Читать книгу A Place Apart - Maureen Lennon - Страница 7

The next morning, Cathy got up early and tiptoed cautiously past her parents’ bedroom to the bathroom. The door to the den was closed, so she knew her father was in there, trying to sleep on the small red loveseat that was too short for anyone but a child. She’d seen how he did it, lying on his back with his legs hanging off one end of the couch, or lying on one side, facing the room with his legs folded up accordion-style. Neither position could be comfortable enough to accommodate a full night’s sleep. If this was going to be a long silence, he’d have to move somewhere else.

Cathy pressed the bathroom door quietly into place behind her, passing her fingers over the useless lock that her mother had destroyed a year ago. After listening at the door for a moment, she turned and stood in front of the wide mirror. The glare from the overhead light highlighted everything.

“Yikes! You’re a mess, kid. Red eyes, swollen lids, puffy cheek. Let’s get a cold compress going. Turn on the tap. If she sees you like this, you’ll only catch it again.”

“I know.”

Adele could wake up at any moment, blast open the bathroom door, and see the damage for herself.

You played with that during the night to get it to swell up, didn’t you? Don’t think I don’t know your tricks, missy, trying to get attention. You didn’t look like that last night.

Cathy decided to concentrate on her swollen eyes. She made a cold compress out of a wet facecloth and held it against one eye. Without the swelling, her eyes wouldn’t look too bad. They’d be only slightly bloodshot and inflamed, and their appearance could easily be passed off as irritation from hay fever.

“That’s good,” Angela said. “Keep it there for a few minutes. What else needs doing?”

Cathy had brought along last night’s damp underwear, hiding them beneath her pyjamas. Now, with one hand, she held them under the running tap, making certain that not a trace of stain or smell of urine remained. When she had wrung them out, she tucked them back inside her pyjamas.

The lump under her cheek was less swollen than it had been last night, but it was still quite visible. She doubted whether a cold compress would have much effect on it but nevertheless reached into the cupboard for another facecloth. Thankfully, the bulk of the swelling rose up at the outer edge of the cheekbone rather than in the dead centre of her face. She shook her head gently, letting her hair fall experimentally over that part of her face. She twisted and turned, examining herself from every possible angle, finally concluding that the injury could be mostly hidden behind an artfully arranged hank of hair.

While she dampened the cloth, she slowly pulled open a vanity drawer and silently withdrew a roll of adhesive tape and the cuticle scissors. She repaired her uprooted nail, carefully holding the roll of tape and the scissors over the carpet in case she dropped either one. The job completed, she reversed her actions, lowering the tools into the drawer, letting go only after each was resting securely on the drawer bottom. After slowly closing the drawer, she lay down on the blue carpeted floor and covered her injured cheek with the second cold cloth. Beside her, the tub filled slowly, the tap barely running, another cloth placed beneath the waterfall to dampen the splashing sound.

Lying on the floor reminded her of seeing her mother on the floor a couple of years ago. It was in the middle of an afternoon, and she had caught her mother laughing alone in the upstairs hall. The hem of her apron was tucked into her mouth, and tears were spilling down her face. The sheets from Richard’s bed were piled in a mound in the middle of the hall. When she spotted Cathy, she pulled the apron out of her mouth, threw her head back and cackled, and then slid down the wall to the floor, her legs splaying out across the carpet.

“Oh my dear that’s a funny word,” she said, using the apron to wipe the tears from her cheeks. Cathy had been on her way to her room, but now she hesitated, unsure of what to do. It was so rare for her mother to laugh like this.

Another wave of hysterics seized her mother and she began to tilt to one side, gasping for breath, propping herself up with one arm and holding her other across her jiggling abdomen. Hardly able to speak, she struggled to look up at Cathy.

“Do you know what a penis is?” she asked.

The word “penis” shot from her mouth like the cork from a champagne bottle, and then she slapped the floor with her hand as more hysterical laughter welled up. Cathy stared at her. Adele wiped the corners of her eyes with the apron.

“Isn’t that a funny word, ‘penis’? That’s what it’s called. A penis. A man has a penis.”

Then she rolled over onto all fours and climbed to her feet. “Ah, me. I haven’t laughed that hard in years.”

And that was the end of it. She picked up the bundle of sheets, stepped past Cathy, and headed downstairs.

