What They Wanted (9 page)

Perhaps—as when Dad had halved his house in order to launch it from Cooney Arm—if the house had remained divided, allowing for each unit of this perfect family to remain on its own shelving, it might not have fallen in on itself—at least where me and Mother were concerned. But the house was already formed when I entered it, with Mother its crossbar, and Dad and the boys—and now me and Gran, too— forming her framework. In Gran’s house it was me who’d been foremost and centre, polishing its floors and windows since I’d been big enough to drag around a broom. And from the time I could swing an axe I was chopping kindling, lugging wood, and stogging that old stove so full that it singed the air with heat whenever Gran needed to bake bread, make soup, or chase off them cold winter days when her old bones creaked more than the rafters in a squally wind.

Yet in Mother’s house I was shooed to the sidelines with the boys, watching as she swept, mopped, and dusted right down to the farthest corner in every room, including the one I shared with Gran. I’d stand resentfully beside my bed, protesting as she polished my bureau or decorated it with doilies and dried flowers, tucking my things—rocks, a bird’s nest, Boots’s tiny, polished skull—into drawers, or worse, into boxes and suitcases that she’d push under the beds or into the closets along with the other things from my old room in Cooney Arm.

“Take it out when you needs it,” she’d respond to my yelps of protest, and carry right on with her cleaning and tidying. Except those times when she strolled determinedly towards me with a ribbon or clips or some article of clothing. She didn’t shoo me away on those days, but would stand arguing till the sun went down over my refusal to have my hair combed and fixed. During those times, I actually ran outdoors, or to my room, barring myself inside for fear of becoming no more than a thing myself, all prettily polished and tidied and tucked inside a fold of Mother’s house.

I got no sympathy from Gran. Back in Cooney Arm, Gran had always lauded my swiftness with a dishcloth or a scrubbing rag. Now she sided with Mother and was forever directing my attention—as Mother did—towards homework, or out to the wharf, watching that the boys didn’t fall overboard. Neither was Father much of a consolation. A brooding figure he’d been, those first years in Hampden, hunched over the wharf and looking back towards Cooney Arm, gutted by the loss of the fish, his stage. And instead of lazing back on the sofa when evening came, snoring out the strains of the day with me on his chest, he was now going off to bed, into that room he shared with my mother, whose door was always closed, emitting tiny gasps of cool air whenever it opened as I walked by. When he did settle on the sofa, throwing his feet upon the humpty, it was always Kyle clambering over him, and sometimes Chris. Never me, for under Mother’s critical eye I suddenly felt too big for anything I used to do, all my cozy comforts replaced by big-girl dresses, big-girl ponytails, big-girl ways of sitting in a chair with my knees beneath the table and not comfortably tucked beneath my chin.

Tricked. I felt like I’d been tricked out of my nice, warm home with Gran and staged in Mother’s, which held nothing of its comforts. All the things I’d brought from my life in Cooney Arm, tucked now into boxes beneath the bed, felt no more than souvenirs of a home that once was. And worse, every time I crept around the house—hoping to escape attention, homework, the boys—and accidentally scared Mother by appearing silently in a doorway, she’d accuse me of sneaking about.

“Just like when you were small, always spying,” she cried out once.

“I’m not spying,” I protested.

“Yes, you are, nobody walks that quietly without they’re up to something.”

“Perhaps I’d like to be alone for once,” I shouted, and seeing the disbelieving look on Mother’s face, flounced to my room in a fit of frustration. In an effort to prove my innocence, I started walking more quietly at all times, keeping a preoccupied look on my face and pretending I was looking for something, should Mother look up from her cooking or cleaning or reading with a start. Times I feigned a start myself upon a sudden gasp from her. Mostly it was during those quietest of moments—when the boys and Father were outside somewhere, and Gran dozing in her rocker, and the house humming along with Mother as she tidied her kitchen or living room—that I tended to appear. Always, during this silly, repeated exercise, I wore a preoccupied look, then bafflement each time Mother jumped or shrieked in fright. Once, she was so startled she dropped and shattered her prized candy dish she’d been about to wash.

