ON SEPTEMBER 5, MAUREEN WENT BACK TO SCHOOL, and if going back to school without Carleen there wasn’t bad enough, it turned out that the Pig with the Wig, Sister Imobilis, was her new homeroom teacher. Maureen knew this year was going to be a real drago dragini.
It was only the first day and already Imobilis was up on bust. Maureen started to feel kind of sick during first period, Religion. She tried to get Sister Imobilis’s attention so she could go to the bathroom, because she was definitely going to hurl. Finally she was forced to make a dash for it, but Sister Imobilis grabbed her by the arm, twirled her around, and then . . . that was it. Maureen barfed everything she’d had for breakfast right down the front of Imobilis’s stiff, white wimple. Maureen was sent immediately to the Prefect of Discipline’s office. She sat there in the office with the eagle eyes of Sister Virginia, the Prefect of Discipline, focused directly on her. Good God, she was practically boring holes in Maureen’s skull. Maureen was in the blood sweats she was so nervous.
Maureen finally said, “I couldn’t help it! I never did it on purpose. I just felt right sick and then Sister Imobilis wouldn’t let me go and I had no control over it. I mean, it’s not like I want to be throwing my guts up in front of thirty-seven girls and onto the Pig with the—I mean Sister Imobilis!”
Sister Virginia, deliberately and without speaking, took Maureen’s wrist, found her pulse, looked directly in Maureen’s eyes and said, “What did you do last night, my child?”
“Got ready for school, S’ter.”
“Do you know any boys, Maureen?” Sister Virginia asked calmly, looking at Maureen so intently that Maureen felt even sicker. She was terrified she might hurl again. She could feel all the blood in her body rushing up to her face. “Why is your pulse quickening my child?”
“I don’t know, Sister,” Maureen said, but thought, Because you are terrifying the crap out of me, you heartless old bat. She felt herself getting swept up in that nameless swirling fear that threatened, on an almost daily basis, to swallow her whole. She felt her heart leap up into her throat, tears filled her eyes and a flood of water pushed and burned just behind her pupils. Oh no! She panicked. I can’t cry! If I start crying now, I’ll never stop. So she began systematically shutting herself down. She knew she was getting that look on her face, that stubborn, stupid, vacant look that so enraged Sister Virginia and pretty much every other grown-up on the planet who’d had to look at it. This time, it worked in Maureen’s favour, though, because Sister Virginia was so angry she stopped taking Maureen’s pulse, which was a bit of a relief anyway.
“Maureen, tell me the truth: Are you in trouble with God?”
Maureen looked back at her blankly.
“Are you in trouble? Have you committed the sin of impurity? Impure thoughts? Words? God forbid, deeds?”
Maureen just sat, stubborn as a rock.
“Young lady, know this: you are going to sit there until you give me some answers.”
So Maureen sat there.
At 3:15, Sister Virginia finally let her go, but she insisted that Maureen be back in her office at ten to nine the next morning.
When Sister Virginia opened the door of her office to her the following day, Maureen immediately and without any forethought whatsoever threw up on the floor. Sister Virginia was horrified; so was Maureen. There was orange with red bits and the undigested egg she had had for her breakfast just half an hour ago. Normally, Maureen didn’t vomit; she wasn’t one of those people. She could usually keep everything down. When she was sick, she just shut down. She didn’t empty out from all ends like some people, and so this new letting go, this opening up, this quite literal spilling of her guts was shocking to Maureen.
Sister Virginia manoeuvred her around the vomit, sat her in a chair and buzzed for Mr. Martin, the janitor. When he came in, Maureen automatically stood up, and she found herself more embarrassed by the standing up than even by the throwing up. Our Lady of Mercy Convent girls were supposed to stand whenever priests entered the classroom or auditorium or even the gym, and since priests were usually the only males who were ever seen, Maureen just automatically stood up whenever any man came in the room.
Sister Virginia snapped, “Sit down, Maureen, for pity’s sake. Thank you, Joseph, if you could just take care of this for us.”
“I’ll just be a minute, Sister,” Mr. Martin said.
