One

My mother says that if I don’t learn to sing “Chaban,” she’ll go to her grave with a broken heart. She says it a few times – over breakfast; when we’re in the kitchen making supper; right before bed – but I ignore her. Once, while she’s asking me to sing with her, Mom’s voice cracks as though she’s about to cry. I pretend that it doesn’t bother me. I roll my eyes, leave the room.

Usually, when Mom decides that it’s time for me to learn a new song, the two of us sit at the piano with her little yellow songbook, Let’s Sing Out In Ukrainian! Zaspivayemo Sobi! There are more than a hundred songs in the book, complete with music and lyrics. Together, we scan the index until she finds a title that she knows from when she was a girl. Then I sight-read the melody on the piano while she sings along. I can sound out the Cyrillic letters on my own but it’s easier if I hear her sing the words. She sings a line and I repeat it until I get the hang of it. Eventually we sing the whole song in unison from beginning to end. Sometimes Mom sings harmony. Her harmony always gives me the shivers.

Things are different, though, since Dauphin. Two weeks ago, after we got home – while we were unpacking the motorhome, actually – I told Mom and Dad that I quit. Simple as that. No more Ukrainian dancing, no more Ukrainian singing.

Now, Mom is doing everything she can to change my mind.

At first, she and Dad both tried to talk me out of quitting Ukrainian dancing. They came up with all sorts of reasons for me to go back in September. I’d miss my friends. Dancing is good exercise. Wouldn’t I feel bad not performing at the annual Pyrohy Supper and in the Spring Concert? I told them my knee hurts too much – which isn’t true. As long as I wear my tensor bandage, my knee feels fine. But the thought of dancing again – in the same group as Carla Senko – makes me sick to my stomach. It’s bad enough that I’ll have to see her every day once school starts again. The thought of singing is even worse. It would be Dauphin all over again each time I opened my mouth.

Dad said that I’d come around. “Leave it alone,” I overheard him tell Mom one night. “Just give her time.”

Mom is too impatient to wait, though, and I’m too stubborn to give in.

So she tries bribing me to learn “Chaban,” and when that doesn’t work she tries other tactics. I find her at the piano one Saturday afternoon with her little yellow songbook open to “Chaban.” Listening to her hum the tune of “Chaban,” seeing her struggle to plunk out the melody with her right hand, I get a lump in my throat. Mom has always wanted to play the piano, but she’s never learned how. When Sophie and I started piano lessons with Simone, Mom tried to learn with us. While we practised our beginner pieces, she sat beside us on the piano bench, watching our fingers. Only she couldn’t keep up. We learned too fast, and she never got past the first few songs.

I know what she’s trying to do. She wants me to feel sorry for her. I’m supposed to just plop down next to her like old times, like nothing has changed. But she wasn’t onstage in Dauphin. She doesn’t know what it was like. She didn’t have to stand there while the adjudicator placed the gold medal around somebody else’s neck. She didn’t hear Corey playing our song to Carla, or watch Corey kissing Carla, or listen to Carla laughing. I don’t care how badly Mom wants me to sing. My singing days are over.

•••

The truth is, everything has changed since Dauphin. Normally, by the end of August, I can’t wait for school to start again. Going back to school is a big event in our house. Sophie, Wes, and I get all new school supplies in St. Paul, and new clothes in Edmonton. Mom and Dad get new clothes, too, because they’re teachers. They go back to school with us. And then there is the excitement of new homerooms, new textbooks, new workbooks. Catching up with friends about what you did during the summer holidays. For the first time in my life, though, when September rolls around, I want to stay home. What are we going to talk about on the first day of school, the kids who went to Dauphin? How we all lost. How we came home with nothing.

Our whole family drives to school together every morning. We live in the country, which means that Sophie, Wes, and I could take the bus to town, but it doesn’t make sense, since Mom and Dad need to drive in anyway. Mom teaches Ukrainian at Glen Avon, the Protestant school for grades one to nine. It’s on the west side of St. Paul. Dad teaches English at Regional, the only high school in town, on the east side. Until grade ten, kids in our area go to the Protestant school or the Catholic schools, St. Paul Elementary and Racette Junior High, but eventually everyone ends up at Regional – which is also Catholic, only there are no prayers and you can choose whether or not to take religion there. This year, Sophie is in grade ten, so she goes to Regional with Dad. Wes is in grade six, and I’m in grade eight. We’re still at Glen Avon.

Sometimes Dad drives, and keeps the car with him at Regional; sometimes Mom drives. It depends on who has errands to do at lunch. Today, Mom is driving because she has to go to the bank at noon. On the way to school, while everyone else chatters about the first day, I stare out the window of the car, wishing I were somewhere else. Anywhere else. St. Paul seems dingy to me, and worn out. Full of old rusted-out pickup trucks with cracked windshields and big cars with broken mufflers. Before we get to Regional, we pass the Co-Op Mall – which is just another word for the Co-Op grocery store – and Peavey Mart, where all the farmers shop, and two farm machinery dealerships. We pass the Red Rooster convenience store and gas station; Senecal Tire; Burger Baron. Nothing ever changes in this town. Nothing exciting ever happens here. There aren’t any nice places to eat, like in the city, or any real malls. We’ll never get a McDonald’s. We don’t even have a 7-Eleven.

