An Audience of Chairs

by Joan Clark

  Bonnie made up a story about a little girl who fell into a sty and was looked after by the mother pig; Brianna’s story was about a ladybug who got lost but found its way home. Moranna carried an old door she found in the barn up to the attic to give the children a place to work. Edwina had sent a supply of artist’s material by bus: paper, watercolours, pastels and poster paints but the little girls preferred to crayon the illustrations Moranna later stitched into a book, using a darning needle and wool. Paula didn’t join in on any of these activities but parked herself in a lawn chair and leafed through Screen Stars of Tomorrow. From time to time, she wandered into the bathroom and restyled her hair, arranging it into a pageboy like Moranna’s. She envied her employer’s hair, her flat stomach and slim legs; the fact that she looked good even when she was wearing a wrinkled blouse and shorts whereas no matter what she herself wore, she always looked fat. If the children were upstairs a long time, Paula experimented with Moranna’s lipstick and eye shadow; or she went home and fetched a bottle of nail polish to touch up her nails. As long as she was paid, it was no concern of hers whether the children were up in the attic with their mother or down here with her.

  When Ginger arrived on the weekend and saw the books Bonnie and Brianna had made, she was consumed with envy and went to work on her parents to let her stay in Baddeck with Aunt Moranna the following week. When they turned a deaf ear, she threw herself on the kitchen floor and banged her feet while her cousins watched with interest—they had never seen a full-blown tantrum. The tantrum left Ginger’s parents unmoved but the tearful implorings that followed met with success and by Saturday night Davina had persuaded Murdoch to allow their daughter to stay.

  Sunday morning Moranna was at the kitchen sink running herself a glass of water when she overheard Murdoch ask Davina if she would stay in Baddeck with Ginger until the following weekend—they were sitting in lawn chairs outside the open window.

  “Not on your life,” Davina said. “Your sister doesn’t need me. She has the girl next door helping her.”

  Murdoch said he wasn’t thinking of his sister. He was thinking of Ginger and whether she’d be homesick staying here without them.

  Moranna heard Davina sigh. “Murdoch, she’s slept over at Tanis’s three times without being homesick. She’ll be all right.”

  “Even so I’d feel better if you stayed.”

  Davina began speaking emphatically. “Murdoch, I am not spending the week with your sister. When she’s not ignoring me, she’s insufferable. Yesterday when I was sitting here crocheting, she asked me what I was making and I said a doily for the back of your easy chair. She said, ‘You’d put a string doily on an easy chair! What’s next, a lampshade made from seashells?’ Then she barked out that creepy laugh. Do you know what I said to her? I said, ‘You think you’re a genius, don’t you, Moranna? You think you’re the only one in the family who has any creative ideas. Well, I’ve got news for you.’”

  Moranna remembered Davina huffing inside, but she hadn’t known that it had anything to do with her. Her remark about the doily had been meant as a joke, but Prissy Missy didn’t get it because she had no sense of humour. And what was wrong thinking herself a genius? Her sister-in-law was jealous of her accomplishments and talent, that was the problem.

  On Sunday evening, after Murdoch and Davina left, Moranna was putting the little girls to bed when Ginger had second thoughts about being left behind and announced that she wanted to go home. To distract her, Moranna suggested a marshmallow roast and the three little girls followed her outside where fireflies flitted through the summer dusk. While the children ran around trying to catch them, Moranna found marshmallows, coat hangers and a used tire she dragged onto the gravel in front of the barn. Arranging crumbled newspaper and kindling inside the tire ring, she lit the fire and placed a wooden bench between the open barn doors, to provide a shelter for the girls—now that the sun had gone down it was cool and a light breeze had swept in from the lake. Untwisting the coat hangers, she pushed a marshmallow onto each hook and handed them to the children, who sat on the bench in their nightgowns, swinging their bare legs, and holding their marsh-mallows above the flame as if they were fishing. When Ginger’s marshmallow caught fire and became an ashy black, Moranna advised her to wave the hanger back and forth until the marshmallow was cool enough to eat. Soon all three children were caught up in the excitement of blackening marshmallows. The smoke from the fire disappeared into the night and the stars became visible above the trees.