He came back in with the bucket. Sister Virginia and Maureen sat in uncomfortable silence during the long process of getting Maureen’s insides off the floor, and it was only after Mr. Martin had sprinkled that red stuff, that special janitor’s absorbent stuff on the floor, and swept it up and withdrew, that Sister Virginia spoke.
“Maureen, my dear, physically . . . do you feel any different?”
Maureen just sat there, still stubbornly determined not to speak. Sister Virginia sighed and looked at her almost with pity, and that look really worried Maureen.
“I fear, Maureen, that your immortal soul is in grave danger, my dear, and you have started down a path of sin and sorrow off which you may never have the spiritual strength to stray.”
Maureen looked at Sister Virginia blankly.
“Maureen, how many mornings have you thrown up?”
Maureen met Sister Virginia’s gaze and suddenly she knew. Of course . . . I’m up the duff, knocked up. I’m up the stump. Montreal. Oh shit, oh no! Montreal. She felt a deep sense of shame and thought, Oh shit, I am fucked in so many ways. I don’t even know who the father is. It could be that guy Fox or the other fella or that old guy. I don’t even know their names.
“I’m afraid that you will have to leave school.”
“But,” Maureen protested, “I’m only in Grade 11, Sister. I . . .”
“I will contact your parents.”
“Oh no, Sister. Please, please, let me tell them.” She almost fell to her knees, but she could see from the look on Sister Virginia’s face how useless her begging would be. Okay then, she thought, I’ll just have to kill myself, I guess, but I don’t even have a gun or drugs or anything. I am so useless, I don’t have any way to kill myself. I can’t cut myself—I’m too afraid. I’ll just jump to my death off Signal Hill. It was settled, then. Before Sister Virginia would even get a chance to tell the Sarge, Maureen would be washed up, dead, at the foot of Signal Hill and everybody would be devastated. A young girl cut down in her prime, in the flower of her youth. Everyone knew it was better to be dead than to be pregnant. It was way better to be dead than for everyone to know that you were nothing but a slut and a loser and a lizzie too probably on top of that. And that’s what they’d call her, because once they started calling you a slut, they automatically called you a lizzie. Maureen didn’t know why.
“Gather up your things and go home now, Maureen, and may God have mercy on your immortal soul.”
Maureen looked at Sister Virginia. “Did you say ‘and may God have mercy on my immortal soul,’ Sister?”
“No, my dear.”
Maureen knew she was lying.
She stumbled down the corridor, unscrewed one of the emergency lights and smashed it in the waste bin just for old times’ sake. She tried to beat the door off her locker so no one else could use 321 ever again, but she attracted the attention of Sister Mary Monique from Room 207, who came out and asked Maureen if everything was all right.
She was such a sweet nun that Maureen almost caved for a second, almost sought the solace of falling sobbing against Sister Monique’s enormous bosom, a set of knockers so huge that even the starched white wimple could not hide them. It was said that her own mother had predicted that Sister Monique would either have to join a convent or have breast reduction surgery because her breasts were that big, those were the only two options open to her. When Maureen had heard the story, she’d quipped, “Or become a famous stripper like Chesty Morgan or Watermelon Jones,” and ever after, every time she clapped eyes on Sister Monique, Maureen had a disturbing vision of seeing Sister Monique peeling off her habit in the most provocative and cheesy way. Today was no exception.
“Stupid door on the stupid locker is stupid stuck, Sister! Stupid!” Maureen said, hitting the offending door with each “stupid.”
“Well, keep it down to a quiet roar!” said Sister Monique, rolling her eyes as she stepped back in her classroom and firmly shut the door.
Maureen flew out the front door and almost ran into Dicey Doyle and her friend Sam—two-thirds of the Three Musketeers. Dicey and Sam were laughing uproariously as they sailed down the steps of Mercy Convent to freedom. The girls were going on the pip, and they somewhat grudgingly invited Maureen to join them.
