Free Walking Backward by Catherine Austen Page A

scrapbooking, but I took classes in computer programming. She said maybe she’ll try that next time. Then she laughed like the idea was just ridiculous.
    You’d think only kindergarteners would need a class in scrapbooking. But it was nice of her to give us the stuff. She said it was two hundred dollars’ worth of paper. I find that hard to believe.
    She didn’t have many stories about Mom. She said Mom was pretty, and she made a face when she said it, like being pretty was just ridiculous. She only had two stories. Once, when I was in grade one, someone’s mother was in an accident, so some of the other moms brought over food for the family. Karen’s mom said my mom baked a couple of lasagnas. I don’t remember Mom ever baking lasagna in her life, so I said maybe she just bought them. Karen’s mom said no, they were homemade. Whatever. I doubt it.
    Her other story was about watching Mom do laps at the pool. She said she couldn’t believe Mom was such a good swimmer. Mom looked like an Olympian, cutting through the water. Karen’s mom stood by the wall for five minutes, just staring, because it was so beautiful to watch someone swim so well. I thought that was a way better story than the lasagna story. I’m going to include it in the scrapbook.
    Mom used to swim all the way across the lake when we went camping. She’d move across the water with long slow strokes, like there was absolutely no chance she’d get tired or frightened in the middle of the lake with nothing to hold onto. She’d be in the sunshine on the very top of the water, getting smaller as she swam farther away, and I’d imagine the hundred feet of darkness underneath her, and all the creatures swimming in the dark. Mom would flip onto her back and wave at me from the middle of the lake. She knew I was a bit afraid of water.
    But I never had a phobia. Our neighbor Mr. Smitts said he has a heights phobia so he knows what it’s like to be too afraid to think straight. He said he wasn’t afraid of heights until thirty years ago, when he took his daughter on a tiny Ferris wheel and freaked out. He’d been up the CN tower before, and in airplanes and on big Ferris wheels, and he’d always liked it. But suddenly that day on the kiddie Ferris wheel, he was overwhelmed with fear. He screamed to get off. The guy running the machine thought it was funny, so he stopped them at the very top. Mr. Smitts tried to climb out of his seat until the guy brought them down again.
    I said, “If you were afraid of heights, how could you be brave enough to climb down?” Mr. Smitts said, “I wasn’t going to climb down. I was going to jump off. Just to get it over with.” If he’d jumped, he’d have won a Darwin Award for sure, because how stupid is that? Mr. Smitts said no one can understand what a phobia is like until they feel it. He said you’re not responsible when you’re in that state of mind.
    I told him about the university student who bounced out the window. He laughed and said that was a good way to die. I also told him about a guy who swallowed a fish on a dare and choked to death. Mr. Smitts said he almost chokes at every meal. I told him to have that checked out by a doctor, because that’s just not normal.
    Mr. Smitts had a lot of stories about Mom. He had so many stories, I think he’s a stalker. He talked all day long about my mother. And all his stories were totally boring. He said when we first moved in, our dog would bark and make me cry. I told him the dog died before I was born, but he said no. Mom used to walk me and the dog at the same time, and I’d fall asleep in my stroller but the dog would bark and make me cry. That was one of his more exciting stories. He had other stories about Mom cleaning the windows. How dull is that?
    He did have one really good story. Once, when I was little, Mom took me to Irene’s Ice Cream shop along the bike path. There were three boys on bikes in the lineup in front of us who bought Freezies for