  “The stars are moving,” Bonnie said.

  “The stars aren’t moving,” Ginger corrected her. “The tree-tops are moving.”

  The children continued eating burnt marshmallows until Ginger announced she was cold. “Bedtime,” Moranna said, and after the little girls stopped at the bathroom to wash their sticky fingers and mouths, they trundled upstairs and got into bed. As she had every night for a week, Moranna told the children the story of the mermaid sisters and by the time she had reached the end, they were asleep. Leaving their bedroom door open, she went up to the attic where she had rigged up extra lights and sat at the work table. Soon she was caught up in the underwater world of the mermaid princesses.

  She had finished three sketches when she heard a loud hammering on the back door. She had no idea of the time, but she knew it was late for someone to come calling and rushing downstairs to the darkened kitchen, she saw a man’s face pressed to the window. She switched on the outdoor light and hesitated, uncertain if she should open the door. The man opened the door himself and glared at her, a thick-bodied, balding man with a red, boiled-looking face.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” He shouted and pointed to the barn. “You left a fire burning!”

  Moranna had completely forgotten the fire and it was a moment before she realized what the man was talking about. She remembered that in her haste to put the children to bed, she hadn’t taken the time to douse the marshmallow fire, but she wasn’t about to admit it to this unpleasant man.

  “Who are you?” she asked imperiously, “and why were you banging on my door? You could have wakened my children.”

  “And you could have burnt them in their beds.”

  “Nonsense,” Moranna scoffed.

  But he wasn’t easily put off. Planting his feet wide and folding his arms, he said, “Don’t tell me you can’t smell burning rubber. You better step outside and see the damage you done.”

  Moranna refused to admit she smelled the burning rubber—she didn’t know rubber could burn—and she almost refused to step outside but, recognizing the man’s persistence and wanting to be rid of him, she followed him across the gravel, still convinced she had done nothing wrong. When they reached the barn, he switched on the flashlight and shone it on the melted tire and the bench with its blistered paint, before shining it on the barn door.

  “The fire caught here. You can see the blackened wood.”

  “I don’t see how the barn door could have caught fire. It was open.”

  “The wind blew the door against the burning tire.”

  Moranna squinted at the door. “It doesn’t look burnt to me.”

  “You better look again.” He had a threatening, hectoring voice. “If the barn had gone up, your house would’ve gone up in flames and mine too. Lucky for you I hosed everything down. I couldn’t find a hose over here,” he grumbled, “and I had to drag mine through the hedge.”

  “You’re Paula’s father,” Moranna said.

  “I am, and don’t think I don’t know who you are. Let me tell you, your father will hear about this next time he’s out.” He spoke to her as if she were a child. “Don’t you light any more fires.” He turned off the flashlight. “I’ll be keeping an eye on you, make no mistake. You haven’t the sense God gave a fly.”

  “And you’re a rude, obnoxious man.”

  “Rudeness has got nothing to do with it,” he said and, turning his back on her, stomped away.

  Lottie was right, Moranna thought,
Rodney Kimball was a bully and a grouch. He had completely exaggerated the situation and she had no intention of giving him a second thought. Returning to the attic, she continued working on the sketches, banishing the burnt wood and the melted tire from her mind.

  Finishing the sketches, Moranna went to bed and slept until noon, wakening when she heard Paula downstairs in the kitchen making the children lunch. Ignoring Ginger’s query about the blackened wood, she went outside and dragging what was left of the melted tire behind the barn, she raked gravel over the ashes. Next, she got out the paint left from redecorating the furniture and repainted the bench. Then she painted the barn doors, humming as she covered the evidence of a fire that was better forgotten. The children watched while she worked and were promised that when the “new” barn doors were dry, they could paint on their own designs as a surprise for Grandpa when he came on the weekend.

  That evening after the children were asleep, Moranna returned to the attic and, experimenting with the new set of watercolours in an effort to create the underwater dream world, began illustrating different parts of the story. On key pages she intended to glue crushed shells, a pair of lobster feelers and a braid of tri-coloured hair to provide texture for the book, a brilliant idea she was sure no other illustrator had tried. She painted several pictures of the lobsters braiding the princesses’ hair before she had one that satisfied.