After we drop off Dad and Sophie, and Mom turns the car back onto main street, we drive past the convent and the Catholic church near the centre of town. The cathedral is enormous and brick. It’s the most beautiful building in St. Paul – and the tallest, by far. I’ve never been inside it. The Catholic church is for the kids who go to the Catholic schools. St. Paul Elementary is two blocks east of the cathedral, and Racette is just north of it – right across the street, in fact.

And then, farther down main street, just a few blocks west of the cathedral, are the shabbiest buildings in town, the Donald and the Lavoie. They’re both called hotels but everyone knows that they’re actually bars. Any time of day you can see drunk Indians staggering out of the doors of the Donald, and drunk rig workers stumbling out of the Lavoie. It’s sad, and scary. The post office is right next door to the bars. Mom and Dad never let us kids pick up the mail. At the end of the school day, we wait in the car with the doors locked while they go to our post office box.

The rest of main street isn’t much better. There’s Al’s Topline Tackle, with stuffed deer heads and stuffed fish collecting dust in the window. The Boston Café, Mr. Wong’s Chinese restaurant, with faded, handwritten signs advertising the same specials week after week. The bingo hall, three pawnshops, the army surplus store. To get to Mom’s parking spot near Glen Avon, we make a left turn at the ufo Landing Pad – St. Paul’s big tourist attraction, and the most embarrassing part of town. It’s a gigantic, mushroom-shaped slab of suspended concrete with a dozen weather-beaten provincial and territorial flags flying along its back end. The Landing Pad was built in 1967 as our town’s Centennial Project. Other towns built curling rinks in 1967; they built hockey arenas, community halls. We built a Landing Pad, so that if aliens were to visit Earth, their first stop would be St. Paul. I hate it. I think it makes the whole town look stupid.

I wear my new plaid miniskirt and my new red shaker knit sweater on the first day of school but, walking through the main doors of Glen Avon, I feel a hundred years old. All the Desna dancers look like me – tired and sad and old. When I see their faces in the hallways, it’s like I’m back in Dauphin, watching them lose over and over again. Of course, at recess and lunchtime, when they all talk about their summers, nobody mentions the festival. They all want to forget that Dauphin ever happened.

And then it occurs to me that every other first-day-of-school has been the same. I just never noticed it before. Even when we competed and won at festivals in Vegreville and Hafford, we never talked about it at school – not to each other, and definitely not to other kids who don’t Ukrainian dance. Dancing is like some kind of secret that we all keep. Nobody talks about the practices each week, the costume fittings, our new boots that are specially made in Saskatoon. The Pyrohy Supper or the Spring Concert. Some of the boys in my group are planning to audition for Cheremosh, the professional dance group in Edmonton that our dance instructor belongs to, but no one ever mentions it around school.

Midway through the first day of school, while I sit with the other girls from Ukrainian dancing, all of us eating lunch together and listening to Carla Senko boast about how she’s switched from Ukrainian to French, I realize that we don’t talk about anything Ukrainian. It’s not just dancing, it’s everything. I happen to know that Kirstin Paulichuk and Tanya Yuzko go to Camp Kiev’s K-Hi every summer for two weeks where they learn about Orthodox church things, and how to speak Ukrainian and do embroidery and make pysanky. I also know that Henry Popowich speaks perfect Ukrainian because he lives with his grandparents and they refuse to speak English to him at home. I watched Dad and J.Y. spend half the summer making a pich, an outdoor clay oven, in our yard at the farm, so that Mom and Yolande Yuzko could bake bread like in the olden days. But at school none of us says a word about any of it. Not one word.

Glancing over at the Native students in our class, eating their lunch at the other side of the classroom, I wonder if they feel the same way. They must. It must be even worse for them. I’ve never heard them talk about what it’s like to be Native, what it’s like living on the reserve. Do they go to powwows in the summer? Do any of them speak Cree at home? There are five Indian reserves around St. Paul – Saddle Lake, Frog Lake, Kehewin, Good Fish, and Fishing Lake – and we have students in our school from almost all of them. It’s never occurred to me before but – why isn’t there a Cree teacher at our school?

Carla Senko talks non-stop about French class while we eat our lunches. Nobody dares interrupt her because everyone wants to be her best friend. She sits at her desk like a queen bee in her brand-new, jet-black, skin-tight jeans and her pale yellow angora sweater while all the girls giggle and coo at everything she says. Carla says she’s quit Ukrainian because it’s boring and stupid. All we ever do is learn vocabulary and numbers. In Miss Maximchuk’s French class they listen to French rock music and make up plays in French; they learn to play the spoons; and once a month Miss Maximchuk brings in French foods for lunch. Of course Carla knows that my mother is the Ukrainian teacher but she still goes on and on.

