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from THE BOOK
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Children of the Day
by Sandra Birdsell
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Fiction •
Random House Canada •
Hardcover, 416 pages •
September 2005 •
$35.95 •
0-679-31369-9
In Children of the Day, Giller Prize-nominated author
Sandra Birdsell has created a portrait of a marriage on the knife-
edge of disaster, in the tiny, mythical town of Union Plains, Manitoba
Emilie watched as Manny and Simon latched on to Oliver's hands, her
older brothers slouching along on either side of him. Ida clomped on
ahead of everyone in a pair of Sara's shoes, the blue wedgies she'd
dug out from a corner of the porch because her sandal strap had
broken. The wedgies were Sara's garden shoes, and although Ida had
wiped them with a wet cloth before leaving the house, the shoes looked
used up. Likely they pinched Ida's toes, but the heels made her taller
and so she felt older, or so Emilie judged from her sister's
self-important walk. When Ida thought no one was looking, she tilted
her face to peer down the neck of her blouse, admiring her new
freckled breasts. Barf city, disgusting, Emilie thought.
Her family turned at the corner, their murmuring voices fading, while
Emilie went towards the oldest residential street in Union Plains. Its
grown-up trees formed a canopy of greenery that shaded the boy from
Arizona as he straddled his bike in front of his grandmother's
prim-looking house. Emilie hurried towards him, the day expanding like
a book opening flat against a table.
He waved and dismounted, the tree branches reflecting in his
eyeglasses; the wedge of sand-coloured hair lay against his forehead
like a hand. A robin called out, its cheery sound suiting the June
sky. The coronation coin was a spot of heat moving against her thigh,
and she thought to tell him that the Queen of England had sent it to
her in the mail, but she knew he wasn't just any kid she could tease.
Charlie was wearing a white
T-shirt and jeans that looked to be new, and an expansion bracelet
engraved with his initials. Something I wouldn't be caught dead
wearing, Sonny Boy had scoffed, when Emilie described it. The veranda
curtains were drawn, as they always were, inviting the suspicion that
Charlie's grandmother spent most of her day spying on people. She
turned the lights off on Halloween, too, as though the town kids
didn't already know to avoid her house. The clipped look of the yard
and the lack of flower beds suggested stinginess. Sonny Boy said the
woman was so tight, her ass squeaked when she walked.
Look, the Queen of England sent this in the mail, Emilie said, despite
herself. The coin was light in her palm, unlike a silver dollar.
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The Queen of England must have sent one to everyone then, because I've
seen other kids with the same thing, Charlie said.
The veranda door of the grandmother's house opened, and Charlie's
older brother came down the stairs, a tall, ginger-haired young man
who walked like a cat, and whom Emilie had seen only fleetingly, when
he drove past her house in the car.
So, where do you guys think you're going? he called.
What's it to you? Charlie replied, and Emilie was surprised at the
unpleasant tone of his voice.
The brother wore grey-blue trousers flamboyantly wide at the knees,
and a silver belt that looked like crinkled metal. He circled Emilie
and Charlie as they stood on the street, the bicycle between them.
Emilie felt shabby, her red checkered pedal-pushers worn at the knees;
the tails of The Other One's cast-off shirt were so long she'd knotted
them to hang like moth-eaten rabbit ears from her waist.
The brother said to Charlie, So, how old is your girlfriend, anyway?
None of your business, Ross, Charlie answered.
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Ross glanced back at the veranda before speaking. I was just
wondering, see. Dad's going to let me have the car for the day. We
could drive to Winnipeg. Maybe Emilie here would like to show us
around?
Emilie felt Ross's eyes pass across her body, glance away and then
back again, and resisted the urge to cross her arms in front of her
chest. She didn't want to admit that she didn't know Winnipeg, except
for the several blocks on Portage Avenue between Eaton's and Hudson
Bay department stores. She might also be able to find her way to the
zoo, but that was it. I'll have to go to the hotel and ask my dad, she
told Ross, confident that permission would not be granted.
Ross can go sightseeing on his own, Charlie objected, and Emilie said,
It's okay. There's nothing but art and phys ed at school today,
anyway.
Charlie gave Emilie a ride downtown, his shoulder blades see-sawing
with effort beneath his white T-shirt. Who are you? he'd wanted to
know days earlier, when he appeared out of nowhere, coming up behind
her on his bicycle. He hadn't asked, Which one are you? Or stated
matter-of-factly, You're one of the Vandals, as though there were
nothing more to be said or learned. She was Emilie, she told him. He
introduced himself as Charlie, from Arizona. He'd driven up with his
parents and brother to help their grandmother pack up her house and
move to an apartment in Winnipeg.
He dismounted from his bicycle to walk beside her that first day, and
when she spoke, he crooked his head to look into her face. His arms
were downy with sun-bleached hair and his skin deeply tanned for early
spring. No, she hadn't heard of Arizona, she replied to his next
question, although of course she had. She was rewarded by a flare of
pleasure in his face as he went on to recite the various statistics
about Arizona, ending by saying that when he returned to Phoenix, he'd
send her a horned toad in the mail to prove they existed.
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Charlie had since talked about guided intercontinental ballistic
missiles whose trajectories would one day carry them beyond the
atmosphere and back to earth,where they'd obliterate an entire city in
Soviet Russia. Push of a button, he said. Emilie didn't mention that
Russia was the country of her mother's birth. Aunt Katy received
letters from relatives and friends still living there, and brought
them with her when she came on a visit. Letters crying out with
requests for prayer, for clothing, for rescue. Katy replied to those
letters, although she said she had nightmares of being kidnapped and
spirited out of Canada. Of being sent into forced labour in a Siberian
gulag.
That's what happens to people over there who believe
in God, Aunt Katy declared. Which Emilie thought was
stupid — they should just say they didn't believe,
and everything would be copacetic. That doesn't mean
God stops believing in them, she said, voicing her opinion
in Sara's presence and being reminded swiftly to watch
her mouth, as there was such a thing as an unpardonable
sin. The entreaties Aunt Katy translated from the soft
grey paper hung around like weary ghosts, and often
sent Emilie to a field beside the schoolyard, a large
open space where she could practise running. She wondered
what could be more unpardonable than a cleverly concealed
gopher hole, the possibility of breaking an ankle.
What she appreciated the most about Charlie was that he ignored the
fact that the back of her hand was never without a bandage of some
sort, and she didn't need to explain that there was a colony of warts
underneath it. He didn't seem to notice that she was female, either,
and that left her free to take him in. To grow to love the flashes of
pleasure in his caramel eyes, the wetness of his small mouth, the
light beaming in his face when she told him something he didn't
already know.
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