by Cathi Bond
I didn’t like embroidery. “Can we watch Frankenstein?”
“You have to follow the pattern.”
When she took the hoop out of my hands our fingers brushed. I touched her gold university ring. Mom never took it off. I shimmied across the sofa, burrowing into her side. She was wearing a black turtleneck, matching slacks and a strand of pearls. Carefully, she undid my mistake.
“I hate patterns. It’s way more interesting to invent my own design.”
“If you don’t follow the pattern all you get is a mess,” Mom replied, putting the pillowcase into the box and closing the lid.
This was the first time I’d seen the pillowcase since then, and I picked it up, burying my face in the fabric, but Mom’s smell was gone. There had to be something left. Desperately, I pushed even more deeply into the stiff cloth when something sharp stabbed my cheek and a drop of blood fell. Mom had stuck the needle with the long red thread into the fabric for safe keeping. The drop of blood began to spread, seeping into Mom’s fine green stems. The stain would never come out. Another thing I ruined.
“Maddy.”
Dad stood in the doorway. I placed the pillowcase back into the sewing box and closed the lid.
“It’s time for bed.”
“Let’s watch the news.” I said, patting the sofa beside me. I wanted to be with him and maybe if we were alone we could talk. But Dad just shook his head.
“Brush your teeth,” he said, turning away. I got up, turned off the TV and followed my father up the stairs.
I hung up my good dress, slipped into my flannelette nightgown and brushed my teeth. The doors to the boys’ rooms were closed, but Dad’s was still ajar and the lights were on. Pushing the door open, I walked in. He was doing exactly what I’d wanted to do the day before. He was sitting on the floor of their closet with Mom’s clothes all around him, crying so hard he didn’t even hear me. He looked like a bomb had gone off inside him.
“Dad?”
He jumped up and stepped back. “Why aren’t you in bed?” he asked, shaking his head, trying to find his bearings.
I moved towards him. “I love you, Dad.”
“I love you, too,” he replied. Then he turned me around, walking me towards the door.
“Dad,” I said, trying to turn around to hug him, but he wouldn’t let me close.
“We’ve got to get some sleep,” he said. “Things will look better in the morning.”
Then he kissed me gently on top of the head, pushed me out into the hall and quietly shut the door behind him. When I reached out for the handle, about to turn it, the lock clicked. I sat on the floor, my back up against the wall, waiting, but Dad never came out.
CHAPTER THREE
We were out of school for two weeks. When I came back somebody new walked through the doors. Somebody who had lost the most important thing in the world and had no idea how to get it back. My brain felt like a balloon suspended on a long piece of string, floating down the hall, propelled by my rack of bones body. Every fragment felt disconnected, like the anatomical skeleton dangling in Dad’s office, clickety-clack clickety-clack. Betsy and Brad were talking by her locker. He laughed at something she said. It was so good to see my friends.
“Hi, Betsy.”
Betsy stopped smiling. Brad backed up.
“I’m sorry about your Mom,” Betsy said and looked at her feet.
“Thanks.”
Brad grabbed Betsy’s arm, pulling her down the hall.
“We’ve got to go.”
I was desperate to do something, anything that would trick reality, even if only for a moment.
“Do you want to go to Frenchy’s after school?” I called. “My treat.”
“Can’t,” Betsy replied and they ran away.
All the other kids acted the same way. One day in the washroom a girl I barely knew saw me come in. She gaped and ran out the door, her soaking wet hands leaving tiny pools of water behind her.
Betsy and Sandy were supposed to be my best friends and Kenneth had given me a ring. One recess when I was sitting on the swing by myself, he started towards me, but some kids pulled him back, whispering something in his ear. He gave me a sad look and walked away. That afternoon I went over to his locker and dropped the ring through the metal slots in the door. I could hear the silver as it bounced and clattered, striking the bottom. I didn’t have a boyfriend anymore.
