Swan Dive Read online

  I told Budgie that school then was kind of a blur, except I don’t think she heard me because that’s when she ran out of Kleenex and needed to look around her office for some more. The desk, the filing cabinets, the bookshelves — they’re all matching coffee brown and she flitted around her little forest of fake wood trying to pretend I couldn’t see she finally had to use her sleeve. She had to call her secretary, or whatever you call them now. Elle’s mom Mindy works in accounts payable for a furniture manufacturer and Elle says she’s very sensitive about titles even though she claims all people are equal no matter who they are or what they do. When Elle calls her a paper-pusher she pretends not to mind, but Elle knows she does, which is why Elle does it. Just like when she calls her Mindy instead of Mom.

  What scared you most?

  I know the difference between when someone is actually listening and when they’re just trying to hold it together. I maybe wasn’t a very perceptive kid but I know fake okey-dokey when I hear it. I asked her if she needed to go home and rest and she said, Thank you, no, it’s just a cold. Then she started shooting off questions again. What made it hardest? Relating to kids at school? The teachers’ expectations? You mentioned your dad, that he struggled with adjusting. Was that hard on you?

  She acted as if she was asking the same thing as before, like the mucus had clogged up her short-term memory.

  I wanted to tell her scary and hard are two different things.

  Maybe I should have told Budgie about Dajdža Drago. I know it sounds stupid to be afraid of your own uncle, especially if he’s never done anything but help your family, but when he met us at the airport, I was just wearing my school jacket which had gotten way too small and he wrapped his fingers around my biceps and damned to hell those bastards who’d done this to me.

  And the thing is, everyone was afraid to tell him I’d always been that skinny.

  He enrolled me in an indoor soccer clinic that first month, and I had to get Mama to tell him that I really wanted to play but needed to get my strength back first, with lots of good Canadian milk and grade A eggs. When he took me bowling and every ball rolled into the gutter, I didn’t mention that the shoes were too tight and that I felt sick from too much of that cheesy Mexican mess called nachos.

  We had to pretend everything was okey-dokey because Dajdža Drago left Bosnia years before the war and Mama called him her lucky star. Mama told his Canadian wife, Sharon, that in high school girls threw themselves at Drago like the harem girls of an Ottoman sultan, but I don’t think Sharon minded because her ancestors were a hodgepodge of Icelandic and Ukrainian and Vietnamese, and Hana said if she is not the most beautiful, then she is the most exceptionally attractive dentist in the world.

  The first time I told Elle about Dajdža Drago, she laughed her head off. You’re shitting me. You have an Uncle Drago? Sounds like a bad book! Like “After his parents’ fatal illness, Cris was shipped off to Uncle Drago’s eccentric mansion, where his only companions were a magic suit of armor and a curious rat.”

  Elle didn’t know Drago actually means dear one, and she never met him because we always went to his house, which he built himself and had a walk-out basement and eight-person hot tub. One time after Mama had some plum brandy in the hot tub, she said in Bosnian that it was funny how Tata always thought her little brother was a big talker who went off to find his fortune overseas and now Tata was supporting his family painting apartments in Dajdža Drago’s rental blocks. Amina got mad and stuck up for Tata, said everyone knew that Tata was the best math teacher in one of the best primary schools in the country and Mama said she was just joking around and if you couldn’t joke with your family then who could you joke with? Tata took his time lighting a cigarette and said even he had to admit that Drago was a force of nature, no more stoppable than an earthquake, and this made Drago laugh and laugh.

  One night, though, I overheard Tata say something else to Mama while they were in bed and I got up to go to the bathroom. It was summer, because I remember Dajdža Drago had barbecued T-bone steaks and then I’d eaten two jam-buster donuts and my stomach was not happy.

  Drago says you keep to yourself at work, Mama said in English. You need to mix with the others, practice your English. How else you going to learn?

  There was no way to see the look on Tata’s face, but he answered in Bosnian as usual. Your brother sucks the air out of the room. I can’t breathe, never mind talk.