The first time Maureen had gotten in tack with the Musketeers was on the steps leading down from the basilica one Sunday morning as she was escaping the end of 12:15 Mass. According to the Rules of the Mass, you could get away with coming into Mass as late as the Gospel and tear out of there right after the Consecration of the Host and still manage, just by a hair’s breadth, not to commit the mortal sin of missing Sunday Mass. That Sunday, Maureen had ducked out and was racing down the basilica steps, thinking how they were too narrow for two footfalls but really too wide for one—weren’t there any step rules? Weren’t they supposed to be standardized? Wasn’t it kind of dangerous for them all to be different widths? Maureen was working herself up into a bit of a fit about how half-assed city council was, when she almost banged right into a girl, a tall girl with coal-black hair, who was standing in the middle of the steps, smoking what looked to be a rollie. Maureen had never seen a girl smoke a rollie before, and this girl was spitting loose tobacco off her tongue. She was wearing a black trench coat, pegged Newfoundland tartan pants, black short boots and a white turtleneck. Maureen had never clapped eyes on anyone decked out quite like that before. Newfoundland tartan pants? Pegged? Short boots? Nobody wore short boots anymore, not since people stopped wearing Beatle boots. It was all so wrong, but on this girl, it was all, somehow, so right, right and true. It turned out her name was Dicey—well, really her name was Patsy Anne, Patsy Anne Doyle, but her father used to call her Dicey when she was little because she was always so thirsty and drank so much milk, she was just like the Old Woman in the Irish song who drank too much, Dicey Riley. The name stuck.
That morning on the steps, Dicey, of the small mouth and the crooked teeth and the great big brown eyes, had a bruise on the side of her face, which she made no attempt to hide. She’d been up on Signal Hill, parking—“car-free parking,” Dicey said, “all the fun with none of the expense,” and laughed. Maureen laughed too, just to be polite. She had no idea what Dicey was going on about. Dicey must have read the confusion in her face.
“You know, how everybody goes parking up on Signal Hill?”
“Yes,” Maureen said, but she didn’t really know.
“Well, me and Roger went parking—without the car. Kind of ‘grassing’ really . . . Yea, we were having a fight and he pushed me and I fell right down over Signal Hill.”
Maureen was kind of horrified at this news, but Dicey seemed almost proud and shrugged off her trench coat to show Maureen the scrapes and cuts on her arms and shoulders. On her upper arm, cutting into the generous amount of flesh she carried, there was a huge, thick copper bracelet—a slave bracelet, Dicey called it, saying an old boyfriend had gotten it for her. Dicey offered Maureen her pouch of tobacco and rolling papers, and Maureen about died of shame as she clumsily tried to roll a cigarette. Dicey rolled one up for her using just one hand. Watching her do it, Maureen’s gob was well and truly smacked. Dicey finished off by striking a Sea Dog strike-anywhere match on the back of her heel and lit up Maureen’s rollie for her. Dicey lived just over the road from Maureen on Bell’s Turn, and Maureen couldn’t believe she had never before run into this extraordinary creature. Was it because Dicey went to Presentation Convent, the other girls’ school, which most of the girls in Maureen’s neighbourhood attended? Maureen had never understood why she had to go to Mercy Convent. All her other sisters had gone to Presentation. The Sarge said that the five bucks a month they had to pay for Maureen to go to Mercy Convent meant that Maureen was getting the best quality of education, but with the same breath, the Sarge would mercilessly torment Maureen, accusing her of putting on airs and thinking herself above everybody else just because she went to Mercy Convent. The Sarge called Maureen “the five-dollar-a-month girl.” But it turned out Dicey went to Mercy too. She was a year older than Maureen, but still Maureen couldn’t believe she’d never met her.
That Sunday morning on the steps, Dicey asked Maureen if she wanted to come down to her house. Dicey, her sister, Sharon, and her mom and dad lived in an apartment on Bell’s Turn, and after that first morning, Maureen tried to spend as much time as she could there, drinking Mrs. Doyle’s tea, which was kept going in a pot at the back of the stove all day long. It was so strong, it was thick. That tea and a cigarette made Maureen sick every Sunday morning, when, for the rest of that year, she went to the Doyles’ instead of going to Sunday Mass, thus damning her immortal soul for eternity. Maureen thought it was worth it. Mrs. Doyle was so nice. She had short white hair and looked just like what you thought a mother should look like. Mr. Doyle went to sea and only came home every fortnight. Whenever Dicey had a little cough, he would give her and whoever was with her a sip of London Dock, the 140-proof rum he was so fond of. Dicey and Maureen were always coughing in the most unconvincing way, but Mr. Doyle didn’t seem to mind and always gave them a sip of rum anyway.