There was no one to talk to. Aunt Anne told me to “soldier on” and Dad retreated to the office. He started seeing patients at eight in the morning, worked straight to midnight and the next day started all over again. One morning I found him asleep on an examining table with an open bottle of pills on the table beside him. The same pills Mom didn’t want to take the night of the dance. They were called Valium. While Dad splashed cold water in his face and brushed his teeth, I straightened his tie. He needed a shave.
“Dad?”
“Hmmm?” Barely there.
“Nobody at school will talk to me.”
“I’m sure you’re exaggerating.”
He filled a Dixie cup with Listerine and began to gargle.
“They hate me. And I don’t know why.”
“Give them some time, they’ll come around.”
No they wouldn’t. Dad threw the paper cup towards the overflowing wastepaper basket, but it bounced off the top and onto the floor. That was another thing that was slipping away. Mom’s beautiful orderly house was becoming a pigsty.
“And don’t forget,” Dad said, turning. “We’ve got church this weekend. There’s a guest preacher.”
I took a deep breath. “I’m not going.”
Now he paid attention. “What do you mean?”
“I’m not going to worship a God who killed my mother.”
When Mom was alive the house was clean and we had good food to eat. She kissed us goodnight and told us that she loved us. Now she was gone and it was as if Dad had followed her. I had to wake him up, make him see that we were still there and needed him. We stood there staring at each other. Eventually somebody had to blink.
“If that’s what you’ve decided,” he said. “You’re a big girl now.”
Ruth was still at the nurse’s station doing paperwork, muttering about how her new husband was going to kill her for coming home late again. Tedder slept on her lap while I leafed through a record club catalogue, checking off the boxes for records I wanted.
Ruth’s eyebrows shot up. “Does your Dad know you’re ordering those?”
Ruth knew Mom didn’t want me listening to rock and roll.
“Sure,” I replied, slipping the order card into the pile of outgoing mail.
“Are you telling the truth?”
“Yes,” I lied. Lying didn’t bother me much anymore. The grown-ups lied so why couldn’t I?
Tedder woke up, snuggling into Ruth’s neck.
“Tell your father I’ve gone home. I’ll finish up in the morning.”
I could hear Ruth walking up the stairs to tuck Tedder into bed. A messy stack of magazines rested in the window well. Since nobody would talk to me, I’d spent the last couple of months reading Dad’s subscriptions, learning about the real world.
The latest issue of Newsweek said there was a youth revolution going on. Young people were fighting with their parents and “the establishment” trying to “make love not war.” They took drugs to “tune in, turn on and drop out.” I wasn’t really sure what that meant, but it was clear that the adults hated what the hippies were doing and claimed that drugs were becoming a serious problem. And then it came to me. I had a dispensary full of them.
I pulled The Compendium off the dispensary shelf and looked up Dad’s nerves pills. Valium could be used to treat depression, but it was especially effective in dealing with anxiety. The book said that if a patient had been agitated for a long period of time Valium could be helpful in returning them to a more balanced state. Dad pushed his way through the dispensary door, searching for urine sample bottles.
&nb
sp; I closed the book. “What’s LSD?”
“What?” Dad asked, looking at me as if I were speaking Chinese. “Where’s Ruth?”
“She had to go home,” I answered. “It says here that the hippies are dropping pills called LSD. Do you have any in here?”
“Dropping?” he asked.
“What’s LSD?”
“It’s illegal dope,” he replied, looking at his watch. “Have you done your homework?”
“It’s all finished.” Another lie.
“You’d better get up to bed anyway. It’s getting late,” he said, finally locating the sample bottles. “I’ll come in and kiss you goodnight.”
The light was still on in Frank’s room, so I just walked in.
“Don’t you ever knock?” he asked.
“Frankly, don’t you ever stop studying?”
I sat down on his bed, examining a model of the Santa Maria that he was building from scratch. A finished model of the Pinta sat on a shelf over his bed. Frank was fascinated by Columbus. Maybe he wanted to sail away to a new land. I couldn’t blame him.