  There was a long pause. He’s not there all the time, Mama said. And that’s all I remember because I was too busy on the toilet.

  September 9, 1999

  When I woke up this morning, my head felt like a beach pail full of sand, and I wondered if I just lay there long enough doing nothing, it would loosen up and move into my lungs and pneumonia would eventually take me.

  I told Mama I had a cold and I should stay home from the session today and she lost it. Hana say it’s not good for you to stay in here watching the B-H-S movies and playing those T-B games. If you say you can’t go back to school right now, you go see doctor. Okay? Okay. End of story.

  She says that all the time now. End of story. She must have picked it up at work.

  Work is probably why Mama picked up English so much better than Tata. When Sharon said her Filipino tailor was looking for help, Amina said Mama was a high-ranking clerk for the Sarajevo municipal politburo who’d never hemmed a pair of pants in her life. But then just like that Mama was handling the cash in the shop and Sara and Hana were imitating Mama’s English with a Filipino accent. It’s your turn to bacuum, Amina. Or What’s the matter, Krysztof, you look ready to bomit.

  Tata smiled at this sometimes but I’m not sure anyone noticed but me.

  So I had to go see Budgie, and first thing she goes ahead and breaks her own rules. Maybe she felt bad that she gave me the plague, or maybe she was just hopped up on goofballs. Elle taught me that one in grade nine when she was pretty sure Mr. Reimer sniffed coke in the staff bathroom. She got it from her dad who Mindy says is a pothead, which means he smokes marijuana.

  So Laz-Aaar, tell me about Elle. How did you two meet?

  I told Budgie we met in gymnastics a few months after we arrived in Winnipeg. I didn’t tell her the only reason I was in gymnastics was because Mama had started staring at me when I was in my pajama bottoms waiting for girls to get out of the bathroom. She was worried I was getting bucmast, or chubbo, thanks to all those dinners at Dajdža Drago’s.

  The thing is, Mama always joked that she came from a long line of slim and stylish Europeans who would rather chain-smoke than carry a few extra pounds. She said that if her mama hadn’t married into a cinema dynasty, she could have been a movie star. And when I think about it, her worrying about us putting on what Elle called good ol’ North American chub was the first sign that things were going to be okay with Mama. Like for as long as I can remember, she touched up her lipstick after she ate. But once we were in Winnipeg, she didn’t do it anymore.

  Or she didn’t seem to care if Amina chewed her nails. Or if Tata wore Dajdža Drago’s cast-off white sweat socks inside the handmade European loafers she bought him before the Chetniks set up a base on the Olympic ski hill.

  Then one day she started stalking neighbors at the apartment mailboxes, asking them if they knew any place nearby for her children to get the exercise. Then she came home and told us about this wonderful Canadian thing called community clubs. She actually signed Sara up for gymnastics and me for karate and for a while I thought about how I was going to karate chop Aidan Snow who kept talking to me with a cartoon Russian accent. But then it turned out Sara was too old for the program and karate involved a lot of yelling and strange breathing led by a guy who made Dajdža Drago look like a little girl.

  The first thing Elle ever said to me was You go to my school. You’re in Ms. Atkinson’s class.

  I didn’t recognize her at all but I said Yeah like it was obvious she wo
uld know that about me. I didn’t say yes, like Amina, but the shortened English Sara was working on. Good, instead of I am fine. Done, instead of I am finished. Gotcha, instead of I understand.

  Then Elle said, Somebody told me you have shrapnel in your skull. I told her I didn’t and she said, I know. People are such liars.

  The only other boy in our gymnastics class was a figure skater who left after the first half hour. Elle told me later that he told her he wouldn’t be coming back because he needed more of a stretch class with more challenge, which meant we all sucked and he was a competition-obsessed snob. She said with him gone, the only ones left were a giant ectomorph (me), a giant endomorph (her), and a bunch of regular little pussies.

