Audacious, p.1
Audacious, page 1
AUDACIOUS
GABRIELLE PRENDERGAST
ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS
Text copyright © 2013 Gabrielle Prendergast
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known
or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Prendergast, Gabrielle, author
Audacious / Gabrielle Prendergast.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-4598-0530-9 (bound).--
ISBN 978-1-4598-0265-0 (pdf).--ISBN 978-1-4598-0266-7 (epub)
I. Title.
PS8631.R448A83 2013 jC813’.6 C2013-902108-6
C2013-902109-4
First published in the United States, 2013
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013936062
Summary: Raphaelle’s involvement with a Muslim boy is only slightly less controversial
than her contribution to a student art show.
Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs
provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Canada Book
Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia
through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.
Cover design by Teresa Bubela
Cover artwork by Janice Kun
Author photo by Leonard Layton
ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS
PO Box 5626, Stn. B PO Box 468
Victoria, BC Canada Custer, WA USA
V8R 6S4 98240-0468
www.orcabook.com
16 15 14 13 • 4 3 2 1
For Alice
Contents
Chapter One: Sirens
Chapter Two: Dinosaurs
Chapter Three: Mandalas
Chapter Four: Portrait
Chapter Five: Martyrs
Chapter Six: Angels
Chapter Seven: Juxtaposition
Chapter Eight: Pornography
Chapter Nine: Books
Chapter Ten: Lies
Chapter Eleven: Snowflakes
Chapter Twelve: Black Ink
Chapter Thirteen: Chiffon
Chapter Fourteen: Tea
Chapter Fifteen: Truth
Acknowledgments
chapter one
SIRENS
PARTING
I guess
This is the part where I
Gather with all my girlfriends
To say goodbye.
The problem is that final scene
Transpired already
I’m not sure when or where.
They walked away, one by one
Looked back with a self-important glare,
Or maybe didn’t look back at all.
We don’t slump across my bed,
Wet red eyes and dramatic voices.
I can’t believe you’re moving. It’s so unfair.
I think I’ll just DIE!
Then paint each other’s toenails
Pink and blue with glitter
And blow on them until they dry.
Instead I fold jeans and hoodies
And a pink vintage dress I wore
Just
Once.
I throw away much more.
Garish 1960s skirts and shirts
At the last moment I snatch out the pink dress too.
I won’t wear it
Again.
It wafts into the charity pile, angel like,
For a girl from the East Side, I think.
I throw in the golden shoes too, and hope they fit her
Whoever she is.
Goodbye, I say to her imagined loveliness.
She waves back from her rain-sagging porch.
Goodbye.
THE LIST
Jill and Casey
So long ago I barely remember.
I left them in the sunshine
Under a papaya tree
Holding hands and crying
As the taxi backed down the driveway.
My heart closed like an envelope
In my bony chest.
Later, when I looked down from the plane
A long white cloud stretched across the horizon.
Megan
Of the lilting words
The church that wasn’t Catholic,
And was therefore scandalous.
We rang the bells
And then something unknown
Happened to her father’s job.
They went back to Wales.
Claire, brilliant Claire
We wrote songs about Ancient Egypt,
And cut our own hair.
Her parents divorced
And she got the one in Florida.
Jan, who I never called Janelle
She wanted a boyfriend
And when she got one
Had no time for me.
And the rest
Those girls in junior high
Who only pretended
To like me.
I don’t care.
I let them go, like the vintage pink dress.
At the new school
I’ll start again.
SIRENS: PART ONE
I will leave behind
The paralyzing nightmares
The smell of whiskey
The callous concrete
The sound of a locking door
My insolvent heart
So easily led
Seduced by their Siren smiles
Their swift promises.
Things not remembered
Entirely accurately
Not quite understood
The things I’d rather
Not memorialize in
A journey eastward
I discard, reject
Purge from my mind and soul so
My reinvention
Can begin.
chapter two
DINOSAURS
THE TRIP : PART ONE
OR HOW I LEARNED TO
APPRECIATE VLAD THE IMPALER
If I told of it in rhyme
I could make it seem sublime
The truth, however, was more like
Being skewered on a spike
Or a twelve-hour drive in a hot car with two teenage
Girls, arguing parents and a radio that doesn’t work.