“What do you want?” Frank asked, his nose wedged even deeper into the geography book. “I’ve still got another chapter to go.”
“Why are you working so hard?”
Frank set his pencil down. “Because that’s what Mom would expect of me. And maybe it’ll make Dad happier.”
“You’re such a suck.”
He jumped up. “You’re a selfish jerk!”
“Why are you mad?”
“It’s your fault Mom’s dead.”
I pushed him. “No, it’s not.”
He shoved back. “Then why did she die?”
“I don’t know.”
But I did.
“She died because she was out in the snow. She was out in the snow because of you and your boyfriend.” He started to cry. “I heard Dad. They were talking when he carried her into the house. He kept saying she had to take care of herself. She said you were her little girl. He said she shouldn’t be out in the snow in her condition. Then he took her away in the car and she never came back.”
Now I was the one who was crying.
“It’s not my fault!”
Frank picked up his book.
“I didn’t mean for it to happen, Frank.”
But he just sat down, wiped his eyes and started to study again.
I walked down the hall and into my room, put on my pajamas and crawled in between the cool sheets. The bedside lamp was on so Dad could find his way. The clock ticked as I watched and waited, but he never came up to kiss me goodnight.
Sometime after one I quietly got up, closed the door and opened the bedside table. There was only one thing the aunts didn’t find when they spirited all of Mom’s stuff out of the house, and it was hidden in the drawer behind a bunch of books. Mom’s magical bottle of Joy.
I lay down and turned off the light with the Joy resting on my chest. Being oh-so-careful, I gently removed the heavy stopper. Moonlight struck the crystal as the genie silently rose out of the bottle.
My eyes closed and Mom appeared, turning every head on the street; that beautiful, long neck and the deep colour of her hair. I could see her dancing around the living room using the dust mop as a partner, when something started happening. The memories began to degrade, like bits of Dad’s home movies that had been overexposed to light, or records that skipped, interrupting the song. I replaced the stopper and tucked the bottle away. The Joy was a powerful potion that had to be handled carefully or it would lose its power, and I’d lose my way back to Mom.
“Can you please turn that down?” Dad asked.
“In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” was playing full blast on the stereo. We were having burgers and cherry Kool-Aid in the living room while Dad was trying to watch the evening news. Young American soldiers in Vietnam were encountering a terrible device called the Bouncing Betty. The announcer explained how it worked. It was safe when a soldier stepped on Betty, but the second he removed his foot Betty shot out from the ground and exploded, blowing the soldier clear out of his boots. The lucky soldiers died, but there were a lot of crippled boys being sent home to veterans’ hospitals. Some of them had joined the hippies to protest the war.
Tedder was trying to cut into the hamburger bun with his spoon. “Do you want some help with that?” I asked.
“No, thank you,” Tedder replied, as the spoon slipped, knocking his glass of Kool-Aid off the tray and onto Mom’s sea green broadloom. Instinctively we all jumped to our feet, petrified that the red punch would stain, but then we stopped. Who would care? Only Mom. Out of habit, or maybe it was respect, Frank ran into the kitchen and got a damp cloth. He was on his hands and knees, trying to get the stain out when Aunt Anne unexpectedly walked into the living room.
The boys were promptly tucked into bed and I was sent to my room to do homework, but instead I perched at my old spying spot at the top of the stairs. Dad and Aunt Anne were out of my sightline, but I could hear snippets of conversation.
“This is no way for children to live,” followed by, “Laura wouldn’t want this,” and, “You need some help.”
When they came towards the foyer I had to run back to my bedroom.
“Don’t think I can’t hear you Madeline Anne!”
Quietly, I closed my eyes and padded off to bed. Aunt Anne was going to come and stay with us. At least things would be kind of normal.
Two days later there was a knock at the door. A girl of about twenty with a brown bowl cut stood there clutching a suitcase.
“Allo? Lookink vor doctor.”
