Summer Cannibals

by Melanie Hobson

  The house was quiet, now that Georgina was gone. Despite its size, it registered even the slightest absence. David and Margaret were seated together on the porch, as was their custom after supper, so silent that the receding crunch of the car’s tires on the gravel still hung in the air twenty minutes later. Margaret was smoking and looking out over the city, the day’s heat still laid across it like a fallen cloud, and David was reading through the newspaper that had been sitting there since morning. His absorption a rebuke—I have been waiting to read this all day … and Look at me, just a labourer, but hungry for self-improvement. The paper was warped and buckled by the humidity, and already yellowing, but he was looking at it anyway. Another instance, his posture said, of how the entire world undervalues me.

  Neither of them could summon the desire to speak. Not because there weren’t any new outrages to vocalize, because certainly there were, but because of all the old injuries whose cruelties were so great that they lay, always, just beneath whatever passed between them. And at times like this, they knew from experience, those grievances would overwhelm if given half a chance and neither of them could afford that because each had their hobby horse to ride, and neither wanted to surrender the lead—because each felt they had the upper hand. Margaret had orchestrated the rescue of their daughter, and David had created a public showcase for his acumen.

  Did you get enough? she said finally, pushing the words through her teeth.

  Darling?

  Dinner. Did you get enough?

  David lowered the paper to his lap and turned, in the sulphurous light cast by the driveway’s single floodlight, to face this wife backlit by the city, her cigarette throbbing.

  Yes. Thank you. Georgina did a very nice job.

  Yes. She did.

  And David knew that his wife’s seemingly casual affirmation was in fact freighted with the contention that if their daughter had done well, it was only because of the lifelong work she’d invested in her. And in all of them.

  Philippa, he countered, laying Margaret’s failure on the floor between them.

  And there it was. The initial cut. The familiar edge he’d rub against her until she begged him for more.

  That tour, she answered, drawing the last syllable out so it floated across and brushed his cheek like a kiss. Like her lips against his neck, taunting him to go back at her, a little deeper each time, both of them thrumming now, because this also was a custom of theirs—sniping at each other until the words reached their climax and became physical.

  7

  Pippa was, to Georgina, barely recognizable when the customs doors slid open and she came through them. There was the pregnancy, of course, but it was more than that. It was as if her actions and thoughts were slowed down to the tempo of something as primordial as one revolution of the sun and the moon. She seemed tidal. In motion, but deceptively so. You’d have to close your eyes for an hour and reopen them to notice a change, and even then it would be so slight you wouldn’t be sure it was true. Georgina had thought this emergency flight home was nothing but impulse and drama—both states she knew Pippa thrived on—but now, Georgina thought this crisis might actually be real. Not just something else Pippa had invented for herself.

  When Georgina, shepherding her through arrivals and out to the car, asked Pippa where her bags were, she only twitched the shoulder her backpack hung from. One of her kids’ bags, Georgina thought, looking at its zipper jangling with novelty key chains.

  This is it? No suitcase?

  She pushed Pippa ahead of her through the revolving door and out to the covered roadway where passengers were queuing for taxis or hotel shuttles, thankful for the noise and commotion which made it impossible to talk. Because Georgina didn’t know what to say to her little sister without betraying how shocked she was. Georgina, trained to analyze, had already summarized Pippa and reduced her down to an archetype: vagabond.

  Pippa stopped just then and looked down at her right foot, which had come forward without its black rubber sandal. It lay behind her, upside down, its thong snapped. After looking at it for a few seconds, she just continued on without it.

  Your—. Georgina jogged back to retrieve the shoe and catch up to Pippa, who’d stopped now. Enough awareness, at least, to realize she didn’t know where the car was parked. And likely, Georgina thought, didn’t even know what it looked like. It had been three or four years since Pippa had last been over, and her father’s car had only been purchased a few years ago. A replacement after the last accident.