Then, a day or two later, in a fit of rage, she had taken the screws out of the lock plate on the bathroom door and dug frantically at the wooden frame, gouging pieces of it out until the plate fell to the floor.

“I don’t need you in here behind a lock doing God-knows-what for hours while the rest of us wait to get in,” Adele had shrilled at Cathy.

“Hey. Let’s not fall asleep down there. Hurry up and get in.”

“Right.”

Cathy got up, turned off the water, and slipped into the tub. Only when the tepid water washed over her legs did she redis-cover her injured knee and toes. Seduced by the comforting warm water, she stretched out, immersing everything but her nose. She lay there, peacefully, her hair dark ribbons drifting around her, her weightless arms floating beside her, the steady rasping of her own breathing magnified in her submerged ears. Breathe in. Breathe out. In. Out. Drifting. Warm. Quiet. The sun on her face. She was in California. On a beach. Where Angela lived.

Then a tremor came up through the water from beneath her. The whole tub was vibrating. A truck passing by on the California highway. No. She heard pounding. Footsteps. The bathroom door abruptly jerked open. Adele marched in and wheeled around to face the tub. She was wearing pink pyjamas and a pink bathrobe and her fuzzy red hair was squashed flat on one side.

Cathy shot forward, splashing water over the rim of the tub, and curled herself over her knees.

“It’s no wonder I can’t sleep with you whaling about in here. Did you wash your vagina?”

Adele’s finger jabbed towards an unseen place beneath the water.

“Use lots of soap and get it clean down there.”

Cathy, cowering, trying to fold herself up and disappear, wrapped her arms around her knees and turned her head to the wall.

Adele abruptly turned away from the tub to lean against the bathroom sink and began examining her teeth in the mirror. Her eyes scanned her gums and the vertical crevices between her teeth. In the bright overhead light, the inside of her mouth appeared pink and glossy.

After a moment, she suddenly gagged and had to bow over the sink.

“Dirty, filthy thing probably never brushes,” she said into the sink.

Cathy quickly ran her tongue over her own front teeth, wondering if her mother’s remark was aimed at her.

Rising up to the mirror again, Adele pulled down her lower lip. She gagged a second time and bowed to the sink again. While she hung there, waiting for the waves of nausea to stop, Cathy lunged for a towel on the back of the door. She managed to wrap it around herself while kneeling in the tub, before her mother straightened up.

“My God, some people are pigs,” Adele said, finally rising up out of the sink. “Yuck.”

This time, she dropped her jaw and looked at the gums at the back of her bottom teeth. Her tongue swept over the tooth surfaces. Next, she shot her tongue straight out, examined it quickly, and frowned when she saw that it was white. Disgusted, she retracted it, and then her eyes lost their focus and roamed over the empty space in the mirror just to the right of her head.

“There it is again,” Angela whispered. “That weirdness of hers. She’s seeing something in the mirror.”

The bathroom fell silent.

Don’t stare.

The secret voice always gave good advice.

Cathy looked down at her wet bare feet.

The tanned, handsome face of the President of the United States smiled out of the mirror at Adele.

“How are you this morning, Adele?” he asked in his peculiar New England accent.

Adele noticed the faint pepperminty odour of toothpaste in the air. The President was such a nice clean man, such a gentleman. His parents had raised all nine of his brothers and sisters to be such well-mannered kids. His wife was so lucky to have found such a wonderful man, such a good father for her children.

She reached absently beneath the sink and pulled out a can of green powdered cleanser, thinking about him in the beach pictures, lying on his bad back, holding his small daughter in the air. The pictures revealed that he wore plain ordinary white sports socks with two coloured rings at the top, one red, one blue. Socks like she bought her own son, Richard. His millions didn’t mean anything to him. He was just a lovely, ordinary family man.

When she looked up from sprinkling the cleanser onto her toothbrush, she noticed Cathy shivering in the corner of the mirror where the President had just been. Her shoulders were bare and wet, and her folded, goosebump-covered arms held a blue bath towel against her torso. Her dark wet hair, hanging down the left side of her face, partially covered her eye and dripped down onto the towel. Adele narrowed her eyes and stared at the reflection of Cathy’s face. Suddenly, she whirled around and flicked Cathy’s hair aside.

