Читать книгу Love Object - Sally Cooper - Страница 7

The summer I turned twelve Sylvia gave up. She was through being a mother and a wife, had done it well over the years but no more. She spent her days on the couch, moving to the kitchen to smoke when we came in from school. She tapped her nails on the table and stared out the window, waiting for Sam. When he got home, she rolled her eyes at him and went back to the couch. Often a few tears leaked out as she flopped onto her stomach and pushed her head under a throw pillow, punching the sides down with her fists.

Sylvia was young, nineteen, when she’d had me, then Nicky, one after the other. We were only ten months apart, twins in some ways. “I got what I wanted,” she often told us with a tight smile. “A boy and a girl. That’s why I stopped.”

When I was little, looking into Sylvia’s face was like looking into a sun: hot and blinding and full of joy. She was forever folding Nicky and me into her long arms, squeezing us between her knees, our hands buried deep in hers.

We played a game where Sylvia lay on her belly, her face buried in her arms, and Nicky and I ran around her, jumping across her hips, skipping between her legs — swiftly at first, keeping our distance, then daring more as she stayed still as a rock. We flopped on her back, feathered her neck with fingertips, scratched her scalp, wet-willied her ears until she shot a hand out around one of each of our ankles and took us down in a shrieking, giggling mass. She flipped us on our backs and straddled us, covering our faces with her hands, tumbling our bodies around until we all three lay in a pile, exhausted, exhilarated and panting. We begged Sam to join us, tugged his pant cuffs and pulled down his socks, but he rattled his newspaper, shook his head and stretched his legs up onto the couch. At odd moments next to my writhing brother, my chest trapped under Sylvia’s knee, I’d look over at Sam and my laughter caught for one breath then came out flat the next.

Sylvia took us on walks along the side of the road to look for beer bottles in the ditch and into the woods by the river to collect driftwood from uprooted trees for her crafts. She put Nicky and I in charge of bagging pine cones and milkweed pods while she scoped out debris from decaying logs — the more gnarls, loops and twists the better.

When Sam came, he taught us survival techniques like how to make a toothbrush by removing the downy head of a cat-tail and where to find the tasty larva of the fish fly and how to listen for frogs to find water. He told of an Indian brave who saved himself from thirst by imitating a mouse he’d seen licking dew off a rock.

More than anything, Sam said, he wanted to be an Indian when he was growing up. He used to spend hours in the bush behind their place in Drag County, snuck out there after his father had left for the hotel — when his mother didn’t care what he did as long as he stayed out of her way. In a library book, he’d read that Indians could walk through the woods without making a sound — quieter than wolves even. They didn’t snap twigs, crackle leaves, crunch gravel. When he went hunting he practised Indian-walking in the bush. Nicky and I weren’t very good at it but Sylvia was excellent. She could be talking to us one minute, loosening bark or sawing a piece of wood free, and slip off soundless into the trees the next, gone no matter where we searched, then back, just as swift: silent and grinning.

When Sam wasn’t around and we were alone with Sylvia, Nicky sometimes danced. He didn’t need music, said he heard rhythms in his head, and when Sylvia was looking, his feet performed intricate steps — ball, toe, heel — that sent him whirling through two or three rooms, one after the other. Often Sylvia laughed, the clapping of her hands like heavy boots with taps on a wooden floor.

We’d seen Sam and Sylvia dance in our living room when my uncles came down for a fish fry at the arena. Larry and Sam were drinking rye and gingers with Reese and his fiancée Shanelle. Reese was watching his mouth then with his wedding date not set. Sylvia was getting dressed in the bedroom while Nadette cleaned up Larry Jr. who had yet to successfully toilet-train. Nicky and I kneeled on the floor in our pyjamas playing Snap. Sam stood as Sylvia strode out in a white halter top and pleated black palazzo pants. In her gold sandals she was as tall as Sam who hugged her in tight at the waist and danced her forward with his thighs. He sang along with the kitchen radio — Roo-oo-bee, don’t take your love to town— then Reese pulled Shanelle up too and I watched from the floor and hoped.

Sylvia reached over Sam’s shoulder and snagged her Peter Jacksons from the top of the buffet. As Sam sang into her hair, she rummaged for a cigarette and pushed it between her lips. Larry jumped up to light it then stayed standing in the middle of the room while his brothers two-stepped their wives around him. Sylvia gestured toward the table and Larry handed her a tumbler. Sam’s palms held Sylvia’s hips while she rested her wrists on his shoulders, taking alternate drags and sips. Her red lips glistened through the shroud of smoke. Larry looked about to tap Sylvia’s bare shoulder before Sam steered her away. When Nadette came in, Larry gulped his drink.