  We’re over here, Georgina said, transferring the bag from her sister’s shoulder to her own, stuffing the broken flip-flop into the mesh pocket on the side as Pippa trudged along just behind her, not seeming to mind her foot against the oil-stained concrete of the parking garage. Not seeming to mind anything. Just following, mutely, and settling into the car as though she might go to sleep, her whole body pressed into the seat like she was custom made for it. Perfectly content to take whatever form was presented to her.

  I thought you’d have luggage, Georgina said as they crept down the spiralling exit ramp. Mum said you’d have luggage, so I brought Dad’s car because it’s bigger. For the luggage. Repeating herself, trying to fill the emptiness and not comment on her sister’s smell, which was filling the car now with the sweet thickness of filth. Of sweat and dirt in layers that must have accumulated over days and days, because this was more than just an eighteen-hour flight. This was a prolonged neglect. A determined savagery.

  Georgina kept her window down after paying at the kiosk.

  Are you hungry? she asked, slowing down at the traffic light before turning onto the road out to the highway. I made chicken, she said, trying not to retch at the thought of eating. A roast. But we could stop for something now if you want.

  Pippa didn’t answer. Just sat there until Georgina asked again, looking right at her, and then she shook her head, shifting her hands on her lap around the enormous mound of her stomach. “Prenatal depression” their mother had said, emphasizing the “pre” in a tone that had seemed, to Georgina, coloured with disbelief. As if what she was really saying was, “Well, that’s what Pippa wants us to think.” Even though Pippa’s husband had told her that their doctor had prescribed an antidepressant, their mother always liked to present herself as closer to the truth than anyone else.

  Perhaps, thought Georgina, that’s what I’m seeing—the effect of that. A semi-conscious medicated state.

  She merged onto the busy highway to begin their journey back home, trying not to stare at Toronto gleaming to the east in the sun’s falling light. The air screaming through the open window. She didn’t need to be reminded that her entire life had been spent on the margins, and that she’d never had the courage to be anywhere else. Georgina concentrated on the traffic signs because it had been a while since she’d picked someone up at the airport and if she wasn’t vigilant, she’d end up downtown in the big city on a Thursday night instead of on her way back to Hamilton. And this, she thought, is not how I’ve envisioned entering it. Nothing triumphal about arriving in my parents’ car with a damaged little sister in the passenger seat. Her arrival in Toronto, she’d always dreamt, would be heralded by miracles. A full choir of angels with trumpets, wings beating the air like an invasion of butterflies. Not limping in, all broken, like this.

  By the time they entered the heavily wooded lane, the sun was almost down and the distance had been stretched by the shadows. It had been a long day and it seemed to take an age to get to the gateway and enter the drive, but then it was there—the house—in front of a purpling sky, timeless and magnificent. Even Pippa sensed the change and sat forward. Georgina slowed the car, hardly rolling now. She noted each light that was on—the kitchen, the family room, her bathroom, an upstairs hallway, and the porch light where she knew her mother would be reclining and watching their progress toward the house. Waiting, on tenterhooks, for her youngest daughter to come home. Ready to pounce. Their father would already be in bed.


  Once they were parked, Pippa stayed where she was until Georgina came around and opened her door, and then she got out and walked mechanically to the porch steps and to her mother who was waiting there, in the yellow of the bug light, willing her daughter to keep moving until she was safe.

  After tomorrow, Georgina wanted to shout, a tour’s coming but we’ll be all right. We just have to stay inside until they’re gone.

  But Pippa wouldn’t have heard her anyway. Their mother had her now, smoothing her hair back, running a hand over the coming grandchild, adjusting Pippa’s cardigan so it sat perfectly on her thin shoulders and marvelling, in a loud voice, at how absolutely terrible she looked. She’d never seen, she howled, a more destitute-looking young woman in all her life. Looking around for someone, anyone, to agree with her. But Georgina was lingering at the car, waiting for the initial shock waves to subside, the thinnest sliver of a respite before re-entering the fray.