Sam Fleming and Sara Browne were Dicey’s friends and they called themselves the Three Musketeers. By association, they kind of became Maureen’s friends too. Sam, Sara and Dicey were the kind of girls who hitchhiked to all the grown-up dances up the shore in Kelligrews, Manuels, Long Pond and out at Power’s Court, where there were always rackets. They even hitched as far as the street dances out in Brigus. A couple of times, they hitchhiked out to Gander—two hundred miles away—where, they told Maureen, they’d done nothing except eat a plate of chips, dressing and gravy and turned right around and hitchhiked back to town the same day. Maureen thought them amazing, but she was a bit afraid of them too. They were so tough and fearless and always blazing some new trail, leaving Maureen stumbling along after them.
The day Maureen was thrown out of school, she, Dicey and Sam walked down to Water Street and started trying to hitchhike to Mount Pearl. They were headed out Waterford Bridge Road when they got a ride with an old, fat, creepy salesman type, who kept on with the “I suppose lovely young ladies like yourselves wouldn’t be interested in an old fella like me?” following on the heels of “Sometimes us old fellas fool ya. We’re all go, you know what I mean.” He actually turned his head and gave them a nod and wink when he said “full of spunk.”
“Okay,” said Dicey, who, as the biggest and fiercest-looking of the Three Musketeers, often led the charge, “that’s it. Let us out here. This is where we’re going.”
“But sure,” fat, old and baldy persisted, “I didn’t mean nudding by dat. Spunk—life, energy.”
“STOP THE CAR!” Dicey screamed at him. “Stop the fucking car and let us the fuck out!”
They’d only gotten as far as Bowring Park.
“You sick old fuck!” Dicey screamed after the car.
“Full of spunk,” Sam said, outraged.
“Spunk,” Maureen said, and she almost giggled until she remembered what she was actually full of—the consequences of spunk—and her heart fell. Spunk! Spunk! Spunk! It was an extraordinarily funny word if you said it often enough.
When they finally got to Mount Pearl and piled out of the car they’d hitched a ride in, they ran into Spider O’Rourke and Spook Wakeham. The boys had just bought a car up in Holyrood for fifty bucks, a real shitbox with the floor in the front passenger side gone and no seat in the back. Dicey and Sam got in the back and Maureen ended up in the front seat. She had to keep her feet up on the dashboard and was scared to death to look down through the hole in the floor at the road that was careening by underneath. Spider drove them to the dump where everybody from Mount Pearl went parking at night. But it was early afternoon, so they had the place to themselves. Just as they got there, the junk-heap car sputtered out and nothing that Spider or Spook could do would make it sputter back in again. Maureen, without being fully conscious of how she got there, ended up on the hood of the stalled and useless car with a ball-peen hammer she’d found in the trunk and was beating in the front windshield while Dicey and Sam were smashing out the back window, and Spider and Spook were banging up the doors. It was glorious. The whole time they were at it, Maureen forgot all about her predicament. She had never felt so alive and so a part of something—all of them working together, lifted up and out of themselves by their united act of destruction.
When they’d finished smashing the car to bits, they hardly knew what to do. They were suddenly uncomfortable and shy; they were having a difficult time looking at each other. Something made them want to get away from each other—it was like they’d been too intimate, too close, too open to each other or something. And so, not talking at all, they walked out of the dump, across the Experimental Farm and back down to Park Avenue, and the girls left.
WHEN MAUREEN WALKED IN THE DOOR, A SHOE HIT HER over the head—not a stunning blow, but it hurt.
“What, Mom! What?”
“Dicey’s mother called me. The principal called her. Ye weren’t in school today. Out curb-crawling, were ya . . .,” she went on, but Maureen just zoned out. She was still safe; the Sarge hadn’t got the call yet from the Prefect of Discipline. Sister Virginia was giving Maureen a chance to tell her parents. Just as she had that thought, the fucking phone rang. Maureen knew right away it was Sister Virginia. Now the shit was really going to hit the fan.