When I can’t take it anymore, when I get up to leave, Carla says, “No offence, Colleen.” As though that makes up for every mean thing she’s said.

She’s right. I know she’s right and that’s why I can’t fight back. My mother’s class is boring and nobody likes it, least of all me. I wish she taught something else, anything else, or taught Ukrainian differently. I wish that I didn’t have to be the Ukrainian teacher’s kid. Mom wishes it, too, because she does her best to forget that I’m in her class.

I’ve been in Mom’s Ukrainian class for four years, since grade four. And for four years, she’s completely ignored me. She’s ignored me, and I’ve ignored her. Five times a week for four years we’ve been in the same classroom, each pretending that the other doesn’t exist. I’m afraid that if open my mouth, I’ll accidentally call her “Mom” and get teased for it. She’s afraid that if she calls on me too much in class, word will get around that she favours me. I have to work twice as hard, three times as hard, as anyone else because Mom marks me harder than any other student. I’m the top of the class but you’d never know it. I never raise my hand, even though I know all the answers.

I try not to blame Mom. I know it’s not her fault that everyone hates Ukrainian. She’d rather be teaching something else. There is no such thing as a Ukrainian curriculum or Ukrainian textbooks, so she’s had to write her own readers and workbooks, and she doesn’t feel qualified to do any of it. She says that she got roped into taking the Ukrainian classes when the school board first decided to offer them because she was the only teacher who had taken a Ukrainian course at university. The principal took away her grade three class and made her do Ukrainian half-time and special ed half-time. Half the reason nobody likes Ukrainian is because we have to sit in the special ed classroom where all the slow kids go for help with reading and math. We feel like a bunch of dummies.

Sometimes, though, I think that if she tried harder Mom could make Ukrainian more fun. At home, we do all kinds of neat Ukrainian things – like singing together, and making pysanky at Easter time. She could bring food in like Miss Maximchuk, or we could all go to the home ec room and make pyrohy. At the annual Christmas Concert, we could perform dances. All of us take Ukrainian dancing anyway, why not show off for the school?

But I know that Mom won’t change her classes, even if I asked her to. Even if I told her that I’ll go to my grave with a broken heart. The thing is, my parents don’t want us to be too Ukrainian. That’s why they never talk to us in Ukrainian, and why they gave us English names. It’s partly why they never take us to the Greek Orthodox church they went to when they were growing up. Once in a while, they talk about how they were embarrassed when they were kids at school – because they couldn’t speak English properly, and because they ate different foods. Being Ukrainian meant being poor and ignorant. The teachers looked down on them, strapping them when they spoke Ukrainian with other Ukrainian kids. Mom and Dad say that they went to university so that it would be different for us – so that Sophie and I could take piano lessons, and Wes could play hockey. So that we could live in a nice house, and focus on our studies instead of farm chores. So that we’d never be ashamed of where we come from.

The truth is, though, my parents can’t forget where they came from – not entirely. They don’t want to forget, either. At least that’s the way it seems. To each other – to my grandparents, and aunts and uncles – they always talk in Ukrainian. My mom cooks Ukrainian food all the time. Before Sophie was born, Mom and Dad lived in town for awhile but they were never happy there. Dad bought land ten kilometres northeast of St. Paul – land that was partly covered in bush and slough – and worked it like a pioneer, cutting down trees, filling in sloughs. Then he built a house with a big garden next to it, so that he and Mom could live on a farm again, and do everything their parents did. My mother’s pride and joy is her garden. She loves to make pickles and jams, pick wild mushrooms, saskatoons, kalyna berries. And she makes a point of teaching Sophie and me everything she knows.

In the spring and summer, my dad spends most of his spare time farming the land around our house, taking Wes out on the tractor, and then the swather, and then the combine. He plants wheat, just like his dad did. During the winter, after hunting season is over, Dad goes to auctions, looking for old John Deeres and other farm implements – the kind his dad owned and used. He buys old cream separators, old wringer washing machines, ancient snow machines – anything that reminds him of his childhood on the farm. There’s no real profit in Dad’s farming. His crops never do well – and, even if they did, he doesn’t seed enough land to make money. He keeps three granaries south of the house, in a part of the bush where he cut down trees by hand and made all of us pick roots by hand. But the granaries are empty of wheat and full of Dad’s junk. Sometimes, before it freezes in the fall, if Mom needs extra storage space for her vegetables while she’s canning, Dad and Wes haul them out to the granaries too.