  I’ll get Pip some dinner, Georgina said when she mounted the porch, going inside and leaving the two of them out there alone. She was glad to have someone else to shoulder the burden of home for a while. Something else for her mother to focus on.

  And there isn’t, she said as the screen door snapped shut behind her, any luggage. Unable to resist.

  When Jax’s taxi drove up to the house at one in the morning, only the light over the kitchen stove was on. No one had waited up for her, not even her mother, but Jax had expected that. Of the three sisters, she was the one who always escaped notice—and that was how she liked it. Even now, when there was nothing to hide—no alcohol or drugs or boyfriend’s mouth leaving marks on her—it was better to just walk inside without being confronted. Without someone—their mother—trying to figure you out. Jax was the middle child but she’d spent her life inhabiting that place in the lineage as if she were the forgotten end.

  They were all there now, the house was full. It shifted around them as they slept, little creaks and groans, readjusting all the heartbeats until they were synchronized, because in all things, it demanded symmetry. If one left, another stayed; if one was born, another might have to die.

  Friday

  8

  I’ll look in on her, David called out from the bathroom. On my way downstairs.

  Philippa’s already down there, his wife answered weakly from the adjoining bedroom, and David knew that she was curled up on her side, the arm under her head flung straight out like a boom across his pillow. She’s throwing up, his wife said. In the bathroom. Downstairs.

  Oh, he said. As though it’s my fault, he thought. As though I am to blame for wanting to try again for a son. For insisting on one more go at it. For wearing you down. For being—he looked in the mirror—an animal. He placed a scrap of toilet paper on the tiny cut along his jaw. Leopard, he thought, baring his fangs.

  Do you need anything, darling? he asked wearily, knowing he’d get only an exhalation. Not a word, but just as expressive as a no. She might sleep all morning. He didn’t think Margaret had slept more than an hour in bits and pieces since Pippa phoned and now that Pippa was here, it would be his wife’s pattern to bottom out. At least it might keep her out of the way. He still had work to do if tomorrow was to be a triumph, and he wouldn’t have her ruining it.

  She listened to him fiddling about in the bathroom, taking his time, so plodding and deliberate it made her want to scream. She raised her arm and dropped it like a hammer on his pillow.

  You could turn the air conditioning on, she called out. It’s stuffy in here.

  Darling?

  The air conditioning. It’s hot.

  He was standing in the doorway looking down at her. She could sense him there, his controlled breathing, and she knew he was thinking that the air conditioning would come on when it was supposed to, that it was pre-set, and interfering would throw the whole system off.

  Hot? In here?

  She twisted her head back over her shoulder in the direction of his silhouette, squinting against the bright morning sunshine. Yes. It is hot. In here. Channelling enough provocation and hurt into her voice to warn him there was plenty more where that came from. An entire storehouse. Forty-seven years of it, in fact.

  You have your covers on, he said just above a whisper.

  She flicked her head back, cinched the duvet around her shoulders and dropped the hammer arm again, repeatedly. He would turn it on, she knew. Just enough to say he’d done it, enough that she couldn’t blame him for not listening, but not enough it would run and cool the room properly.

  David trod down the steps, remembering, when he saw the bathroom door shut on the ground floor, what his wife had said about Pippa and thinking that he should have gone down the back stairs instead because sickness unnerved him. He might be a doctor, but only of skin—not what was down inside. Not what was always—he shuddered—trying to rise up and make us see what we’re really made of, which is messy, pungent and raw. And wasn’t that precisely why the girls were here? To deal with that? He adjusted the thermostat a few degrees lower, resolving not to think about it again until afternoon, and then he’d put it back to where it was supposed to be. If my wife kept normal hours, he thought, none of this would be necessary. I could just get on with things.