“You two look more alike than twins,” Nadette said. “It’s not normal.”

I nudged Nicky as if it was us she was talking about but it was my parents and Nadette was right. Sylvia puckered her lips and blew a smoke ring at Larry and everybody laughed. With a twist, Sylvia freed her hips from Sam’s hands and sat on the couch, the black crepe spreading like a cape as she crossed one long thigh over the other.

Sometimes when Nicky danced, Sylvia took him by the hands, slid her bare feet under his toes and, counting out the steps, calibrated him in precise squares around the room.

With me it was different. The light around Sylvia was safe and warm, true, but structure was what I needed. Sylvia had rules — was full of them in fact, more than Sam, who hid behind newspapers and seemed not to care which rules Sylvia made and whether we followed them, as long as they were there and he was disturbed as little as possible about settling disputes.

Dinner was on the table at six, fifteen minutes after Sam got home from work, and Sylvia served our plates from the stove. Sam preferred the staples: pork chops, venison steak or chicken drumsticks with mashed potatoes and buttered white bread on the side. Sylvia added canned peas or creamed corn so we’d have a vegetable and insisted we all three ate everything on our plates. When she was feeling creative she made casseroles from her magazines: macaroni with peas and cream of mushroom soup, spiced with paprika and topped with a crust of crushed potato chips, or turkey pot pie with frozen carrot medallions and happy faces cut in the Tenderflake crust. Dessert was butterscotch ice cream with corn syrup, or bananas cut up in brown sugar and evaporated milk.

We said “please” when we asked for a condiment and “thank you” when it was passed. We sat with paper serviettes unfolded on our laps and rested our forearms — and never our elbows — on the edge of the table. Our mouths were closed while we chewed and no part of my body was allowed to touch any part of my brother’s or vice versa. No kicking the chair or drinking while eating or slurping or playing with food or interrupting. Sam talked about his clients and Sylvia talked about how she’d made the meal and, if it was new, where she’d got the recipe and what changes she’d made. She told about whatever project she was working on too, the teak beads she’d found for the macramé owl hanging, the scratching technique she’d learned in pottery class, the lamp base she’d wired out of shellacked driftwood.

There were math games with Sam asking Sylvia for an equation then competing with us to find the answer fastest without writing anything down. Sylvia smiled close-mouthed while the three of us clamoured to shout the right answer first, the numbers often tripping over our tongues and coming out incomplete or backward in our haste. Sam loved the language of geometry — hypotenuse, vertex, congruent, isosceles — and had a particular fondness for the Pythagorean Theorem. He started us off — “The square of the hypotenuse…” — and we raced to see who could finish reciting it first: “…of a right-angled triangle equals the sum of the squares of the other two sides!” Cards roused a similar fierceness: cribbage or rummy with Sam was a madcap contest to add points for runs and pairs and sets and fifteens. It was rare that Nicky or I was swifter than Sam but we were neck and neck with each other. Sylvia always claimed she’d figured the answer before us but didn’t need to bother with shouting it out.

On Sundays Sylvia walked Nicky and I down the hill to the United Church. She dressed me in homemade jumpers fastened with wooden buttons over white blouses and white leotards with two-toned brown shoes we’d found at the Salvation Army store. I tied my hair in braids with matching yarn ribbons. Nicky wore an orange shirt tucked into stretchy plaid pants with a paisley clip-on tie and desert boots. We stayed for the first part of the service, through two hymns from the choir and announcements, until Reverend Green called all the children forth to sit at his feet for a Jesus story then sent us down to the basement for Sunday school.

There were three others in my Sunday school class: Susan Baker from up on the highway near Vi, Jenny Taylor from the bottom of the hill and a boy named Duncan Matheson, who lived on Back Street and wanted a different one of us to marry him each week. Susan Baker was his favourite. I told Duncan I wouldn’t marry him unless it was upstairs in the proper church. Our teacher was Lucy Stevens, a teenager from a church family who lived next to the ballpark where we sat on bleachers for Friday night regular games and at weekend tournaments to watch Sam catch pop flies in centre field. Duncan’s family was a church family too because his father came to service and his grandfather was an elder who carried a wooden plate around to collect the offering. Sam sang in the choir at Christmas but only because they needed deep men’s voices not because he belonged. We weren’t really United, Sylvia told us, we weren’t anything, but one church was as good as another and this church was so close and worship was important.

