Free Daddy Lenin and Other Stories by Guy Vanderhaeghe Page B

nothing to me. After some dramatic hemming and hawing, I told her, Okay, it would be all right if she came over.
    Being jilted put me in a bad mood and for the first time in ages I resorted to my father’s bottle of Canadian Club. Shortly before midnight I was enjoying a cocktail when I heard Sabrina’s timid tap at the back door.
    “Come in!”
    I heard some furtive movements in the kitchen, then she stepped into the living room, revealed her surprise. It was the first time I had ever seen Sabrina Koenig wearing makeup. Her sandy eyelashes were blackened with mascara, there was blue eyeshadow smeared on her eyelids, and pale pink lipstick smeared on her lips.
    “It’s my Julie Christie look,” she said with a tight, uneasy laugh.
    “Sure. If you say so.”
    “What’s that you’re drinking?”
    “Rye and Coke.”
    “I’ll have one too.”
    I got up and got her a glass. The forty-ouncer was still half full so I didn’t begrudge her a drink, although I was a bit taken aback she had asked for one. It wasn’t Sabrina’s style, but then neither was the makeup, which made her a trifle weird and scary-looking. She poured for herself a shot of alarming quantity.
    Knocking back her booze, she launched into the story of how she had pillaged her sister Jennifer’s makeup kit, and when she told it, she laughed too much, and in a forced way that sounded nothing like the joyful yelps that Lou Costello’s pratfalls provoked. It was a relief when the movie started.
    For the next hour and a half, Sabrina didn’t say a word, sat silent and still, a stillness only broken when her hand went stealing out for the bottle, tipped it to slop more whiskey into her glass. About the third time she went to that well, I said to her, “Hey, you better go easy on that. You’re slamming it down pretty fast.” But she just ignored me, eyes glued to the screen.
    The British naval frigate collected the child-survivors from the island, the movie ended. “So,” I said, “what did you think of that?”
    She was still riveted on the TV , which was signalling the conclusion of the day’s programming, a flag bravely fluttering in a brisk breeze and the national anthem playing. “I was thinking,” she said in a whisper, “those kids in the movie, they’re like a big family, but then the monsters in the family take control and fuck everything up for everybody else.”
    I had never heard her say
fuck
before, and the two or three times it had slipped out of me, she had said, “Language, mister. Language.”
    “Tell me about it,” I said. “Every family’s got monsters.”
    For the first time in a couple of hours she looked at me, eyes slightly unfocused, her shockingly blue eyelids hanging at half-mast. “You talking about your mother?”
    I said nothing. My feelings about my mother were difficult to reconcile and even more difficult to explain. I loved her, but right now I didn’t
miss
her. I was on vacation from Mother and doing my best not to think about her, about where she was, or how she was doing, because I knew that when she came home, the pattern would start all over again. The three of us, Father, Mother, and I, would have to face the same old devil, our very own leering Lord of the Flies who would be preparing another ambush for us weeks, months, maybe as much as a year down the road. Mother’s mental torments would be revisited.
    “I
like
your mother,” said Sabrina. “I wish she was my mother.” Her speech was slurred and the pitch of her sentences wavered.
    “Oh Christ,” I said, “you don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t even know my mother.”
    But Sabrina showed a drunk’s persistence in getting a point across. “I know your mother. She’s a good person. You know what she said to me one day?”
    “How the hell would I know what she said to you one day?”
    “I was walking down the street and she stopped me. She said, ‘You’re Sabrina Koenig, aren’t you?’ And I said I was. And she