Remembering the Bones by Frances Itani Page A

skirt, and a hat with no veil that could be seen. She was so thin, she resembled a rib that had been straightened at both ends.
    Ally and I had never heard such a fuss. But long before the Prince made his public declaration, I was enamoured of The Princess Elizabeth Gift Book , with its plethora of princesses. The illustrations were of girls entirely unlike Ally and me, and this might have been the attraction. They wore cream-coloureddresses with flowing skirts, their laps strewn with pink roses. There were drawings of bears and dolls and giant puddings. Both Ally and I read and reread the stories and poems, and silently studied the illustrations. Each time Ally closed the book, she returned to her drawings of snow. When I closed the book, I felt as if I had travelled to other lands.
    Come and change, come and change
    Into anything you will
    I recited the lines when we were outside. I loved make-believe, to a point, until it interfered with my practical side. Genes which I believe Case has inherited. Ally told me, long after we’d grown up, that she still experiences a physical sensation when she thinks about our days reading the Gift Book , a deep sense of dreaminess and longing.

SIXTEEN
    I ’ve slept again. I dreamed of Lazarus, of water dripping from a tap. Has an hour passed? A minute? My body is tightening, shrinking from the cold. Clouds lie on their backs like sullen bears. How do they stay aloft? Grand Dan sat in her chair on Sundays with her Bible on her lap and read, “He that observeth the wind shall not sow, and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap.”
    But what is this? Tears?
    Rain on my face. Soft, and oh how welcome. A gift from the sky. It must not be wasted, not a drop. I’ve tried not to allow myself to dwell on thirst but now I can admit how little hope I’ve had, how parched I’ve been. Hold out my good palm, suck my fingers, scrabble for a dry, downed leaf, a blade of last year’s grass, suck the edge of my sweater. A crazy woman I am. When I grope and scrape with my hand, bits of shale loosen around me like handfuls of pennies. But my fingers are wet, my sleeve holds moisture. And I am thankful.
    Little drops of water, little grains of sand.
    How things fly into my muddled brain. I’d heard this recited by Grand Dan at home, and one morning at school I tried to convince Miss Grinfeld that the line was a sentence. She was teaching nouns, banging her pointer and chanting “Person Place or Thing!” and making the class repeat after her, “Person Place or Thing!” She did this for three consecutive days, telling us that the chant would never leave our heads. For the rest of our lives, we would always be able to identify a noun.
    But my words, she argued, after asking me to construct a sentence, did not make a sentence at all. My words had no predicate. She stood over my desk.
    I resisted. Nothing she said could persuade me to understand the meaning of the word predicate. She gave up and turned to the other students. I looked at her back and silently rolled off my tongue, Little drops of water, little grains of sand. I loved the sound, loved the line. Sadly, it did not have a predicate and therefore was not a sentence. I did not like Miss Grinfeld that day. I gave up the soothing sound and went home after school and opened Gray’s Anatomy and stared at the ghoulish throat that resembled my teacher.
    Miss Grinfeld had every country child in her grip for eight years. She filled us with warnings about stepping on rusty nails and the threat of lockjaw. I lived through a mercifully brief period of being terrified that my jaw would clamp shut through no fault of my own and that no one would be able to pry it open, not even to give me water. She did spot checks of our health habits, made us confess what we had eaten for breakfast and admit whether or not we’d brushed our teeth before we walked to school. While we were eating lunch at our desks,she wandered between rows and peered into lunch