“That’s around the side of the house. But my Dad isn’t taking any new patients right now.”
The girl shook her head. Her English was terrible.
“My name Rika,” she said. “I am here vor verk.”
“Dad, she can’t cook.”
Dad was sitting at the head of the table pretending to read the morning paper while Frank and Tedder were staring at slices of white Wonder Bread slathered in suspicious brown goo.
“Vat is matter?”
“It’s fine,” Dad replied with a gentle smile, as Rika excused herself.
She had just served us another breakfast of chocolate sandwiches. Rika was an even worse cook than I was, she didn’t even know how to operate the washer and dryer and never cleaned dishes properly.
“I can take better care of the family than she can!”
“I don’t want you doing the housework. You’ve got school to think of and fun to have.”
“But Dad, she’s no good!”
“Give her a chance,” he said, finishing his chocolate sandwich and getting up to go to work. “Your mother would want you kids to enjoy yourselves,” he added as he disappeared.
Frank, Tedder and I stared at the sandwiches. There was no way we were eating that.
More new records arrived in the mail. Clutching them under my arm, I approached the smokers’ wall. It had taken every bit of nerve I had, but I had to lure my friends back and the records were the best bait I could think of. Betsy and Brad stood in the middle of a big group of kids. We’d had a good spring rain earlier that day and pools of muddy water pockmarked the football field. Betsy lit a cigarette. I didn’t know she was smoking. Taking a deep breath, I walked into the centre holding Janis Joplin out in front of me like an Indian with a peace offering. Everyone stopped talking and looked at the album cover. Brad pulled back, but Betsy didn’t. She was intrigued.
“I’ve got a whole bunch more. You want to come over and listen?”
I slowly held up each record so everyone could get a look. The crowd moved closer. Somebody oohed. A couple of kids muttered, “Cool.” They’d never seen these records before.
“Betsy!” a girl shouted.
The crowd turned. A scowling girl stood near the back, her fists shoved deeply into her coat pockets. The same girl who had run out of the washroom with soaking wet hands because she was afraid of me. The other kids nervously giggled. The girl da
rted in and out of the milling crowd, getting closer to me and then abruptly pulling back.
“Stay away from her,” the girl said, yanking her hand out of her pocket and pointing her finger at me. “You know what will happen. You’ll catch cancer.”
Silence fell. My face throbbed and my heart started to thump with raw anger. The records fell into the mud. My heart pumped something up into my throat, something I’d never felt before.
“You better shut your mouth,” a strange voice said. It was my voice, but a deep scary me that I’d never heard before.
The girl got closer, putting her hand over her mouth making a finger mask.
“My mother said your mother died of it and everyone knows you only get cancer if you deserve it,” the girl said, looking at the pack of kids surrounding us. “Or,” she added, “if you’ve been around people who’ve had it.”
“You are such a liar!” I screamed, grabbing the girl by the lapels, smashing her back into the brick wall.
Mr. Thom, the principal, rushed across the field and arrived just in time to hear the end. He seized the girl by the arm and gave her a really good shake.
“That is an ignorant thing to say. You apologize right now.”
The girl’s face flushed. She hated me and I hated Sterling. I hated every kid I’d gone to school with for the last eight years. I didn’t belong there. I turned and ran.
I ran across Main Street, past Comfort’s Diner and down McKenzie. It was raining again. A neighbour who was taking out the garbage waved at me. I could barely see him, I was crying so hard. Dad was just getting out of the car when I tore up the driveway.
“Everyone’s saying that Mom died of cancer. Make them stop, Dad. Please make them stop lying!”
Dad took me by the shoulders. “It’s true, honeybunch.”
It couldn’t be. Only bad people got cancer. People who deserved it. Rain bounced off the hood of the car.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“She didn’t want anyone to know.”
A car pulled into the driveway with headlights so bright that Dad’s glove flew up to shield his eyes. Mr. Thom got out and asked me if I was all right.