Sylvia was most rigid about swearing, offended when as much as a damn or a shit came out of Nicky or me. Sam coached us on the alternatives — darn, shoot, heck— but I got caught saying the F-word and had to be dragged then shoved, into the bathroom where Sylvia held a pink bar of Dove under warm water until it was sudsy then rubbed it on my tongue. She let me spit after and rinse with Listerine but my mouth smarted and swallowing was hard, even with water. Nicky swore too but managed to avoid getting his mouth washed out.

For me the rules were stricter than for Nicky, but I never complained. The more exact the rules, the more able I was to perform them to the letter. My appearance had to be precise: T-shirt tucked in, pants belted, socks pulled up, not a hair out of place. Each morning I came to Sylvia with a hairbrush and a jar full of barrettes, ribbons, bobby pins and toggles. I leaned into her thighs as she brushed my tatted hair up into bunches which she fingered into two long ringlets and sprayed with Final Net. My room was spotless too: floor swept, rag rug lined up with the floorboards, all surfaces dusted, windows clear, socks rolled in pairs, sweaters folded with the arms crossed, panties in balls. It wasn’t that I liked cleaning; I loathed it and spent hours hanging my head off my bed agonizing over whether to do it in the first place: how much was plenty and how much was too much and had I gone overboard enough? The rules themselves concerned me, not the cleaning. Sylvia’s love depended on me not only obeying but excelling at those rules. It was unclear whether the rules were Sylvia’s or my own.

That spring, when Sylvia took to the couch, Nicky and I forgot to bathe. It was Sam who noticed the grimy cuffs on our necks, wrists and ankles. He grabbed a hank of my sticky hair as I sat down for dinner and held it as if weighing it or testing it for ripeness. A close, feral scent rose up and I. glanced at Nicky. Our eyes met. After a few seconds, Sam let the hair drop, and searched for somewhere to wipe his palm.

Sam pulled a pressback chair from the kitchen to the bottom of the stairs. He sat with the newspaper folded open to the crossword puzzle and pointed up.

“March,” he said, and we did.

At ten and eleven, Nicky and I hadn’t taken a bath together for a long time. Usually Sylvia stood over us one at a time, arms crossed, big hands cupping hipbones, ensuring that every crack and crevice was sufficiently scrubbed. This time Sylvia was in bed already and Nicky let the water run until it covered the drainage holes. In our bedrooms, we stripped down to the long white undervests that made us indistinguishable. Then we met in the hallway.

“You’re not marching right. Raise your knees higher,” I commanded.

Nicky tried, but his feet were so dirty they stuck to the floor.

We took turns sliding down the sloped end of the claw foot tub and splashing water onto the mirror. It became a contest to make the most noise so Sam would know we were taking a bath.

When I slid, my bum stuck to the porcelain and squeaked. It felt like a pinch and I squealed, causing Nicky to let out a loud fake laugh.

It was a long time before I realized that contrary to what Sylvia had told me, everything between my legs wasn’t called my bum.

My bum held great interest — a place where I put marbles and pushed them around with my fingertips, savouring their glassy coolness, imagining an eye staring inside me. I’d take the marble out and hold it under my nose, compelled by the salty, slightly sour odour. Sometimes I tasted it. When I was eight, Jenny Watson had held out her finger and said, “Smell this.” I had wrinkled my nose, but even then I was attracted. The between-my-legs smell. The smell of my underpants before bed.

After drying off, we fought over the square white container of baby powder, shaking it wildly, some of the powder sprinkling our bodies, the rest scattering across the bathroom, leaving spots on the mirror. Giggling, we whacked each other’s bottoms and backs with flat hands, marking the sheer powdered skin. Then we tripped down the hall.

I broke free of Nicky’s slapping hands and tramped white barefoot prints across my wooden floor and rag rug. I grabbed my red nightie from under my pillow and pulled it on, kicking my legs and arms out in a crazy dance so Nicky couldn’t touch me.

He stopped.

Our eyes met for an instant. I turned and pulled the gilt scoop handles on the top drawer of my white dresser. I selected another nightgown, a seersucker baby doll with green and purple flowers, and turned to Nicky.

“Come here.”

He did.

“Lift your arms up.”

My tone of voice promised adventure and threatened menace if it wasn’t obeyed. So Nicky obeyed.

