Free Leaning, Leaning Over Water by Frances Itani

held in my hands.
    “Mon Dieu,” said Mimi. “If you lose your beads, you lose your luck.” She added grimly, “Maybe somebody threw them in.”
    I leaned over the boat and washed every wooden bead and then I carried them up to the house. Mimi showed me the Hail Mary beads and the Glory Be bead but she did not want to handle them herself.
    “They could keep us safe,” I said. “We could make things up to say over each one.”
    But Mimi had her own white beads, and she did not want to say anything over these.
    Lyd was the only one in the house when we went in. She was standing in front of Duffy’s long mirror. Lyd was the tallest girl in her class at school and at Sunday school. Because she would soon be thirteen, this was the cut-off year for her to leave Stone and start Brick. We’d still be taking the same orange bus out of the village but we’d be going to different schools. We knew that the one-room schools would be pooled together in a new school, but before that could happen the new school had to be built.
    “All I did at Sunday school was pass out animal crackers tothe little kids,” Lyd said. “I get claustrophobic on that stage. I don’t know why they close the curtains.”
    “It’s just babysitting,” I said. “Don’t you give them Bible pictures to colour?”
    “I did,” she said. “Moses in the bulrushes. And while they were crunching their little brown camels I closed my eyes and prayed to God to keep my feet from growing as quickly as my height.” She snorted.
    The last time Father measured us, Lyd’s mark had jumped an inch and a half on the pantry door. We both knew there were genes in the family to be reckoned with—the genes of our Giant Ant, Aunt Lucy King. The two of us were always on the lookout for women with wide shoulders and huge bones. We were on the lookout for Big Feet. We knew that a wild and erratic gene might already have skipped, Amazonlike, into our own bones. I remembered Aunt Lucy in Darley, hooting with laughter as she held up one of her own sizetwelve feet.
    “Where is everybody?” I said.
    “Mother and Father are at Rebecque’s,” she said. “Duffy stays at her place overnight now, but he can’t marry her because his runaway wife won’t give him a divorce. Anyway, the Church won’t allow. Eddie’s playing in the Pines with his friends. He’s trying to prove that Brébeuf was tortured at the top of our road, where it turns into chemin Brébeuf.”
    “Brébeuf wasn’t killed anywhere near here,” I said. “He only canoed past. We studied him in school. He died somewhere in Ontario.”
    “Try to tell that to Eddie,” she said.
    I showed Lyd the rosary. The circle of it was large and she slipped it over her head and draped it around her neck. Thenshe went to the window and checked the path through the field to see if anyone was coming. She began to take off her clothes one by one in front of the mirror. Mimi and I stared. Only the rosary was around Lyd’s neck. It lay heavily over her tanned bare skin.
    “Somebody might come in,” I said. I didn’t know why she was doing this.
    “They’ll be a while,” she said. She was scrutinizing the new patch of hair, the height of her leg bones, the length of her feet. She stretched her neck and lifted the rosary and turned sideways to examine her breasts. Mimi and I looked at each other; she and I still played outside, sometimes, with our shirts off, but Lyd could never do that now.
    “I checked Mother’s name book,” she said. “I looked up my name to see what it stands for. Lyd means the voluptuous one.” She scrambled back into her clothes. “I hate my arms,” she said. “There’s dark hair on my arms. And I don’t have my period yet. It’s taking forever. I’ll be getting it this year, I’ll bet. And when I start, I’m going to call it Jennifer. That’s what girls call their periods when they talk about them so no one else will know. You two are babies,” she said. “You don’t have