Maureen’s mother stopped the “we’re not running a whorehouse” attack just long enough to answer the phone. Maureen stood there, trapped like a rabbit in the headlights. There was nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. It was all coming down, and coming down fast. She started up over the stairs but thought better of it. What was the point? They’d come up too. So she just gave up and sat on the stairs, waiting for the inevitable shitstorm. It came. All her father said was “Well, there’s not much point in locking the barn door after the horse is out”—this after her mother had called her all the big whores in the book and swore that Maureen would never step outside the door again.
That night, Maureen went to bed and dreamed and dreamed and dreamed, first of smashing cars and then of bulldozing St. John’s, driving everything before her into the sea. In her dream, she was full of rage, nothing stopped her and the more she destroyed, the more joy she felt, and so she rose up in her dream, full of beauty and destruction and swollen up with life, but when she woke in the morning and looked around the crummy room in her crummy house on the crummy street on the edge of the crummy world, Maureen just wanted to go back to sleep and keep dreaming her dreams of destruction. She heard her mother’s footsteps and pulled the covers over her head and pretended she was still asleep.
“Don’t think, my dear, just because you got yourself knocked up and thrown out of school that you’re just gonna lay there in the bunk all day, doin’ nothin’. Get up outta that bed and get down over them stairs.” She hauled the covers off Maureen.
“Jesus, Mom, what are ya doin’?” You old bag, you big bitch, you ugly, syphilitic old whore . . . All those names, all those bitternesses were going through Maureen’s head, but she dare not, of course, breathe a word because the Sarge would kill her. That was a certainty. She would actually kill her, not just beat her within an inch of her life, but totally beat the life right out of her. The fact that Maureen was carrying a new life would do nothing to stop her.
“Go down to Water Street and don’t come back to this house till you got a job of work.”
Well, at least she’d be out for the day and not home listening to the name-calling and the screeching and the bawling and the tears and the recriminations and the hatred. If Maureen’s life were a TV show, Maureen’s TV mother would blame herself, go all weak in the knees wondering where she’d gone wrong, say if only she’d loved Maureen more. Then she’d tearfully embrace Maureen and say she’d always love her no matter what, and everything would work out for the best in the end. Unfortunately, they didn’t make any TV shows in St. John’s in 1967 except, of course, for the news; and no stories of knocked-up sixteen-year-olds whose lives were totally fucked, never to be unfucked again, ever found their way onto NTV or CBC News. Oh, if Maureen didn’t feel so mad, she might lie down and weep and never, ever get up again.
That day, she got a part-time job at The Agora, a discount place downtown, locally owned, full of stuff that had been bought at various fire sales in Montreal. That’s what she felt like too, like she was the victim of a Montreal fire; she would fit right in. But, of course, she didn’t. All the girls who worked there were that hard crowd who could—magically, it seemed to Maureen—see right through her tough act and see that she liked books and thought way too much of herself. They could see that even though she felt she was worth nothing, she still thought she was better than all of them, and she could tell right off the bat that they were going to set her straight on that little misapprehension. She pretended to the owner, Mr. White, whom she’d convinced to give her the job, that she was still at school and could only work Thursday and Friday night and all day Saturday. She would have gone for a full-time job, but Mr. White had assumed from the start that she was looking for part-time work and that’s what they needed, part-timers, so she went along with him. Will that old cunt—oh God, she couldn’t believe she’d even thought that word, the ugliest word in the entire English language; she would never, ever think that word again—will the Sarge want me to get another part-time job or is one enough to shut her up for the time being?
The Agora—a pretentious name for a dump. Maureen started off on the floor of the ladies’ department, tidying and folding bins of cotton bras by size and colour, black, white and beige. God, how mortifying Maureen found it to be out in public, touching over-the-shoulder-boulder-holders. And even more humiliating to have the actual boulders stuck on your very own chest, poking out at the world, always just a B-cup step ahead of you. Folding up those bins of bras was kind of like the myth of Sisyphus: no sooner would Maureen have one bin tidied and in good order when a flock of Portuguese sailors—“the Gees,” that’s what the girls on the floor called them—would descend on it and, in a flurry of looking for bras to fit their wives and girlfriends back home in Portugal, would totally obliterate all of Maureen’s careful folding work. The Gees were generally not popular at The Agora. Maximum mess for minimum spending—and they smelled on top of that, you know, exotic, like different kinds of cigarettes, Maureen thought, and different food and, of course, fish. Good God, the dreaded smell of fish. The entire island was up to its neck in the stink of fish, and everyone worked overtime trying to get away from it and at the same time pretend it wasn’t there.
