Children's Games

She drowned - just at the end of the laneway, by the property line really, between our yard and the one next door. I guess she was playing by the drainage ditch which ran along the side of the street and under the laneways in those days. Ours was a new subdivision. We didn’t have sidewalks at that point. She was just little, 24 months maybe. I remember she had a pink snowsuit. Soft pink, like a flower. She was so blond and fair. They were German, that family – her family. I must have walked right past her on my way home from school that day, but the snow banks were about six feet high and the spring thaw made everything slippery and slushy. Plus I was shepherding my little brothers, all three - no easy task.

 

The winter before I’d pulled a skater out of the canal after she went through the ice. Everyone panicked – I did too - I wanted to run like the rest of the kids but I didn’t.  Instead I got a hold of myself and  convinced a boy to lend me his hockey stick. Then I lay down on the ice and inched towards the girl. We lay there talking and shivering, each holding on to an end of the stick,  trying to find some firm ice. She was crying. Another kid went through the ice because he wouldn’t lie down. Finally an adult came and we could get up on our feet without too much danger.

 

And the next summer I would save my bratty brother from drowning in the ocean – because no one else would. He was always playing tricks. He thinks I’m stupid, but he’s the one who’s stupid. No one believed he was in trouble, but I knew.

 

So I should have saved her as well, the little pink snowsuit girl. She must have just lost her balance. She could barely walk. She must have fallen face first into that cold frozen slush and wondered what was going on until she stopped…wondering. She’d have been the easiest to save. She couldn’t have weighed much and all I would have had to do was stand her upright.

 

Why would a two year old have been out on her own?

 

They kept a Doberman, that family. Often you would see the child outside with just the dog, dark and feral, trembling with elegance. It was so highly strung it seemed to jump at us before we even thought about moving.

 

Years later, in France, I would get to know another German, a lady, three times a widow, a dangerous woman you might say. She kept a Doberman that would only respond to her voice. She didn’t understand why people were reluctant to visit her. We didn’t have cell phones then so would enter her property through a large iron gate and then try to dash up a delightful little rockery path to her door before Olga, the Doberman, dashed down to greet us on the growl.

 

I painted a pretty good portrait of the two of them, I called it “Helga & Olga”. All I had to do was have a nicely chilled bottle of rosé ready for her when they came to pose. She preferred Côte de Provence. She often said that I had saved her from drowning, in her sorrows I suppose. But then her sewing machine disappeared and she thought I had taken it. Then little things in her house started to get broken, and she drifted into another world. My friends said this was par for the course. Her life had been difficult, a little too much to bear and I wasn’t to feel that it was my fault. She may never have even had a sewing machine, and her maid was notoriously clumsy.