“Lift them higher.”

He lifted his arms higher. I slipped the cap-sleeved nightie over his up-stretched hands and wriggled it down until his head stuck out. I pinched and straightened with the attention and expertise I usually reserved for Barbie.

He stood still while I brushed his wet hair straight back and tied a purple ribbon around his head. He lifted his face while I rubbed berry lipgloss into his lips and wrapped a length of beads around his neck. Finally, I painted his nails red.

“I christen you Nina,” I said, turning the comers of my mouth down and curtsying.

Nicky made a face. “I don’t want to play with that name.”

I considered. “Nicole. How about that? It’s close to Nicholas. Or Nicola. What about Nicola? It’s pretty.”

“Okay,” he said. His face shone.

The crinkly fabric looked bright and crisp on his dusted skin. His winter skin was a hard beige, like the rinds of certain melons. Streaks of missed dirt showed through the white powder and his body looked strange compared to mine. I stood in front of the mirror. Nicky fixed his eyes on me and would not look at his reflection.

I patted his shoulders and hips and twirled him. around. No matter where I moved him, his eyes gripped mine.

I looked in the mirror, hoping he would do the same, and saw two girls: me and the one I had named Nicola. I stared at Nicola in her flouncy crinkled dress and brazen purple ribbon over dark wet hair, and finally Nicola’s eyes darted off my face. She glanced back at me then slowly turned to absorb her full reflection. Her chest expanded.

With one hand on my waist, Nicola took my hand and two-stepped me across the wooden floor. Her feet were unfettered, expressing complex rhythms with natural confidence. The powder was like silk under our toes. I let my own feet go, and threw my head back in long, toothy laughter. As the room spun past and Nicola’s purple and green image cut across the mirror in the golden taffy evening light, Nicky didn’t seem to care one bit. Who could care? In that moment he was Nicola. It was enough.

In the evenings I lay in bed and listened for the crunch of Sam’s car in the driveway. Every night he went to committee meetings for the town or to play ball or to umpire or referee. When I heard the gravel, I pushed my chin into my chest and pulled my shoulders up around my ears. Some nights I called downstairs for my mother, but Sylvia no longer responded. Nicky called for her, too, but it was like yelling into a vacuum. She was in the bedroom below or sprawled on the couch. Maybe she was ignoring us. Neither of us had the courage to get up and check if she was there. What if she had left, crawled out the window and left us behind?

Nicky’s bed shared a wall with mine. With my lips against the blue fleur-de-lis wallpaper, I whispered of mutations: “Sylvia’s nose has grown into a long dirty parsnip. Her eyes are little piggy beads. Her teeth are black smelly Doberman’s balls and her mouth oozes green poo. She is getting fatter and fatter and has developed a taste for plump juicy boy-flesh. My flesh is too stringy. But I am sure a witch like her would appreciate a meal of a boy like you, Nicky.”

Nicky grew silent. I pictured him in emptiness, his mind sucked into the witch’s void.

“I know you sleep curled in a ball near the bottom of your bed so the witch-mother can’t find you.”

The possibility of frightening my brother until he cracked spurred me on. I stopped the story only when I had convinced myself the witch-mother’s eyes were glowing red outside my own door as she stood, drawn by her daughter’s words, head tilted, waiting for me to get the story wrong.

In the quiet after my stories, I saw cobwebs forming in the night sky where the ceiling should have been. Spiders crawled over the webs, some hanging from threads. The longer I looked, the more the spiders multiplied and soon I saw them dropping on my covers, felt them creeping on my skin and pricking me. I scratched, leaving long red ridges on my cheeks and neck and arms.

In the morning the witch-mother was gone and Sylvia sat smoking at the kitchen table. The welts escaped her detection but Jenny Taylor pointed them out on the bus. Eventually I turned the bedroom light on when I went to sleep. No one seemed to mind.

That spring, Sylvia’s eyes assumed a new position: up and to the left. Over and over, I was fooled, turning to look where they pointed only to find she was staring at a clay mask on the wall or the painted rung of a chair.

I avoided any space Sylvia’s eyes might rest, in case my mother saw something she didn’t want to and that something was me.

Nicky couldn’t tolerate Sylvia’s eyes not resting on him. Nicky wanted to be noticed.