“Nobody walks that quietly, Sylvie, without they’re trying to,” she cried, looking piteously at the glass scattered around her feet.

“Gawd, you always says that.”

“Then why you doing it—always trying to frighten me?”

“I don’t. I’m not—lord, everybody else always hears me.”

“Everybody else—you only does it around me, whatever kind of game you’re playing.”

“Well, you knows I’m in the house,” I kept going as Mother fell to her knees, picking up bits of glass, “what’s so strange about me walking down the hall—you rather I stayed in my room all day?” Getting nothing more than a painful yelp from Mother as she pricked a finger with a sliver of glass, I gave a righteous huff and went outside, muttering loudly about the unfairness of her accusations when I was simply walking down the hallway, was all, simply minding my own business like the day in the graveyard, like the abandoned house thing—just minding my own business when suddenly, poof—there’s Mother, all in a jitters and frightening her own self with her own jittery nerves.

“Jumpin’s, why’s everybody so rabbity,” I complained a few days after the broken dish, when I appeared out of the hallway, startling Gran this time.

“You’ll give us all heart attacks,” warned Gran as I glided to the sofa, picking up the catalogue I’d been flipping through earlier. I sat with my back to them both, hearing Gran tsk. A sideways glance at Mother showed her pursed mouth as she kept silent, stirring the meat and onions she was frying up on the stove. Gran, letting out a small groan over the ache in her legs from the foggy, drizzly day outside, shuffled to where I was sitting and poked at my back with a gnarled finger.

“I tell you, you’re making your mother sick,” she said irritably.

“Jumpin’s, I didn’t do nothing.”

“You’re making your mother sick, I tell you.”

“How’s I making her sick—I don’t do nothing to make her sick.”

“You just frightened Gran,” said Mother firmly. “So I’m not imagining things when you frightened Gran as well. It’s how you’ve always been, sneaking about.”

I jumped to my feet, swinging around to face her. “I don’t! I don’t sneak about, you always says that, and I don’t. Well, I don’t,” I yelled as Mother went, tight-lipped, back to her stirring.

I threw the catalogue on the sofa. “You always believes her,” I charged Gran. “Ever since we moved in here you always believes her.”

Gran tsked again, sitting back down in her rocker.

“Well, it’s true!” I yelled. Hurt by Gran’s not listening, and with a surge of brazenness, I looked to Mother, saying in a loud, prim voice, “Not my fault you’re always thinking I’m a ghost. Well, that’s what you thinks, isn’t it, that I’m a ghost? You always looks afraid of me, like I was walking around dead or something. I believe you wishes I was dead, anyway.”

I fell silent for a moment, Mother’s face going all white again. “And perhaps I wishes I
was
dead,” I yelled, my voice turning into a whine. “I wouldn’t have to live here then, she only likes Chris anyway,” and felt the cut of my words in Mother’s flinch. “Leaving here anyway,” I shouted, half bawling now, and fled down the hall, “soon’s I finishes school, I’m leaving, I won’t be living around here.”

I slammed the door of my room and fell across the bed, heart pounding, ears ringing, no different from that moment when I’d sat hidden in the closet of the boarded-up house. Only this time I wasn’t holding my breath. I’d just blown it out like a tempest, releasing a tension in my chest that I hadn’t realized was there till now, with the sudden release of its being gone.

But, like any rutted container in a storm, it remained empty only for as long as it takes the elements to fill it again, and instantly my chest tightened with another thought: that my carelessly flung words had hurt Mother, a hurt I couldn’t fathom, given how foolish and of little meaning I felt the words to be. For sure I had yelled worse than those before, cussed even, and gotten scarcely a backhanded glance.

I pulled the blankets over me, but then hearing Gran’s voice rising in the kitchen, I snuck off the bed and eased open the door, listening.

“Start ignoring her, maid,” Gran was saying, “long as you keeps it in your head, she’ll keep doing it, she’ll keep carrying it out.”

“Carrying it out—carrying what out?” asked Mother, but then kept on talking, scarcely able to keep her voice down as she rattled on about the ridiculousness of my words, the silly things I was getting on with, my foolishness. “For goodness sakes, you seen her, Gran, how you suppose to ignore someone traipsing like a ghost through the house?”