Although Mom and Dad have never said so, there are rules. Rules that can’t be broken. I get it now. I see it so clearly. We never talk about the rules, but we all know them – everyone in our family, everyone in Desna, everyone who takes Ukrainian. It’s okay to be Ukrainian at home but not at school. At school you act like everyone else. You don’t talk about the stuff that goes on at weddings and funerals, at Ukrainian dancing, at festivals. You pretend that you’re not Ukrainian. That’s just the way it goes.

•••

By the time the news of Dean and Diana’s engagement reaches our household – via the bbc, Baba Babi Cazala, one Baba tells another Baba – it’s almost Christmas and Mom has stopped trying to convince me to learn “Chaban,” or any other Ukrainian song for that matter. Naturally, I’m going to be asked to sing at the wedding, and for the first time ever, I’m going to say no.

At least I think I’m going to say no. Part of me wants to sing, like I always do. It’s tradition. Whenever there is a family wedding, the bride and groom ask me to perform. In fact, our whole family gets involved because we’re the wedding family. We come as a wedding package. Wes is the ring bearer, Mom is the bridesmaid. In the hall, Sophie plays for me while I sing – mostly in Ukrainian, the odd time in English – and Dad is the mc. We’ve done this routine for Darlene and Rick, Orysia and Danny, Paul and Kelly, Sonya and Robert. It’s always the same. If I don’t sing, Dean and Diana’s wedding won’t feel right.

Dean is my cousin, my rich Auntie Helen and Uncle Dan’s son. Diana is the fiancée. The wedding date, May long weekend. At the Hotel Macdonald in Edmonton.

The aunts and uncles aren’t altogether happy with the news. The ceremony will take place in the Orthodox church at Szypenitz, which is where the wedding ceremonies in our family always happen, but we’ve never been to a wedding reception in a ritzy hotel. Plus on the bbc, there is talk of the meal being catered – catered and served rather than buffet-style. Fifty dollars a plate, Uncle Bill has heard, and not one Ukrainian dish on the menu. The bride isn’t Ukrainian, apparently. She’s an Angliik. Not like us. Auntie Rose has it from a reliable source that the flowers will be ordered not from Auntie Pearl – who has a shop in Two Hills and who takes care of the flowers for every family wedding – but from a flower shop on Jasper Avenue. From Auntie Natalka, the first to receive an invitation, comes a report that her son Steve has not been included on the guest list. Auntie Rose calls Auntie Natalka – has she been asked to the Second Day? To the Gift Opening? Auntie Pearl calls Auntie Natalka, Auntie Natalka calls Auntie Marika. Nobody has heard a word about the Second Day. Marika calls my mother, my mother calls Pearl. There is not going to be a Gift Opening. The Angliiks are too cheap to feed the guests a second time.

The problem is that Dean and Diana are breaking the rules. Weddings have to be done a certain way and they’re doing it all wrong. The bride and groom are supposed to invite the whole family – even distant cousins they haven’t seen in years – because otherwise feelings will be hurt. They’re supposed to order flowers from Auntie Pearl because her shop has never done very well. She needs the business. And everybody knows that there should be a Second Day, a Gift Opening, right in the hall where the reception has taken place. The guests eat the leftovers from the wedding supper while the bride and groom open their presents.

This wedding is going to be different and I don’t like it anymore than the aunts and uncles. I just might have to change my mind about singing. I might have to say yes when they ask me to sing – to keep at least one wedding tradition alive. In the months leading up to the wedding, I give the matter a lot of thought. It’s not an easy decision to make after I’ve worked so hard to convince Mom that I’m never singing again. I don’t like the rules – the rules about not being Ukrainian in some places, and being Ukrainian in others. I don’t think they make any sense. But if we can only be ourselves when we’re with the family, maybe we should fight for that. Maybe there’s a reason to fight. If I don’t sing at Dean and Diana’s wedding, it would set a precedent for other weddings. Then everything would change.

One month before the wedding, when no one involved in the wedding has called our family, we realize that something’s up. We’ve gotten the invitation, but Dean hasn’t called, or Diana. Or Auntie Helen, or Uncle Dan. Not that we expect Dean or Uncle Dan to call – it’s usually the women who organize the wedding details. The men just order the booze. Sophie and I think it’s weird, and even Mom and Dad are concerned. They should have called by now. Maybe they’re behind schedule with their planning; they’re waiting until the last minute to ask us. They forgot. It’s been cancelled. The wedding’s off?

Mom calls Auntie Jean to see if she’s heard anything about the wedding plans, then Auntie Jean calls Auntie Helen directly. All the aunts are shocked to hear that Mom isn’t going to be a bridesmaid, that Dad isn’t going to be mc. That I’m not going to sing. No, the wedding isn’t cancelled. But Auntie Helen says that half the marriage ceremony will be conducted in English, and wedding guests must pay cash for their drinks at this wedding.

Conversations on the bbc Hot Line reach a feverish pitch with news of the cash bar. Mom is forced to pull the telephone away from her ear when she calls Auntie Mary. Across the kitchen we can hear the bellowing of Uncle Andy’s voice through the receiver.