  Mama is yelling to me and Tata that it’s supper as if we all still eat together instead of just three of us staring at our plates and pretending we didn’t wish we were somewhere else.

  I told Budgie that later that week I had a hall pass to go to the bathroom and Elle was sitting on the hallway floor outside her classroom. Her legs were spread out like Hana’s old Serbian rag doll and she was scraping nail polish off her thumbnail with her teeth. I laughed too loud, she said, and I stopped and stared like an idiot. That’s why I’m here, she said. I laughed too loud. I said, I see, and walked away, because I really had to go.

  I didn’t tell Budgie that I remember sitting on the toilet thinking I should have said oh, instead of I see, or even better, that sucks, which I’d just learned from Sara.

  I told her Elle came over after the second gymnastics class. We were standing watching the other girls inching across the balance beam because Elle said she’d already had her turn even though she hadn’t. She asked me if we had a VHS player, and we did, because Dajdža Drago and Sharon renovated their rec room and gave us their old one. So Elle marched up to Hana, who was on pickup duty even though the community club was only four blocks away from our apartment, and asked if she could come for a play-date after.

  Hana looked at me like I had any idea. A what? she said in Bosnian. What does this girl want? She told Mama later that she thought Elle was asking me out. Eventually Mindy showed up looking the same as always, like she just rolled out of bed and sipping what she called her overpriced, overroasted cup of addiction.

  She’d like to visit with your son this afternoon, she said to Hana.

  I told Budgie that Elle pretty much talked without stopping from the minute she walked in the door. My dad says apartments are better because urban sprawl is killing us. But that’s just because he can’t afford a house and a yard and the whole enchilada. You have a bigger living room but we have a dishwasher. The worst thing about our place is that the elevator smells like feet.

  She said all this while picking through the girls’ mess of fake leather heels at the front door or poking at all the wet tights drying on our kitchen chairs like snakes or opening all the mascara tubes I always had to pick up when they rolled off the bathroom counter.

  Mindy says it’s hell being a woman, which is why I’m not buying in. I refuse to be a victim of my own making.

  It turned out her VHS machine was on the fritz so she brought a movie that Mindy had just picked up at Liquidation World for a steal and I tried to pretend I knew what she was talking about. She even brought popcorn, except we didn’t have a microwave, which she thought was amazing. I think Sara and Mama had gone for groceries and Hana was pretending to read a textbook at the kitchen table, but Amina and Tata sat down to watch for a while.

  Which the one ess Beethoven? Tata asked in English.

  The dog, Elle said.

  The dog? Tata asked.

  That’s the joke, I said in Bosnian.

  When Mama got home, she asked us if we’d offered Elle some juice or milk or tea and then whacked me and Tata on the back of the head because we hadn’t. When Mindy came to pick up Elle an hour late, Mama wouldn’t hear of any apologies. My son has no bisitors very often yet. It good she come, it good she stay.

  It wasn’t until they were gone that the claws came out, as Elle would say. Mama wondered why Canadian women thought it was okay to walk around like they were in their pajamas. Then she asked how I could have found this girl at the gym club because she was so bucmast.

  I told Budgie this meant fat and she said she had to cut our time a little short because she had to pick up her daughter.

  * * *

  —

  Back then, Elle was not just bucmast. She was debeo. And that first day she came over, I was thinking about how to get rid of her before she even left. But it still bothered me, what Mama said. Maybe I didn’t know yet that Elle didn’t care what anyone thought of her. That she could look after herself.

  She says she refuses to be a victim of her own making, I told Mama and the girls.

  And they all looked at me like I was talking Swedish.

  September 14, 1999

  Budgie’s partner and their little girl have the plague now. Elle says when people say “partner” they usually mean same-sex, but I doubt it, because Budgie wears a wedding ring and seems the type to say it no matter what. She wasn’t snuffling anymore. She just looked like Mama after a night of shelling.