  He caught sight of himself in the hall’s floor-length mirror—and wasn’t that the very picture of success? He stopped to appraise himself. That compact man of average height whose hair was only greying at the temples and still bounced when he walked because it was still a full head of hair—almost embarrassing at his age, how much hair he still had. He ran a hand through it. He imagined the girls at the office whispering about it being a weave or a transplant or, at the very least, an exquisite dye-job and he expected, any day now, that they’d sidle up and ask him where he’d had the work done so they could book their husbands in. Make them young and virile and interesting, those sad-sack men who slowed their cars at the curb just enough so their wives could jump in. A technique, he imagined, they’d perfected cruising prostitutes. Years since they’d handled their wives. And I handled mine, he thought complacently, only last night.

  Tomorrow, he thought grandly, is the garden tour. Breakfast first, and then I will dress and get started. He’d not let his wife, with her invented crises, spoil things this time.

  The tea bags were nearly finished and someone, he saw as he reached for it, had used the sugar spoon to stir, putting it back in the sugar bowl afterwards so now the measuring end was caked with dirty crystals. It was small things like this that smacked of laziness and infuriated him. He knew it would have been his wife at midnight or one a.m. just drifting through the house making messes, and no thought of who’d have to put up with them. The entire counter, if he looked, would be full of similar violations, but he knew from long experience just to concentrate on the simple tasks of porridge and tea and then get out. He was the only man in a clutch of women and he had to look out for himself because they were always trying to turn him, and he’d be buggered if he’d let them do it. They can keep their irrational messes, he thought, for themselves. A trap he’d avoid. A stumble he refused to take. Just another instance, he thought, of being better—veni vidi vici—than everyone.

  The porch door swung out and Jax came in.

  Hola, she said brightly, her bursting good health like a slap.

  Jacqueline, her father answered, his hand paused at the kettle. I didn’t expect to see you up this early.

  Jax grinned, lifting her foot to show him her running shoes. I jog every morning now. Three miles.

  You jog, David repeated vaguely, crossing the kitchen to give his daughter a welcome. For exercise?

  Well, yeah.

  Good flight? he asked.

  Jax shrugged. Good enough.

  Sleep well?

  Great. That room’s like a crypt, it’s so quiet.

  David nodded, returning to the kettle.

  What does that make my room, I wonder. A sub-crypt? Crypta sub locus. Tea, darling?

  No, thanks
. I haven’t gone running yet. Was just stretching and heard someone in here, so thought I’d say hi. Thought it might be Pippa.

  Pippa? No. And your mother’s in bed. Georgie’s up there somewhere too.

  Just us early birds, then. Jax laughed. Bet you never thought you’d hear me say that.

  David smiled, as if those awful teenage years of hers were a fond memory they shared.

  You know, he said, nursing his tea, I could use some help in the garden today. Since you’re here, and awake.

  Sure. At the usual rate?

  David looked momentarily thrown.

  Don’t you remember? You used to pay us five dollars an hour. Subject, of course, to whether we did a good job or not.

  Did I?

  Yeah. You’d go around at the end of the day and evaluate what we’d done and then pay out accordingly. Quality control, you called it.

  Well. I was teaching you to do work you could stand behind.

  And saving yourself some money, Jax joked.

  But her father bristled, drawing his shoulders back in that gesture Jax recognized as the preamble to an attack.

  I’m sure I deserved it, she said quickly. And I can definitely help out today. For free, she grinned, going out and letting the door slam behind her and becoming just a bounding figure framed by the window, leaving David alone in the kitchen with his tea. Needing a minute to reorient himself to this new, and unpleasant, reality of the children back home again. Needing to find a way to make it advantageous.

  He retreated, before Pippa the injured or anyone else could come out and delay him, to the other end of the house where he’d laid the accounts out on the enormous walnut table to organize. Where he’d be surrounded by antiques jumbled on credenzas and end tables and mantel and windowsills and stuffed, cheek to jowl, into the glass-fronted sideboard. A lifetime of acquisitions—passing fancies for Waterford and Royal Doulton and Fabergé, anything with a name that would draw a gasp in conversation. A storehouse, he thought complacently as he put his tea down and retied his dressing gown, of my astuteness.