“Since when? Since when do we pay to go to a wedding? Pay to go to a goddamn wedding! Who opened their wallets at my son’s wedding? That was a wedding. Food, drink, music. That was a real wedding, a goddamn real Ukrainian wedding. Nai shliak ta ba trafiv, goddamn chewtobachnik. I’d sooner go to my grave than go to this Englishman-wedding.”

But we all go – Uncle Andy included – in suits and dresses, ties and nylons; shoe-polished, powdered, pressed, and high-heeled. Sophie in her orange sundress, me in my lemon miniskirt, bra straps pinned to the shoulders of my blouse.

The road to Szypenitz isn’t long – forty, forty-five minutes – but it’s boring. More boring than ever because I don’t have songs to run through in my head. We drive past St. Bride’s, Brosseau, and Duvernay; past the same country stores that sell the usual hard ice cream and fishing bait. As we enter Saddle Lake, there’s the same worn, weather-beaten siding on the houses along both sides of the highway that cuts through the reserve. The same mangy dogs and rusty cars with grass growing up through their frames; the same kids playing on the shoulder of the road that leads first to Two Hills, then to Edmonton. After Saddle Lake, we make a sharp turn west toward Hairy Hill, where my parents went to school, then west past the old Szypenitz hall – same old graffiti, Grad ’76, Grad ’77 – and on to Szypenitz church, a mile or so down the hill.

As we approach the church, Sophie tries to look on the bright side. She says that this is the first wedding at which we’ll actually be able to enjoy ourselves. Usually, we’re too nervous to eat the wedding supper. I always throw up before going onstage. This time, Sophie won’t have to hold my hair back while I heave into the toilet.

“The fact is,” says Sophie, “the aunts always complain about having to make wedding meals at every wedding, every single one. This is their long-awaited, well-earned break. Auntie Natalka hasn’t said a word to Steve in six years, ever since he married that divorcee, eight years older than him. What does Auntie Natalka care if Steve’s not invited? Plus no one has ever been impressed with Auntie Pearl’s flower arrangements. She’s cheap with the baby’s breath. And, as for the price tags on drinks – we’re not old enough anyway.”

“You’re right,” I say, nodding. “Let’s forget all the trouble and concentrate on having a good time.”

“Let’s party on!”

Together, Sophie and I invent a secret party-on signal: the right hand curled into a fist, the right arm thrust up in the air.

In church, of course, it’s difficult to make the party-on signal without drawing attention to ourselves, so Sophie nudges me with her elbow and then makes a little horizontal punch with her right fist. We sit on the women’s side of the church with Mom while Dad and Wes go to the men’s side. I get squeezed into a pew between Sophie and Auntie Rose. Not the best place to be – Auntie Rose’s perfume is so strong that it makes my eyes water. Once the incense starts, I’m going to get nauseous.

I should be happy that the ceremony is taking place in the Orthodox church. It’s the tradition, after all. It always smells awful, though, in the church, and it’s always gloomy. There is a bit of a draft from the open doors, but not enough of a draft to make the air smell fresh. The church at Szypenitz is so old that it doesn’t have any lights, just hundreds of tiny candles dripping wax everywhere. I feel sorry for the bride. Organs aren’t allowed in the Orthodox church, so she can’t even walk down the aisle to the Wedding March. I’d never want to get married in a place like this.

The choir in the balcony above us is what gets the service started. They sound creepy as ever. They don’t sing, really, they half-talk and half-cry. If you ask me, the bride looks scared as she walks down the aisle, and I don’t blame her. After the choir has done their cry-singing for a while, Father Zubritsky appears in his long, black gown. He comes through the saloon doors at the front of the church. At least they look like saloon doors, the kind that you see in old Westerns. He carries his usual smoking silver ball that hangs on a silver chain. The more he swings the ball and chain, the more the smoke poofs out and up our noses. It stinks. The incense must be rancid. It’s like old mothballs, dust, honey, all mixed together. The smell makes me sick to my stomach, just like I thought it would.

Father Zubritsky likes a lot of incense; his ceremonies are always long and mostly in Ukrainian. I’ve been to other weddings where he officiated so I know what I expect. To pass the time, I flip through the Bible stuck into the little bookshelf attached to the pew in front of me. It’s in Ukrainian, but it’s got neat shiny paper. I flip through the Bible, rubbing the pages with my fingers.

Auntie Mary gives me a dirty look. She’s sitting beside Auntie Rose. It’s Mom, Sophie, me, Auntie Rose, Auntie Mary, Auntie Pearl. In the pew behind us are my grown-up cousins, Orysia and Dalia, plus Rick’s new wife, Darlene. And in the pew in front of us, Auntie Linda, Auntie Jean, Auntie Marika, Auntie Helen, Auntie Natalka. I find it hard to believe that my aunts come here regularly, by choice. My parents never take us to church. To my aunts, the whole place must seem normal.