  Back in Sarajevo, I hated sleeping in the stinky cellar. Afterwards my ears would ring and one time at breakfast I told Mama that she looked old and she smiled like everything was okey-dokey and Amina said it was just because she had her period. I used to think that getting your period was something like diarrhea, because it gave you cramps and made you spend a lot of time running to the bathroom.

  Budgie wanted to know more about Elle and I told her she stopped showing up at gymnastics because she decided that organized activities weren’t for her. She said she didn’t need to be so-called instructed by some pimply teenaged gymnast who was born to be compact and muscular, and that someone who was a natural had no idea how to teach someone like her, who was not.

  After Elle quit, the bendy girls at gymnastics kind of clumped together like I was a lion and they were a herd of antelopes, even though it’s the female lion who does the hunting.

  But Elle would keep popping up at school, answering questions I hadn’t asked her. Hey, Cris? It’s Ms. Atkinson. I heard you say, Mrs. Atkinson. It’s Ms. Atkinson.

  Or she’d find me in the cafeteria. They say people overeat to fill a void but I don’t have a void. I just enjoy life. I want it all, baby.

  Or This taco salad probably has more calories than fries. But I don’t care. It’s the best thing on the menu.

  I never tried anything on the menu because Mama sent plastic containers filled with noodle soup or beef goulash or sometimes cevapi made with store-bought sausage and pita. Or sometimes Elle came by my locker and fiddled with the lock like she might guess the combo. Jimmy says men who grow up with a lot of women are less hung up on all that macho crap. I told her that all my sisters talked about was what the dry Winnipeg weather did to their hair or how much they missed so-and-so, who was dead or still living in hell or off in New Zealand where they’d never see them again. Or they had arguments over whose dirty panties were on the floor or how Amina/Hana/Sara could say this or that when she knew damn well it made Amina/Hana/Sara spit nails, and Elle said, Trust me, Jimmy says you’re going to thank them one day.

  Elle acted like it was a given that I would want to hang out with her. I’m going to my dad’s in BC for a month or so. Mindy wants me to take homework this time, but if I don’t do it she won’t say boo. She sucks at follow-through. So if you’re wondering where I am, that’s the story.

  While she was gone I actually sort of made friends with a guy called Brandon, who said he was Hungarian but he’d never been to Hungary. He was even skinnier than me and already had pimples on his neck and sat beside me in homeroom. He was always doodling on his math sheets and so I asked him one time what he was drawing, just to make conversation, and it turns out he was crazy for Doom II. He invited me over to p
lay one day, but since I didn’t have a game console or a computer, I wasn’t very good and I think he was pretty disappointed.

  But he didn’t totally give up until he got Quest for Glory IV: Shadows of Darkness, which transports you to the Slavic land of Mordavia, where you have to banish the darkness taking over the valley and prevent the summoning of a terrible demon into the world.

  I started telling him about the siege, all the worst and gory things I could think of, like how freshly shot people in the street don’t look how you might think. Eyes open, still clutching their purse or bread or whatever, they look more surprised than dead for quite a while after. This made him all bug-eyed and impressed, until I had to spend most of the afternoon in the bathroom because I’d eaten too many chocolate-covered peanuts.

  Budgie wanted to know if I felt bad I didn’t have a game console, which seemed like a dumb question. My birthday is on Canadian Christmas Eve and that year, Dajdža Drago told me to name a present, any present, and I almost asked for a PlayStation or even a Sega, which Brandon said were grossly inferior. But I didn’t ask because I knew Tata would have hated it almost as much as he hated his own in-laws in the end.

  Tell me more about that game, Budgie said. Did it bother you?

  This is what happens when you don’t watch what you say. You go back to square one. I told her I never found out if I ruined the game for Brandon or made it even better for him, because we never really hung out again.

  All I knew was that even though we left, escaped the whole valley of darkness shit-show, somehow it still stuck around my family like a stink.

  Budgie made a little mmmm sound, like she’d just eaten a yummy piece of chocolate.

  I told her I was kind of relieved when Elle came back in March because all I’d got from Dajdža Drago was a hockey stick and practice net that took up half my bedroom.