  It was long past midnight and downstairs the children had been sleeping for hours when Moranna was seized by the overpowering urge to add the children’s hair to the painting. Wouldn’t they be delighted to wake up in the morning and see their own hair in the book! Well, it wasn’t a book yet, but they would be thrilled to see a painting that included a little bit of themselves. Carrying a pair of scissors and a candle to light her way—there was no light in the stairway or hall—Moranna entered the children’s room and set the candle on the dresser. Then she stood gazing at the three children asleep on the bed, Bonnie on her stomach to the right, Brianna on her side to the left, Ginger on her back in the middle. What beautiful children they were, how absolutely perfect. Moranna adored her daughters and never slapped or spanked them. When they were naughty, as children will be, she scolded them but gently—it didn’t take much to bring tears to Brianna’s eyes. Other times, too detached for anger, she ignored them until they behaved.

  Holding the scissors in her right hand, she tiptoed to the bed, the candle casting her oversized shadow on the wall. Because her daughters were on either side of the bed, she was able to snip a length of their hair without either of them stirring and they slept blissfully on. Ginger was another matter. To reach her hair, Moranna had to kneel on the bed and lean across a sleeping child while holding the scissors. Added to this difficulty was the shortness of Ginger’s hair, which had been recently cut. As soon as Moranna knelt on the bed, the iron bed-springs groaned and Ginger’s eyes flew open and she saw her aunt looming above her with arms outstretched while on the wall behind a gigantic winged creature was descending, a sharp instrument in its claws. Ginger whimpered, too frightened to cry, and called for her father.

  “Shush! It’s all right,” Moranna whispered. “It’s just me cutting a lock of your hair for my book.”

  “I want Daddy.” Ginger said.

  “You don’t need Daddy,” Moranna said. “Remember the story about the princesses with the braided hair?”

  “Yes,” Ginger said but her lower lip wobbled and she began to sniffle.

  “Shush!” Moranna said impatiently, “You’ll wake your cousins.”

  Ginger stopped sniffling and Moranna went on, “I’m using real hair in the book. I have a length of Bonnie’s hair and a length of Brianna’s. Can I have one of yours?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe tomorrow.”

  Ginger wouldn’t say.

  Her recalcitrance wearied Moranna. “I’m tired. I’m going to bed now,” she said and, carrying the candle and scissors, left the room. By the time she had put on her nightgown and used the bathroom, Ginger was asleep. It wasn’t until she herself was falling asleep that she remembered Duncan hadn’t made his usual Sunday call from Moscow—when she was caught up in a project, she could forget her husband for days on end.

  In the morning, the girls awoke and went downstairs. Drifting awake, Moranna heard them in the kitchen talking to Paula. Eager to return to the illustrations, she went up to the attic in her nightgown and set to work.

  She had painted a scene showing the lobsters begging the King to let them marry his daughters when she heard the children climbing up the stairs. She looked up and saw their faces floating to the top, Ginger’s first. Smiling proudly, Ginger placed a lock of red hair on Moranna’s work table.

  “Thank you, Ginger. I’ll show you where I’m going to put your contribution.” Moranna went over to the painting on the steamer trunk, where she had placed her daughters’ hair.

  “Where did you get our hair?” Bonnie said.

  “There, and there.” Moranna tweaked her daughters’ hair.

  “When we were sleeping.”

  “That’s right.”

  Ginger had told Paula about how her aunt had scared her during the night. Paula wasn’t surprised to hear what Moranna had done because she had already decided her neighbour was nuttier than Bucky Benson, who came to school wearing pyjamas and had to be sent home to change. Paula wasn’t particularly bothered by what had happened. What bothered her was that without being asked if she minded, she was now expected to look after three children instead of two, and to make up for the extra work she would demand to be paid for an extra hour a day.