My mom has eight sisters, all of whom are much older than she is, and much more old-fashioned. With the exception of Auntie Helen, who lives in Edmonton with her husband, Uncle Dan, the other sisters all live around Two Hills and Hairy Hill. They all married farmers. Besides my mom, Auntie Pearl, who owns the flower shop in Two Hills, is the only sister who isn’t a housewife. But my mom is the only girl in the family who doesn’t go to church anymore.

After Auntie Mary’s dirty look, I try hard to follow what’s going on during the ceremony. I just don’t understand why Father Zubritsky can’t be more cheerful. Why does he have to act like it’s a funeral? He talks like the choir sings, half-moaning and half-crying. His favourite phrase seems to be hospody pomylui and variations of it – which, Sophie and I joke, must mean stand up and sit down. We go up, pray silently, pray mumbling, pray out loud. Down. Up. Down, up, down. I try to guess when the ups and downs will come but it’s hopeless. I have to watch everyone else for a cue; everyone else seems to watch everyone else.

Who are we all following? It can’t be Father Zubritsky because he stands the whole time. It’s not the people in front of us. I watch them closely. They follow somebody in front of them. Maybe the ups and downs aren’t so bad. At least I have something to think about for the rest of the ceremony. I want to determine who’s leading us. Someone in the front row, someone who speaks Ukrainian. Someone who goes to church regularly. Someone who must actually like Father Zubritsky.

I think it’s my cousin Kalyna.

I watch her carefully. The more I watch, the more convinced I become. It is Kalyna. She’s leading the whole church. She gets up first, she sits down first – as long as I watch her, I keep in time with Father Zubritsky. I don’t know how she can do it, being not mentally normal and all.

After a while, though, I get a car-sick feeling from the up-down motion and the smoke. Auntie Rose’s perfume isn’t helping either. I lean hard on Sophie to make the church stop spinning. This is the worst I’ve ever felt at a wedding. I put my mouth on her ear to say, “Soph, I’m gonna throw up.” Sophie doesn’t look so well herself. She grabs my hand and holds it, hard.

For an hour and a half, Father Zubritsky talks and wails and out-and-out yells – all in Ukrainian. At the very end of the service, he finally switches to English. English with a heavy accent, but English nonetheless. The problem is that his English words have nothing to do with the wedding ceremony. He talks in English about young people. Young people who don’t go to church. Father Zubritsky makes church a two-syllable word – char-itch – and he says it over and over again.

“You young people,” he booms, “you’ve forgotten the char-itch! You don’t come to char-itch. For shame! You go to your discos in your fancy cars and you forget where you come from. Hospode! Too much English. You young people don’t know your mother tongue. For shame!”

By the end of the ceremony, the bride looks like she’s about to cry, and her parents storm out of the church after the wedding party with frowns on their faces. Auntie Helen and Uncle Dan don’t look too pleased either, but they try their best to smile at the crowd as they walk toward their car.

The whole thing makes me sick – not just sick, but angry, too. Sophie’s just as mad. And, on the drive from Szypenitz to Edmonton, Mom and Dad talk non-stop about the things that Father Zubritsky said.

“No wonder we don’t go to church,” says Mom. “What’s wrong with him? Senile old goat, making a fool of himself like that. Making all of us look like a bunch of dumb Ukrainians in front of those English people.”

We all cross our fingers that the priest won’t show up at the wedding reception to make more speeches – and he doesn’t.

Which is a good thing. Father Zubritsky would be outraged.

The Hotel Macdonald is a classy place, there’s no doubt about it. It reminds me of the legislature with its ornate ceilings and marble floors. We’re all directed by bellboys to one huge banquet room with plush carpet, a dozen enormous chandeliers, and a candlelit patio. The guests’ tables are round, with bright white tablecloths and huge arrangements of white roses for centrepieces. The head table is long and rectangular, decorated with big white bows and bunches of white flowers and leaves, all strung together with vines – which are real because, after dinner, I have a look at them up close. Besides the vines, everything else is white. The tablecloths, the napkins, the flowers, the bows, the cake. The limo, the tuxes, the candles, the centerpieces on the tables, the tables. And the bride’s and bridesmaids’ dresses, of course – all bright white. You’d never guess that they all spent the afternoon in the gloomy little church at Szypenitz.

Now I’m not sure what to think. The Hotel Macdonald is beautiful. It’s like something right out of the movies. The bride looks happy here, and relaxed. She looks like a movie star bride. But it’s all wrong for a Ukrainian wedding. It’s not the right place for a reception.

The seating has all been arranged beforehand, something we’ve never seen before. Sophie and I sit together – in our assigned spots, at the very back of the hall, behind two pillars and the bar, with the rest of my mother’s family – sipping our orange pops, and sulking. The whole place makes us nervous. Are we allowed to leave our seats once we sit down? We hardly speak, and when we do, it’s in whispers. We’re afraid that if we move, we’ll touch something white and dirty it.