THE HOTEL
Read this
Someone wrote on the Gideon Bible.
It will change your life.
That may be, I write in reply,
And mine is a life
That needs changing,
But I don’t have the time.
Moments later, I take it out again and sign my name
Raphaelle
A Bible autographed by an angel
Has got to be worth something.
DINOSAURS
These are the reasons we couldn’t make the trip in June:
Michaela’s baseball
Michaela’s grade-eight graduation trip
Michaela’s friend asked her to stay for a week
On the island.
Michaela wanted to go to Bible camp
Michaela had to do math at summer school
She’s not stupid, Mom says,
Just not much good with numbers.
She’s quite good with telephone numbers, I say.
Michaela wanted to go to the end-of–summer-school party
Michaela wanted to throw an end-of-summer-school party
Michaela had to repeat the summer-school exam
The more I think about it
The more inclined I am to categorically declare
This is all Michaela’s fault.
By the way, this was an ocean once
Writhing with fish and trilobites.
Dinosaurs splooshed around in marshy lagoons
And ate palm fronds
Or each other.
Now it’s dust and sand, dry and hot.
The dinosaurs left this place 65 million years ago
And never came back
I can’t say I blame them.
THE TRIP: PART TWO
Beyond the dinosaurs there is nothing to see.
Dad’s jokes about cruise control
Make Mom’s lips pinch.
I can see her in the rearview
Staring forward, squinting in the golden light.
But as the land flattens out, I am suddenly free.
A giant dome of blue sky above us, my soul
Expands to fill up every empty open inch
No mountains or trees or oil rigs,
The land feels new
Clean, uncluttered.
Like a shaved head,
Shiny and bright.
What are you grinning about? Michaela groans
I feel like we’ve landed on the moon.
I can tell Mom agrees
But Dad’s fingers tap the steering wheel
He grins too, sunglasses on, and begins to whistle
Delighting, I alone understand, in all the unknowns.
What’s that plant, he says that afternoon
The purple flower makes Michaela sneeze
And retreat to the car, whining
While we finish our meal.<
I savor that purple flower,
And its name I know:
Prairie thistle.
NEW HOUSE
Okay, first let me say: It’s huge.
Michaela and I try to count the rooms,
But lose track at twelve.
Our old bungalow eight blocks from the beach,
The one with the blackberry winding up the porch,
The cracked path,
The tiny tiled second bath that no one wanted to use?
It could fit in the three-car garage.
Heated garage, my father says, ominously.
There’s a suite—not like our old suite,
Low-ceilinged cave
With dewy walls and unknown smells—
A real suite, bright high windows and its own patio.
Mortgage free, Dad says, no more tenants.
Mom pretends not to be pleased.
The girls will fight, she says.
But Michaela is already moving in
Picturing slumber parties, pink-pajama frolics
Late nights of gossiping
Can I have my own phone?
And boys, eventually, one day
Silently, stealthily,
Sliding the screen door closed
And stealing,
Slick and satisfied,
Into the night.
I don’t mind. I’ve picked my room.
A gabled loft above the attached garage.
The “bonus room.”
It has its own narrow staircase,
With a door at the bottom.
We could put a bathroom up here
Dad says about a giant closet.
Yes, please, I say.
Even Mom laughs.
There’s a window, facing east.
I can see the freeway and the prairie beyond.
The horizon, my long-lost newfound friend.
I make a vow.
At least once a month
I will watch the sun rise.
CORN: PART ONE
The next day, a guy arrives
Tools jangling
And tears apart the giant closet
Business is slow, he tells my father
Which is why he could come today.
Michaela takes a bus to a paint store
By the end of the day the suite is as pink
As the inside of a watermelon
And a trellis of golden vines
Is winding across the walls
At noon, our furniture arrives.
My bed won’t fit up the narrow stairs
Within seconds, Michaela has claimed it.
A hammock, maybe, Dad suggests.
Mom phones a futon store.
Dad and I set out
Like consumer Argonauts
The empty car expectant
We will stop for groceries on the way back.
