get into any trouble while he's in the barn.

Frances says, “I don't think anyone else knows about Nashville.”

Her father stops and looks at her and says, “Why do you keep going on about Nashville?”

“She's gone to be a singer,” Frances says. “Like Skeeter Davis and Kitty Wells.”

“Oh,” he says. “Well, that's ridiculous, Frances. Your mother has the singing voice of a frog.” Then he puts his cap on his head. “Judas Priest,” he says on his way out the door to finish his chores.