I think that the uncles and the aunts don’t like the idea of assigned spots either. They’re all sitting quietly – barely talking, let alone laughing. Sophie says it’s the white washed atmosphere. It’s all too clinical.

“At a wedding,” says Sophie, “the bride’s gown should be the only all-white thing.”

I disagree. The food, too, should be white, or nearly white. Pyrohy, nalysnyky, holubtsi, pyrizhky. I point to the food in front of us – green Brussels sprouts, orange carrots, red potatoes – and raise my eyebrows. Who wants to eat this at a wedding?

For dessert, we’re served something brownish and semi-sweet and coagulated that looks like a poached egg in syrup. I almost gag. At a real wedding, after a real supper, we get up to stretch our legs. Then we help ourselves to real dessert – squares. Twenty different kinds, at least. Auntie Mary’s matrimonial squares, with dates and oatmeal; Auntie Linda’s seven-layer squares with coconut and butterscotch chips; Auntie Rose’s rhubarb delights, Minnesota bars, and rocky road fudge; Mom’s cookie sheet brownies and poppyseed Pampushky.

At a real wedding, we all sit at long, rectangular tables, wrapped in paper. We sit wherever we please. There are bells, streamers, and balloons, and two big cardboard hearts joined together, with the name of the bride and the name of the groom written in sparkles. Across the head table, we lay a piece of embroidered cloth and, on it, a jar of salt and the korovai, with tiny dough birdies squatting in golden braids of bread. Before the meal, we have a Ukrainian blessing and an English blessing. At a real wedding, Uncle Dave and Uncle Charlie and Uncle Andy take turns going to the bar during the meal, each bringing back to the table a tray of drinks in plastic glasses. From time to time while we eat, we clank our forks against our plates to make the newlyweds kiss. We sing “Mnohaia Lita” for the couple at least two times. And, at a real wedding, as the speeches begin, the men pull hankies from their pockets, so that the women will have something with which to wipe their eyes.

At Dean and Diana’s wedding, we’re too far from the podium to see who is speaking and the pillars seem to block what is being said. Diana’s family and friends are all seated at the front of the banquet hall and each time someone at the microphone says something funny, we hear them laughing, but it’s like we’re all left out of the joke. We miss the Toast to the Bride completely, and the Toast to the Groom.

When a little streak of mauve takes her place behind the mike, though, we all know exactly what’s going on. A little girl is about to sing.

A girl from the bride’s family.

Not me.

I would like to make the secret party-on signal in the little girl’s face, to stop her – or slow her down at the very least – from butchering “You Light Up My Life.” As she starts singing, someone turns up the volume on the pa system, so we can all hear every word of the song. She sings it twice as fast as she should. Of course, I would sing it double-time too if my voice were that weak. Because she can’t sustain a note, she holds the microphone right against her lips, which makes her ps and bs explode. Amateur. When she hits her first semi-gutsy note, the mike squeals. Surprise. Any semi-experienced, semi-talented singer would pull the mike away on the loud notes. It seems to me she’s had voice lessons because she’s concentrating too much on rounding her lips and dropping her jaw and rolling her rs. I don’t think about my mouth when I sing, or my lips, or my tongue. Instead, I tell myself that my voice is an arrow and that I’ve got to send it powerfully and precisely. Her voice is a half-dead jackfish, hooked in the gills, drowning in air.

I should be up there in front of the crowd, not her. I should be singing. I should be singing in Ukrainian. I’m better than her, and I always sing. I want people to look at me. I whisper in Sophie’s ear a hundred times before Mom gives me a poke and a “Shhh.”

It doesn’t matter, though, if I whisper. It doesn’t matter if I scream at the top of my lungs. Nobody in the hall can see us because we’re behind the pillars, and nobody can hear us over the sound of the little mauve girl’s voice.

After “You Light Up My Life,” Auntie Helen and Uncle Dan take a turn at the mike, but someone turns down the pa again so we can’t make out anything they say. They start at 9:36 and talk until 10:17. Wes times them. They talk and talk. All we can hear are boom-booms, lower when Uncle Dan takes the mike and a little higher when Auntie Helen speaks. After ten minutes or so, Sophie and I make our way to the front and stand by the wall, promising to report what we hear to the family. Wes tags along.

Auntie Helen thanks certain people for coming – Uncle Dan’s business colleagues, mostly, who work with him in the industry. The oil industry, she means. Uncle Dan cuts in and makes some jokes about the industry, and some of the people in the front – industry people, I suppose – slap each other’s backs and chuckle. Auntie Helen thanks the world-class florist and the world-class chef and the world-class photographer that they hired for the wedding. In front of the pillars, the ladies wear long gowns and big, gold hoops on their ears. The men don’t wear regular suits like my uncles and my dad. They wear tuxes, like the groomsmen, with real cufflinks. Standing against the wall and staring, Sophie, Wes, and I look like little brown Indian kids, brown from the time we spend outside on the farm. Looking in, from the outside.

