Liddy O'Dowd's Photobooth - Sarah Mitchell
Gabrielle Nowicki
Sarah Mitchell
Sarah keeps to herself. She lives alone in the farmhouse she was born in, on the Eighth Concession about half a mile west of town. She’s the daughter of Walter Mitchell, who was one of the local scrap dealers. When Walter’s health failed, Sarah stayed home to care for him and when he died she took over the scrap business. Don’t go to Sarah expecting a deal, she’s fair but if you rub her the wrong way (which is easy enough to do) she’ll nickel and dime you to death.
Sarah is the youngest of eight kids in the Mitchell family. She’s the only girl, well sort of… she’s always been a tomboy. When Sarah was 4 years old, her mother ran off and so her dad raised her. The Mitchell boys were rough and got into a lot of trouble.
She was in my grade at school. She was puny. I don’t think I ever saw her in a dress even though we went to the Catholic school and the dress code said that girls had to wear dresses. In the winter, we used to wear pants under our dresses to keep warm and as dumb as it seems, they didn’t mind what else you wore, as long as you had a dress on top. Well, Sarah didn’t even bother with a dress. Somehow she got away with it, either because no one wanted to cross the Mitchells the wrong way or they figured that Sarah might as well be a boy because she was tougher than most of the boys in our school.
The kids used to tease her, they called her Scrap, because she was small, because of what her dad did for a living and because she was always getting into fights. They said that she never wore dresses because all she had to wear were her brothers’ hand-me-downs and her dad was too poor to buy her one. Sarah didn’t care and had the last laugh because at least she didn’t have to wear a dumb dress.
In grade eight, no one asked Sarah to the graduation dance and nobody really gave it any thought. The night of the dance, Sarah shocked us all and showed up on her own, wearing the plainest blue cotton dress from the Stedman’s dress rack. You could hear a penny drop in the gym when everyone saw her. The dress was too big, and it looked like she’d tried to trim her own hair. Someone laughed and then the rest of the gym joined in. Sarah ran out of the gym and down the seniors’ hall.
I left the gym and followed her. I found her in the girls washroom, crying in a stall. I’d never seen Sarah cry before or since then. I took my curling iron out of my purse and plugged it in. I took the sash from my own dress and cinched the baggy dress in at her waist. Then I curled her hair to hide the crop marks. When I had finished, she looked at her reflection in the mirror but I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Then we went back to the gym, everyone had forgotten about Sarah’s arrival.
Years later, when my grandfather passed away and we had to clear out the junk behind his barns. I took the heap down to Sarah’s scrap yard. Sarah never ever looks anyone in the eye, but this time, she looked right at me and thanked me. She said that of all the kids she knew when she was growing up, I was one of very few who were ever nice to her and that she’d never forget what I did for her on graduation night.
True to Sarah, she didn’t give me a break on the price she paid for the junk, but she was fair. Sometimes when I see her in town, she’ll cast a quick glance towards me and give a small nod.
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