  Late that afternoon after Paula left, Ginger announced that she wanted to telephone Mummy and Daddy and tell them to come and get her. Moranna put this down to homesickness, not fear—she had no idea how frightening she’d been the night before. To distract her niece, she suggested a picnic supper on Kidston Island. Before going to Russia, Duncan had rowed her and the children across the lake to look at the eagles nesting in the woods on the far side of the island, and Ginger had been taken there several times by her parents. Moranna made a jug of cherry Kool-Aid and a stack of peanut-butter sandwiches, and put a box of Oreos in the picnic basket along with a blanket, towels and bathing suits. By the time they set off, it was as late as five o’clock, maybe six.

  There wasn’t a single car on the road, the last of the weekend cottagers having left early that morning, and Moranna crossed the road well ahead of her goslings, who straggled behind her in a line. When they reached the dock, Ginger dug out the life jackets and buckling up hers and her cousins,’ reminded her aunt to put one on. “I don’t need a life jacket,” Moranna said breezily—when she was on a high no one could tell her anything. “And it will get in the way of rowing.” She lifted the little girls into the boat, where they sat beaming beneath their sun hats, delighted to be setting off on an adventure. They were in gay spirits and joined in merrily when Moranna sang, “Row Row Row Your Boat.” Not even Moranna could claim to be a powerful rower and the boat veered one way and another. The erratic rowing didn’t slow them down, at least not by much. The water was calm and the distance just short of a mile, and in less than thirty minutes Moranna had reached the island and was pulling the boat ashore and lifting the children onto a beach of golden brown sand.

  The beach was narrow, sloping a few yards into the lake before banking steeply, becoming the swimming hole where Murdoch had frolicked with his pals as a boy. Behind it was a forest of softwoods and beside it a swamp of brackish water. On the other side of the swamp was the promontory where the automated lighthouse flashed at night to warn boaters off the rocky shoal. The lighthouse wasn’t large and when Moranna was a girl she had thought of it more as a toy lighthouse than a real one. She still thought of it that way.

  “Do you think dwarves live in that lighthouse?” she said to the children. Blinking against the sun, her daughters mulled over the idea.

  “Little people live there like the old woman in the shoe,”
Ginger said with the authority of the oldest child.

  “Why don’t you make up a story about a family living in the lighthouse for your book?” Moranna said.

  “I might,” Ginger said.

  Moranna was thinking about “The Mermaid Sisters,” vaguely dissatisfied that she hadn’t finished more illustrations. Once she got going on a project, it was important to work on it nonstop until it was done because if a project was left idle, it became stale and she lost interest. To lose interest was to admit defeat and defeat was at all costs to be avoided. Anyone with ambition understood that.

  The little girls were clamouring for a swim and, allowing them to take off their life jackets, she gave them what amounted to shallow baths, holding each of them in turn while they kicked their feet and flailed their arms. Ginger could dog-paddle a few feet on her own but neither of Moranna’s daughters could swim. After the little girls had grown tired of “swimming” and were playing in the sand, Moranna dove into the water and surfacing, floated face down, gazing at the bottom, wondering if she could capture the amber light being poured into the water by the sun. Often wind riffled, and opaque, today the Bras d’Or was flat and clear and she saw three blue-green lobsters perambulating across the bottom four or five feet below. If she could pick one up, she could bring it ashore to show the children one of the lobster princes. She could also pluck its feelers to use in the book. She had no qualms about plucking them. They would grow back, wouldn’t they, like starfish arms? She made one duck dive after another, but each time the lobster scuttled from her outstretched hand, and the largest lobster stood up on his tail and boxed his claws like a prize fighter. There was no chance of catching one without a net.

  She came out of the water and sat on the beach watching the children build a sandcastle, droplets of lake water evaporating on her skin. She was facing the sun, a gigantic peach-coloured beach ball balanced on the trees to the west, behind the farmhouse. She couldn’t see the farmhouse because like the other houses on the Bay Road it was hidden behind trees. What she should do, she decided, was to row quickly across the lake, fetch the fishnet and catch a lobster while the sun was up and the water was clear. There was no need to take the children with her. They would slow her down and without them she would be back that much sooner. Spreading the blanket on the sand, she laid out the sandwiches and cookies and poured glasses of Kool-Aid. Then she set off, rowing and humming, leaving the children stuffing themselves while they heaped sand around the castle, scarcely noticing she had gone.