“The wife. This one,” said one of the older Gees, holding a white cotton bra to his chest, the bra with the butterfly inset under the breast. Just being in bras made Maureen want to break out in boils, let alone having to watch some guy pretend to wear one. Breasts, boobs, boobies, knockers, gazoombas, jugs, hoohas, tits, titties—good God, even the words were like some big advertisement of shame.
Mrs. Lee, the head of the department, spoke loud and slow, as she did to all the foreign sailors, like they were deaf as well as stunned. “How big is she, your wife? Is she a big woman like me, or small, like you are?” After a few more bawls at him, the Gee held his hands out in front of him, way out in front, making the universal sign for big tits.
“Oh my,” said Mrs. Lee, “that’s big! You’ll probably have to find somethin’ up in Yard Goods, in the fabric department, to fit her!”
Every Thursday and Friday night, and all day Saturday, Maureen worked at The Agora. Nobody said anything about her getting bigger. Everybody who worked at The Agora got fat eventually anyway—blown up from sadness, Maureen figured.
Three months after she started working there, the management took the doors off the toilets, and that meant that when the staff, who were 99 per cent girls, were sitting in their lunchroom, having their bite to eat, they had a full view of other girls going to the toilet. Management said it was to cut down on the girls stealing pantyhose and underwear and whatnot.
Though the morning sickness had passed, just the thought of having to gawk at someone else going to the toilet made Maureen too queasy to even go into the staff lunchroom. So, on her break, Maureen had to sit at the public lunch counter, where, through some weird alignment of the stars or something, there happened to be another Maureen Brennan, working in the snack bar. This one was from Torbay, big-boned and raw and graceless. Three times a day, people thought Maureen was her. Maureen was shattered. Okay, so she had always been “a big girl for twelve,” granted, but she had a certain . . . Oh, I don’t know, Maureen thought. Even though she was ashamed to think it, she still thought, I don’t look . . . poor, not like this other Maureen, with that raw look and her big hands and feet and her big, strong, thick upper back and neck, almost like she was built especially to haul a plough through the fields. I’ve got long legs, and my ankles are quite delicate. I do have little, sort of meanish eyes and a thin mouth, but overall I have a good bone structure, big cheekbones and a strong-but-not-too-strong chin. I definitely do not look like that other Maureen Brennan. No, not one bit. I look destined for better things. Yea, destined for better things, like bringing another little bastard into a world already rotted out with poor little bastards and straightening out bins of bras that have been flung about by poor, stinking sailors—poor Portuguese sailors lost in a foreign land, where no one remembered anymore that the Portuguese led the Age of Discovery and that their great explorers had opened up the world. But now the world has left them far behind. They’re no longer the Kings of the Sea, but just the butt of some shopgirl’s contempt.
One night, while lying awake, unable to get back to sleep because now, in the second trimester, with her belly as big as it was, it was getting harder and harder to find a comfortable way to sleep, she had a thought come to her out of nowhere: she’d do something about what management was putting the girls through in the lunchroom. Maybe she’d make some cartoons. Of course, she wasn’t what you’d call a natural cartoonist. For one thing, she couldn’t draw, and on top of that, she didn’t really think in a cartoony kind of way. She tossed and she turned and she finally went down to the front room. Dad’s paper, The Telegram, was there. She turned to the editorial page and saw a cartoon of a guy in a prison cell. He was skinny, done in, and he was counting off, with strokes on the wall, his time left in prison. Maureen found a big sheet of tracing paper in Raymond’s bookbag and traced out the cartoon. She wrote, “In the Agora lunchroom,” put a few strands of hair on buddy’s head and replaced the caption with “Only three more minutes before lunch break is over.” She did all that again, and she was going to do it again, but she’d used up all the paper and couldn’t find any more. Sometimes paper was hard to come by in the house on Princess Street, and it was hard to find a pencil or a pen, never mind something like a sharpener. Always with a big kitchen knife, that’s how they sharpened their pencils. One big knife was pretty well Edna’s only household tool. It served as a hammer, screwdriver and beer bottle opener and was driven down into the top of the can of milk to make the two holes. It cut the bread, it buttered the bread and it could usually be found stuck in an industrial-sized jar of jam in the middle of the table. Of course, it was also an excellent weapon. It should have its own K-tel ad on television: The Amazing Big Knife, the household tool that can be put to any use. They could even use it to chop wood if they had to.