Uncle Dan takes over again, describing the difficulties the bride encountered in selecting her bridal gown. Our jaws drop when we hear that she couldn’t find anything she liked in Seattle, Vancouver, Toronto, or Montreal. We’ve never been to any of these places. Uncle Dan says that Auntie Helen had to bring Diana to a designer in London. London, England.

“And, wouldn’t you know it,” says Auntie Helen, taking over from Uncle Dan, “the silk the designer needed was nowhere to be found in the Western World!”

The crowd rumbles at the joke.

“So it was off to the Orient.”

The Orient.

Sophie and I simultaneously turn our heads to look at the bride, whose gown is long and white and has sleeves. From looking at the gown, it’s hard to tell the difference between it and every other wedding gown we’ve seen. Unable to stop ourselves, Sophie and I cover our mouths and giggle into our hands. All the heads at the tables closest to us turn and stare. Auntie Helen’s head turns our way as well. She gives us a horrified look, a look of embarrassment, disgust, reprimand. We are out of place, out of our assigned spots, on the wrong side of the pillars. Sophie and I blush and start to move back to our table. We’ve forgotten to party on. We’ve altogether abandoned the secret party-on signal.

At a real wedding, the band starts with a few old-time waltzes, seven-steps, and foxtrots. After their first break, they play the schottische and the heel-toe, and the bird dance, if it’s requested. Polkas and butterflies just before midnight, when the fiddler and the tsymbaly player are warmed up; the kolomyika just after midnight, before they’re too warmed up with liquor. The uncles take turns on the dance floor with the girl-cousins, half-carrying us as they twirl us around. Once in a while they take their wives for a slow two-step. If the band can manage “In the Mood,” Mom and Dad jive. But mostly the women sit and talk after the meal and the dishes have been done.

This isn’t a real wedding. Because this isn’t a real band. There is no accordion, no tsymbaly. Nine musicians on stage, and not one of them plays the fiddle. Two play trumpets, one plays the trombone; there is a piano player, an upright bassist, three singers, a drummer. I was hoping for the Melodizers from Mundare in their matching black slacks and light blue velour shirts. This band doesn’t have a name, even, and they wear tuxedos. They play elevator and shopping mall music.

When the industry people start stepping onto the dance floor, the uncles gather in bunches, leaning on the pillars, talking quietly and shaking their heads. The aunts cross their arms and their legs, press their lips together. They glance at their watches a lot. For us, there is no dancing.

At exactly midnight, the band stops and there is some commotion on stage.

“The throwing of the bouquet,” Sophie whispers to me, smiling.

It’s time for the bride to throw her flowers, and for the groom to throw her garter. We make our way toward the middle of the dance floor. We’re single girls, after all, so we’re eligible to catch the bouquet. The little mauve girl, too, I notice, is walking towards the dance floor. I’m going to stand beside her so that I can push her out of the way when the time comes – push her hard, so that she falls on her little mauve bum and shows the crowd her mauve panties. It will be her best performance of the day.

Only, she doesn’t stop at the dance floor, she heads straight for the stage, mauve heels clickety-clacking on the hardwood. I don’t think I can bear it. I don’t think I can stand another of her songs. But here it comes, her grand finale, a special song for the special couple.

It sounds like the other song she sang tonight: weak, flimsy, bloodless, uninspired. Like the singer herself. I am your lady and you are my man. Give me a break. She looks like she’s all of nine years old, ten at the most. She’s got nerve. Whenever you reach for me I’ll do all that I can. I wish that she would reach out to me on the dance floor. I’d smile up at her, and hold her bony little hand in mine. Then I’d squeeze. I’d grip her wrist with one hand and her marbly knuckles in the other; I’d pull her down, nose-first, onto the floor, and the mike would be mine. Nobody would take notice of her bawling her bulgy eyes out, her nose leaking blood and snot all over her mauve party dress, because they’d all be transfixed by my singing. I’d sing “Chaban.”

Halfway through the girl’s song, Kalyna appears at my side. I shift my weight from one foot to the other and look for Sophie, who is on the other side of the dance floor, getting us two more glasses of pop.

When the little mauve girl’s song is finished and people are clapping and the band is preparing to start up again, Kalyna turns to me and smiles. She leans over close to my face, so close that I can feel her mouth warm on my neck, and she cups her hands around my ear, as if she has a secret to tell me.

“Mauve is my least favourite color,” she whispers, and then she takes my hand in hers and twirls me around. “They’re crazy, all of them, crazy crazy. You should be singing, Colleen. Sing a Ukrainian song. Sing now! Sing for me, Kalyna!”

But Kalyna’s wrong. There’s no room for my voice here, and no place for a Ukrainian song. The rules have all changed.

You’d have to be crazy not to see it.