Fall On Your Knees by Ann-Marie Macdonald

Author:Ann-Marie Macdonald [Macdonald, Ann-Marie]
Format: epub
Published: 2010-10-16T20:00:00+00:00

Every night, when the last drunks are being peeled off the floor and deposited outside, Frances passes through the tired curtains to the back room and changes. One night, early in her career, she tiptoed up the back stairs and discovered her Aunt Camille sitting in a kitchen, playing solitaire under a dim yellow bulb. Again Frances was struck sad by the sullen heap so like and unlike Mumma. Camille was too absorbed in her cards to notice Frances peering around the doorjamb. Frances watched Camille sip her tea and cheat.

Frances can't help but wonder how Camille wound up here, married to Jameel. But then, look where Mumma ended up. Maybe Camille eloped too. Frances's reflections on the subject of romance are summed up by the last scene of Pandora's Box: when Louise

Brooks finally gives it away to a fella for free, he ups and kills her.

Frances has no desire to penetrate any further the shabby mystery of Aunt Camille, so she hasn't repeated her foray into the upper domestic reaches of the speak. Come closing time she removes her costume among the crates and kegs of the chilly back room and washes her face and hands at the pump. She never washes the

costumes. She climbs into her beige woolen stockings, her black button boots, Girl Guide uniform and beret, and heads back to New Waterford.

Lily is always faithfully at the window, ready with the sheet, even though Daddy never gets home before Frances on weekends anymore. James doesn't want to be there when Frances "sneaks" in or out. He doesn't want to know where she goes. In the mornings he glances into her room, half expecting to find her gone. Run off with a man, perhaps. Perhaps dead in a ditch.

"Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair!" rasps Frances, and Lily lowers the knotted bedsheet. Frances is usually fairly sober by the time she climbs in the window, unless she has nicked a jar for the road.

"Want a sip, Lily?"

"No thank you."

"C'm'ere, dollface." Lily steps onto Frances's feet and they spin about while Frances sings, ""Let's dance, though you've only a small room, make it your ballroom, let's dance"--"

Mercedes stands in the darkened doorway, spectral in her white nightgown.

"Join me in a nightcap, toots?" "Frances, you're drunk."

Frances rattles, "The-sheet-is-slit-who- slit-the-sheet-whoever-slit-the-sheet-is-a-good- sheet-slitter. Say it fast, Lily."

"Frances, it's time to go to bed." Mercedes tries to sound calm and bossy at the same time.

"Piss on you, sister." Frances laughs. Occasionally, if she's feeling up to it and Frances is sufficiently intoxicated, Mercedes will seize her round the waist, carry her to the waiting tub and bathe her forcibly, uniform and all. Otherwise Frances would not be fit to live with, for she only ever washes her face and hands. And she never washes her uniform. Mercedes rifles the Guide pouch in search of soiled hankies but finds only a dirty white glove.

"Where's your other glove, Frances?" "I only use one."

"Oh. Well, it may as well be clean." Mercedes wrings it under the hot water, asking, "Isn't it rather small for you now?"

"It does the trick.

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