“Huh! Is that all? Big baby. A little tap and you think it’s the end of the world. All that wailing and carrying on over nothing. I tell you, if you think you’re hard done by, you should have seen some of the swats my father doled out.”

She let the hair drop and turned back to the mirror. Cathy kept her gaze down.

“No siree boy,” Adele started up again, “nobody is going to call me dirty, that’s for sure. You should have seen this woman in front of me in the grocery yesterday morning. I tell you, I’ve never seen such dirty teeth in all my life.”

Adele bent over the sink, plunged her brush deep inside her cheek and began to scrub vigorously, talking despite the obstruction.

“Honestly, some people are just born pigs, too lazy to brush their own teeth. I don’t know how people can live like that. Yuck! And when she smiled...”

Here Adele pulled herself up to look directly into the mirror at Cathy.

“You should have seen how all of her gums showed above her teeth. Big wet horsy gums. Ew, I hate that.”

She dropped back into the depths of the sink. Cathy kept her eyes down, watching her bare big toe trace a circle in the pile of the royal blue carpet.

“Brushing off all the enamel, my ass. I don’t need a dentist to show me how to keep clean. I know what feels clean, by God, and this stuff really cleans. It’s people like that woman who need a dentist, not me. Somebody should tie her down and give her a good scrub. God, she was dirty!”

She fell silent, spat, ran her tongue over her teeth and began to brush again. Cathy watched her own toe, listening to the steady, unbroken whoosh of running tap water beneath the chugging rhythm of her mother’s brushing.

“Somebody else who looks like they need a good overhaul, I tell you, is that new helper priest of Father Lauzon’s. What’s his name? Father Martin or something? I ran into Father at the shopping plaza yesterday and he had this other priest with him. The man looked neglected, positively unkempt. He said he came back into this neck of the woods to pick up a few things for his new place.”

Adele removed the red brush from her mouth and held it in the air as if she were going to use it as a pointer.

“Honest to God, you should have seen this man, a priest ... his hair was greasy, his shoulders were covered in big chips of dandruff, and he had these big dirty sores on his face and neck. Whiteheads and boils. Ew! I’ve never seen such a walking mess in all my life. It was enough to make me sick.”

Adele’s voice was beginning to rise and whine. She bobbed back down into the sink and resumed brushing.

“Poor things have been struggling over at that new rectory for almost a month without a housekeeper. Old Mrs. Dupuis died on them, you know. Can you imagine, three men trying to take care of themselves? Father was asking if I knew anybody...”

She stopped to spit, stood up abruptly, and watched herself in the mirror.

“I told him you could fill in during the summer, until they found someone permanent.”

Cathy’s foot froze on the carpet. Her eyes flashed up to the mirror.

“Me? You told them me?”

“Yes you, miss sitting-around-all-summer-with-nothing-todo. It’s time you worked for a living. When I was your age I was already out in the world. It’ll do you good to get out and earn a few dollars. Now that school’s out, I don’t need a big lazy fifteen-year-old lying around all summer getting ideas about boys. What happened across the street is not going to happen in this house. The rectory will be a good place for you. You’re to be there the beginning of next week, early, before morning mass is finished.”

She dropped abruptly from the mirror into the sink, drank from the tap, swished noisily from cheek to cheek, and spat triumphantly.

“Hmm. Wonder what went on across the street?”

Don’t ask, Cathy thought back. “You just have to get their meals, clean the rectory up a bit, make beds, do a bit of laundry. Nothing that’ll kill you.”

Cathy’s eyes dropped down to rest on Adele’s feet puffing up out of their pink feather-trimmed slippers. Adele slurped noisily from the tap a second time, swished, spat, and finally rose. Looking into the mirror, she retracted her lips and brought her bottom teeth forward to rest under the edges of her top teeth.

“See? Look at that. Sparkling clean, white as snow, and all my own, too.”

She held a pose in the mirror. Cathy thought she looked like a chimpanzee.

Adele banged her brush loudly several times on the rim of the sink, sending a spray of excess water in several directions, and then abruptly shot the toothbrush into its nearby holder.

“Let’s see if you can say that, missy, when you’re my age.” Blotting her mouth on a hand towel without removing it from the rack, she pushed past Cathy.

“And don’t hog this room all morning.”