The futon store is over the train tracks,
Past the exhibition ground, the football stadium
And rows of drooping houses
Sweating in the heat.
Dad pulls over and buys corn
From a flatbed truck in someone’s yard.
My brother’s farm, the tanned kid says, pocketing coins.
A skinny pregnant girl stares at me from the front door.
She’s my age or younger.
Her black hair wisps across her face
In a light summer breeze.
The futon fits in the car,
Folded like an origami crane.
The groceries pile on top
They are un-exotic and, Dad says,
Expensive.
I think of the pregnant girl
The tanned kid
And his brother
And hope they eat some corn.
TWO MORE DAYS
Two more days until school, huh Rah Rah?
Dad’s nickname for me sounds, as always, like a cheer.
Sis-boom-bah! Rah rah rah!
A better name for Michaela in my opinion.
Still, he calls her Me Me
Which also seems to fit.
Two more days.
I nod silently
And history hangs between us.
New schools, full of promise.
A bloody nose
An empty bottle
A locked steel door
A letter sent home in a sealed envelope
Which I tore open
Right in front of that self-righteous blowhard.
The look on his face still makes me smile.
Raphaelle
Is not adjusting well
We think some therapy would be swell
Or maybe drugs those often work
For those whose teacher is a jerk
Without treatment she may go berserk.
The letter didn’t rhyme.
That part I made up.
NEW SHOES
Michaela’s feet have grown.
To keep the peace, I get new shoes too.
We trundle to the mall
Dad wanders around looking for the pay-parking
meter
Heat dazed
Until he realizes parking is free.
We deposit him in the coffee shop,
Like a child to day care
Michaela and I take our fifty dollars each
She bolsters hers with pocket money
And birthday money
And buys fat white and silver sneakers
The logo gleams fit to blind me.
I take mine to Walmart
And buy canvas ballet flats
Two pairs:
Red-and-gold-striped and blue and green polka dots.
I plan to wear one of each.
With my leftover money, I get my nails painted black.
Only when we get home
Does Mom remember
We’ll need snow boots.
PUBLIC TRANSIT
I will get my driver’s license one day
But not today.
Today I practice getting to school.
We have made a decision, my parents and I
Michaela will go to the Catholic Girls School
Wear the knee-length blue pinafore
The gray cardigan
She will be, apparently,
Allowed to wear the blinding-white shoes.
The school is walking distance from the house.
I will go elsewhere.
The Catholic system and I agree to disagree.
And a school full of girls, frankly
Fills me with dread.
I’m going to the public school.
It has an alternative approach,
The brochure says, mysteriously.
The bus stop is outside Starbucks.
Caffeine soaked and foam flecked
I board the number 12
Whitmore, the bus reads.
With more what, I think
Dyslexically.
Then lament for ten minutes
That the bus isn’t called Whitman.
It rumbles past a park, a mall, a church, a parking lot.
The plan is for me to stay on the bus
Let it complete the loop
The scenic tour of town, and get off again at
Starbucks.
But instead I ring the bell when the school is in sight.
Disembarking in the heat, I feel a slip of fear
Alone on an unknown street.
JOHN CRETCHLY COLLEGIATE
HIGH SCHOOL
It screams
BUILT IN 1962!
Low, bland, utilitarian.
Like a cheap frying pan.
The flag waves listlessly on a rusty pole.
I still have Walt Whitman on my mind.
I make a pact with you
John Cretchly (whoever you are), I say
I have screwed around long enough.
I come to you a reformed girl, in mismatched shoes
Who has a softhearted father and a resolute mother.
I’m perplexed enough to try again
I don’t know what you did
To deserve a school named after you.
But now that you are words carved into stone
I will try to learn from you.
ANOTHER LIST
St. Margaret’s Preschool
I wanted to play with the boys
They wanted to see my underwear
Who was I to disappoint them?
St. Pius X Primary
Jackie Wengerwich stole my raincoat
So I put worms in her sandwich
And only told her after she had eaten it.
St. Patrick’s Elementary
Katie LaBelle laughed about my bloody nose in gym
I opened her locker and let the blood drip
All over her best skating dress.
St. John the Baptist Junior High
I argued in class about the Resurrection