Gran’s voice fell, and straining to hear, I leaned harder against the door, creaking it. Both voices stopped for a second, and then carried on in normal tones about Father working too hard in the woods. I threw myself back across the bed, balling up the pillow and winging it at the wall. Even Gran was blaming me for Mother’s bad nerves. To show them I didn’t care, I bounced off the bed, opened the door with a quick soundless movement, and glided down the hallway more quietly than a swan crossing a summer’s pond. Snatching up the catalogue that I’d thrown on the sofa and looking to neither of them, I glided back to my room, closing the door in the same quick, soundless motion.

For the rest of that week and the following I glided through the house. I glided about the wharf, too, as silent in my rubber boots as I was in stocking feet, taking no apparent notice of anyone, most especially Mother and Gran. Neither did they seem to notice me, except in the usual way of a parent—how’s school, got your homework done, are you hungry. Always I shook or nodded my head, as silent with words as I was with my footstep, spending most of the days in my room, needing nothing from nobody. I did notice, however, that Mother was no longer gasping out loud those times I appeared unexpectedly before her. Not that she wasn’t startled, for I saw in the way she pursed her mouth or whipped her hand to her heart that she was. But nothing was ever said, and after a short while it all faded into nothing, Mother’s frights, my emanations. The rowing might’ve stopped too, if not for a comment I overheard Mother making to Gran a few months later, on Christmas morning.

I had ripped the wrapping paper off a pair of shiny black shoes that had rhinestones across the toes and soles that clicked loudly against the vinyl floors as I excitedly pulled them on and tap-danced down the hall.

“Could’ve saved myself a few grey hairs,” Mother said to Gran, and vexed by the quiet laugh they shared, I threw Mother a dark look and tapped extra loud coming back up the hall.

Another series of rows started, this time over my noisy step. But now Mother kept a smile on her face and paid me no more attention than she did Chris and Kyle roughhousing about the sofa. Within a short time I gave up—or forgot—my tap-dancing routine, and found other things to bicker over with Mother.

That was one thing that never changed, me and Mother bickering—much to the anguish of everyone else, most especially Father. Times when I’d fling out through the door and hunch beside him on the wharf, taking up his sullen stare out the bay, and he’d ply me with soft talk, trying to get at the reason for my apparent anger with Mother. But I could never say, for I never knew, beyond the trivialities of the moment. Going beyond that took me back into the graveyard, the house of haunts, or some look in Mother’s eye—conscious moments that capped some deeper thing I was never able to properly see or give expression to. Yet, for all its elusiveness, it bubbled along just below the surface in my relationship with Mother, obscured in its brackish waters but requiring only the slightest slackening of the tides for that black edge of a dorsal fin to jut between us.

“Going to university anyway,” I’d say loudly to Father whenever Mother was lurking within earshot. “And after that I’m moving to Rome.”

“Learn to navigate Hampden first,” said Mother, patting my head in passing, “or are we just a stepping stone now? Stop pouting, get your boots on, you’re late for school.”

I sniffed hard at that one and dragged my heels out the door, miffed that my travel aspirations, having once garnered such looks of delight from Mother, had somehow become the family joke.

Worse, I hated the overstuffed school in Hampden. They made fun of the way I talked. Plus, coming from the quiet of Cooney Arm with simply Chris and Kyle for company, the number of kids I met that first day in a real school felt like a mob, stoning me with words. I got used to it quickly enough, though. The kids even started being friendly, inviting me to birthday parties, bonfires, soccer games in the field behind the school. Sometimes I went, but it was never fun. I simply wasn’t the type to make close friends. And there were always so many of them, and so highly charged and caught up in each other’s lives that they felt like one large family. As with Mother’s house, they were fully formed before I arrived; I never felt a comfortable fit. Besides, I’d already made up my mind sitting at Mother’s table in Cooney Arm that I’d be travelling far and wide the minute I finished school. So why bother planting feet on a stepping stone, I kept asking myself, casting surly looks at Mother.