Annabel - Kathleen Winter [25]
“Skaters have men,” Treadway said.
“Skaters?”
“Olympic skaters. There are men.”
“Figure skaters?”
“Even if they are like — what’s his name?”
“Toller Cranston.”
“Yeah. And they’re not all like him. There are normal figure skaters.”
“But Toller Cranston is the best.”
“That’s a matter of personal opinion. Did he win the gold medal? What I’m saying is, even if Wayne picked skating to go crazy over. But no. He picks the one sport anywhere, in the entire world, that you have to be a girl to perform. There are no boys in synchronized swimming, right?”
“I hadn’t thought of it.”
“Just cast your mind.”
“I’m not sure.”
In his own bed Wayne looked at the broken ceiling tile, which he knew had only 209 holes in it instead of the 224 in all the others, a fact he had discerned the time he had croup when he was seven and had to stay in bed nine days. He lay picturing the swimsuit of Elizaveta Kirilovna, the soloist for the Russian team. It was the first time he had wished he lived somewhere other than Croydon Harbour. All over the world, his mother had told him, there were swimming pools. Even in St. John’s.
“Mom?” he asked 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.