This dance works best if you are buxom but anyone can do it, it’s that kind of dance. And although officially a man is supposed to lead a line of pretty girls, the dabke is for everyone. At weddings, at baptisms, with children, grandmothers, anyone. That’s why the eyes are so important. Because the whole point of the dabke is to get up and do it in the centre of the gathering, where you acknowledge everyone until you pick out the person you will invite into the dance. Then you lower your arms towards them, hands still weaving to the music, and you lure that person until they get up and join you because they can’t refuse. Then they become the centre.
The dabke is all about hips and breeze whereas, if you find yourself at a ceilidh, Celtic step-dancing is all about feet and knees. Both can be danced in a kitchen by anyone.
The dabke is a big favourite with Frances and Mercedes. They’ll do it as long as Materia can hold up, which, in these early days, is a long time. She teaches them a whole bunch of Arabic songs, as well as the way to wail them while dancing. The trick is that the dancing and singing are unrepeatable. Once you know this, you’re ready to start learning.
When the precious record wears out, Frances innovates with a comb and wax paper to approximate the reeds and strings. Far from thinking it a sacrilege, Materia considers it ingenious, and it is.
Put the shell to your ear. You can hear the Mediterranean. Open the hope chest. You can smell the Old Country.
Holy Angels
Perhaps her requirements were too great, or her indulgence for human weakness too small, for her attempts to form a friendship had always ended in disappointment.
CLAUDIA, BY A.L.O.E.
Sister Saint Monica’s class is decorated with a map of the world, a chart of a volcano in cross-section, a collection of fossils and a colour print of her namesake. It hangs above the blackboard. In it, Saint Monica holds a book open on her lap, but she is not reading; she is gazing off, seemingly unaware of another pair of eyes peering up from the book itself, one on each page.
When she is overcome by boredom, Kathleen’s eyes often stray to this picture, it being the one focal point for covert day-dreaming not disapproved of by Sister Saint Monica, who is given to impromptu anecdotes on the lives of the saints in amongst lessons on the earth’s crust and its chief capitals. The girls all know that the Prairies are the bread-basket of Canada and that Saint Monica was the mother of the greatest of all Church fathers, Saint Augustine. In his youth, Augustine lived in sin with a heathen African woman. His mother prayed for his redemption and one day, when Augustine was strolling in a garden, he heard a child’s voice sing out, “Take it, read it!” It was the Bible talking. Augustine deserted his African concubine, converted to Christianity and became the scourge of fornicators. And Rangoon is the capital of Burma.
This afternoon, however, Kathleen’s eyes are not on Saint Monica’s picture. Kathleen is far far away in the English countryside, where she lives with her widowed father in a manor house —
“Kathleen!”
Kathleen jolts at her desk and looks up into Sister Saint Monica’s towering wimple.
“Yes, sister?”
“What could possibly be more engrossing than the formation of glacial moraine?” Sister Saint Monica does not wait for an answer, but seizes Kathleen’s novel from behind its camouflage Geography of the British Empire.
“Claudia, by A.L.O.E. Who” — scathing tones — “is A. L. O. E.?”
Kathleen feels herself blush. She looks down. “… A Lady of England.”
“I beg your pardon? You have a voice, don’t you?” — titters from the class — “Use it.”
Kathleen looks up,
“A Lady of England.”
“A Lady of England, what?”
“A Lady of England, sister.”
Kathleen swallows as Sister Saint Monica scans the page. The other girls start whispering. “Silence!” Silence. Sister dangles the book before Kathleen and commands, “Share a few gems with the class.”
Kathleen takes the book and bites her lip.
“Loudly and clearly. I for one do not wish to miss a single charming word.”
Kathleen starts anywhere, reads, “‘I often catch a glimpse —’”
Singsong: “I can’t hear you, Kathleen.”
“‘— of dark robes —’”
“Louder.”
“‘— passing across the little open space yonder —’”
“Good, continue.”
“‘— with something of the longing for forbidden fruit.’”
Giggles on all sides. Kathleen takes a breath, blinks. Continues, “‘Doubtless one would get a knowledge of good and evil by being better acquainted with convent life. I suspect more of the evil than of the good … ’” Gasps from the other girls. Kathleen waits, her eyes on the book, please don’t make me continue.
“Continue.”
“‘but Papa forbade me to hold any intercourse whatsoever with the Romanist ladies.’”
Silence, shocked and appalled. Sorrowful sister. “Girls, profit and perpend. This is a piece of unalloyed trash, a libel hatched by a low type of woman whose refusal to publish under her true name testifies to the evil of her intentions. No one but an idiot or a fiend could derive pleasure between its covers; which, Kathleen, are you?”
Kathleen can’t look up. All around her, petty triumph.
She forces herself to answer, which is, in itself, a defiance. “Neither.”
Sister Saint Monica confiscates the book and swishes away to her desk.
Sister Saint Monica is the one teacher who does not subscribe to the untouchability of Kathleen Piper. She has been looking for an opportunity to give the girl the gift of mortification, but it hasn’t been easy; Kathleen is a model student and it is well nigh impossible to put one’s finger on the insolent pride that colours her flawless manners — not to mention the unsubstantiated but unmistakeable whiff of immodesty. “I’ll teach her,” thinks Sister Saint Monica, locking the offending book in her desk.
“She’ll learn,” thinks Kathleen, staring at the inkwell, hot with humiliation. “She’ll be sorry, I’ll kill her with a stake in her heart, I’ll be famous and she’ll be ugly and dead, I’d like to poke out her eye, I’ll show her. She’s not worth showing.” Kathleen bites her lip. Hard. “I’ll show them all.” She feels her eyes brim up. Don’t cry. Don’t. Stare. Harder.
Kathleen glares out the window at the blast furnaces of Dominion Iron and Steel; imagines herself bursting in flames from the stack and soaring all the way to La Scala. Or anywhere, so long as it’s far from this one-horse burg, this wretched rock, these horrible girls —
“I said! Advance to the front.”
Kathleen starts and looks up. Sister is waiting on her high platform in front of the blackboard — Ice Age, Cretaceous, mass extinction — what now? Kathleen slides from her desk, leaving palm prints on its surface, snagging her woollen stocking on a splinter, and walks the gauntlet of female eyes.
“Face the class.”
Kathleen obeys. The next thing she knows, she is showered with scrap paper and pencil shavings, and the lights have gone out.
“Since you’re so eager to fill your head with garbage,” says Sister Saint Monica, “you may as well have a garbage can on your shoulders.”