He experimented. When he wore his tiny red stretch bathing suit to school, Sylvia didn’t bat an eye. He wore Sam’s boxers or his own pajama bottoms with a belt looped around his waist. He wore the same T-shirt for days on end. He went shirtless. He didn’t comb his hair so it become a matted helmet. Each morning, Sylvia sat looking at a potted baby’s tears on the windowsill, sucking on her cigarette and letting the smoke trail out her nostrils.

One day Nicky came downstairs with his nails, his knuckles and part of his neck painted with pink polish. The time I had painted his nails was already fading from my memory. I had removed the polish right away then so no one had seen it. This time Nicky had made sure that no one would miss it.

I was in the kitchen when Nicky came in. These days, if we wanted breakfast we had to get it ourselves. Nicky made toast, covering it with chunks of peanut butter, then tossing the knife into the sink with a clatter.

“Shit,” said Nicky, louder than he needed to. Sylvia didn’t flinch. Nicky sat and tapped his fingers on the table but Sylvia stayed facing the window, the heater on her cigarette burning until it was over an inch long, then dropping. I glared at Nicky. He wasn’t supposed to wear polish on his own. I stood beside Sylvia at the edge of her vision and pushed the ashtray so the ashes would fall into it.

At school I was dying to say something, to use those freakish pink nails as a way of getting Nicky back for using my polish in the first place. Nicky walked around with his chin out and a big grin and somehow it was okay. I didn’t know how he did it. He didn’t have a good memory like mine and his grades were average but there was something about my brother — maybe something he’d said — that made the other boys want his approval. Maybe he’d blamed it on me. Making fun of him would make things worse.

Sam didn’t see the nails until dinner time. Though more and more Sylvia’s dinners came from a can, that night she served up a meatloaf, loosely-packed ground beef swimming in a yellow sauce. The table was set with no tablecloth or napkins, and the forks and knives were on the same side of the plate. Sam got out the milk and ketchup.

Despite the liquid, my first bite crunched.

“What’s in it?” I asked.

Sylvia looked around with a smile, not meeting anyone’s eyes.

“Soup. Tomato soup and mushroom.”

“Are there onions?”

“Onions. Corn flakes. Mustard. Whatever was around. Maybe even some peanut butter.”

My throat rose but I kept my mouth closed. Sylvia had slumped and didn’t notice. The meat separated into a golden slosh.

“It’s delicious. Right, kids?” Sam said, exaggerating his chewing and nodding toward Nicky and me.

“Right, Dad,” I said, taking a big swallow of milk. I calculated how long I had to wait before I could safely get up and take a mouthful to the bathroom to deposit in the toilet.

Nicky nodded but didn’t answer.

“Thank you,” Sylvia said into her plate.

Nicky kept his hands on his lap, curling his fingers around his fork when he had to use it but when Nicky lifted his milk, Sam saw the nails.

Sam laid his utensils down, first the knife and then the fork, and stared, his face growing red. I counted my chews, four per mouthful, so as not to attract his attention.

The stares had the reverse effect on Nicky; soon he had both hands up on the table, fingertips outstretched, preening and fussing, admiring the job he’d done. By now some of the polish had chipped off, so the nails were more of a mess. He waved them under my nose until I had to hold chunks of lip and cheek skin between my teeth to stop the giggles. Nicky curled his fingers inward and blew.

Sam watched, eyes narrowing, then reached across the table, grabbed Nicky’s fingers and squeezed. He gripped harder and harder, his eyes on the nails as if he expected them to fly off and parts of Nicky — the bad parts — to stream out. Nicky squinted at Sam and refused to budge or make a noise, even as his fingers turned pink, then a lurid blue-red, then white, the way my fingers did at school when I tried to make them fall off by wrapping elastic bands around them. They never did but I wasn’t certain Nicky’s wouldn’t now.

“You!”

Sam slammed Nicky’s hand down onto his plate, spraying me with meatloaf juice. I held back a yelp. Sylvia pulled out a cigarette and lit up, eyes directed at the fridge radio, waiting. Nicky smirked, only his red ears betraying his fear.

Sam stood.

“You’re grounded until I say so. And your sister,” he jerked his head in my direction, “can clean you up. I never want to see those nails again. You look like a fairy.”

Sam’s neck throbbed. His lips moved but no words came out. He walked into the mud room, pulled on his jacket and yanked open the back door.

Five minutes later, Nicky got up and left, too.

I snuck away to my room. Later that night, Nicky sat on the toilet seat while I dipped toilet paper into nail polish remover and scrubbed his fingernails until the skin around them was raw. We didn’t speak; like Sylvia, he could barely look at me.