Free Annabel by Kathleen Winter Page A

Jacinta in the morning. He was trying out the difference between Mom and Mommy. His mother was scrubbing hardened soap out of her English porcelain soap dish. “Where is your friend Eleanor Furneaux now?”
    “I think she’s in Brampton, Ontario.”
    “What is she doing?”
    “I think she married a man who makes tires.”
    “But what is she doing?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Is she still synchronized swimming?”
    Jacinta dried the ridges. Her soap dish was one of the few things she had left of her mother’s. “She’ll be in her forties now, Wayne. Like me.”
    Wayne cut around his yolk. If you did the right thing with the tip of your knife you could eat the white and leave the yolk a perfect circle. “But does she go synchronized swimming sometimes?”
    “She might still be interested in it. She might help coach or something.”
    “Do you have to be young to synchronized swim?”
    “You don’t have to be. But a lot of things like that are based partly on beauty. And youth.”
    “Elizaveta Kirilovna is beautiful, isn’t she, Mommy?” They had shared a can of lime drink in wineglasses and watched the Russian soloist together over a bowl of ripple chips. Elizaveta Kirilovna had chosen Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. It had sounded like snow that floats before a storm. Wayne had listened carefully to the commentator’s descriptions of what Elizaveta Kirilovna had choreographed. The commentator labelled and broke down the magic poetry of her routine, naming the parts with names and numbers Wayne liked so much he wrote them in the margins of page 176 of the Labrador phone book. Deckwork eight. Pretzel tuck two. Right left right left eggbeater eight. Move diagonally. Tub two. Front flutter twist. Sailboat. Flowerpot. Vertical spin.
    “Yes, Wayne, she’s beautiful. If you’re not going to eat that yolk don’t let your father see it. Here.” Jacinta scraped it into the bowl in which she kept kitchen scraps for Treadway’s dogs and covered it with a piece of toast crust.
    “I wish I was her.”
    Jacinta put the bowl on the counter and stood with her back to him. “You can’t go wishing that, Wayne.”
    “But I do. I wish it. I would be so good at that. If we had a pool. Maybe we could get a pool. Some people have pools in their backyards. They have them in the catalogue. How do they get the water so blue?”
    “They cost fifteen hundred dollars. And they’re not practical in Labrador. They’re hardly practical anywhere in Canada. Two months of the year. Then the winter destroys them. It destroys them, Wayne.”
    “Do they put blue dye in it?”
    “They have to put a lot of chlorine in it.”
    “If I was Elizaveta Kirilovna I’d get an orange suit. Bright orange. And a gold cap. I really like orange and gold. And I’d like to do that eggbeater thing. That looks great. I could do that here, in the river, in summer. Mom?”
    “What, Wayne?”
    “Would it be all right if I got a really nice bathing suit that was orange, the same shape as Elizaveta Kirilovna’s, instead of swimming trunks?”
    “No.”
    “It wouldn’t?”
    “No, Wayne.”
    “Boys don’t wear them?”
    “They could, if people would let them.”
    “But people won’t?”
    “No.”
    “Even if I wore it when no one was looking?”
    “I don’t know about that, Wayne. I don’t think so.”
    “Would you let me?” He gave her a fierce little look that broke her heart. “I know Dad wouldn’t let me. But would you? You understand, don’t you, Mommy? About how amazing Elizaveta Kirilovna is? I could be like her.”
    “Wayne, your dad was asking me about that. He doesn’t think there are any boy synchronized swimmers.”
    “Maybe there are some and we just haven’t seen them on TV yet. Maybe the boys are on another channel.”
    “Your dad doesn’t think so.”
    “But he doesn’t know for sure.”
    “He’s pretty sure.”
    “But just because Dad hasn’t seen them doesn’t mean there aren’t any.”
    “That’s