There never was a pair of scissors in that house. They had a lack of everything and a glut of nothing. Of course, they never had anything like glue. The covers they made for their school books were stuck together with canned Carnation milk, so their books always smelled like sour milk, and no, this was not the life Maureen wanted, not now, not ever. She wanted art supplies. She wanted the kind of house where the mom put up a pencil sharpener, like a school one, in the kitchen. Some people even had desks in their rooms and “oh mind out you don’t swell” books. Maureen’s father had the odd book. Sometimes he’d just stay in bed days on end and read Louis L’Amour or books with pictures of big four-masted ships on the covers, coming down over the stairs to get something to eat before going right back up. He wouldn’t even go to the bathroom, just piss in an empty Captain Morgan bottle. He’d buy second-hand paperbacks at John D. Snow’s. Maureen used to go with him to Mr. Snow’s store when she was little. Mr. John D. Snow was pale, the palest kind of pale, even his lips had no colour. His hands were dry and papery, and he had no hair, no discernible lips and definitely no eyebrows. The store was toppling with junk, endless paperbacks, glass bottles, old bits of mouldy clothes, broken lamps. Nothing in that store seemed to have any colour. Maureen believed that Mr. Snow had somehow sucked the colour out of everything—even himself.
Maureen’s mother read too—Harlequin romances mostly. Maureen remembered her mother sending her to the drugstore one September when Maureen was small, far away from the house, Ricketts’ drugstore. “Success to Private Ricketts, our gallant native son, he proved himself a hero, the Victoria Cross he’d won. He was only a boy from Newfoundland . . . ” Maureen couldn’t remember the rest of that song, but it was about buddy who owned the drugstore. That day at the drugstore, there was money left over and it was the Sarge’s birthday, and so Maureen bought her mother a Harlequin romance. The woman in the drugstore wrapped it up nice, and when Maureen gave it so proudly to her mom—yes, admittedly, she was a bit puffed up, but she was only seven years old, for Christ sakes—all Edna said was “A birthday present? Shure you bought that outta the change from the money I gave ya. What kind of a gift is that?” Maureen had mistakenly thought that giving her mother a birthday present would make her happy, but when it came to her mother, Maureen realized very early on that she didn’t have a clue. She was endlessly trying to figure her mother out. She twisted herself into knots trying to become whatever it was this terrifying mountain of flesh called Mom wanted her to be.
“Maureen, Reenie, Reens . . . Whaddya at?”
Maureen almost jumped out of her skin. Kathleen was standing at the bottom of the stairs, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes and talking loudly in a stage whisper.
“Shh . . . SHHH! You are gonna wake up the whole house. Shhh . . . Look. I am drawing a cartoon—look!” Maureen whispered at Kathleen.
“Let me draw. I can draw.” Kathleen sat down next to Maureen on the chesterfield, picked up a pencil and started to colour in or scratch out—Maureen wasn’t sure which—one of the two cartoons Maureen had managed to trace out. Maureen made a grab for the pencil, but Kathleen just held on. “Let me draw. I’m the one who draws. Let me!” she said, grabbing the tracing paper from Maureen’s hand.
Maureen lost it. She yelled at Kathleen—something she’d done a lot when she was younger but something she had promised herself she’d never do again. “What’s wrong with you, you moron?”
Kathleen was crumpling up the paper.
“Look! You’re ruining it, just like you ruin everything. I just spent an hour on that. Here, give it to me.”
As Maureen grabbed to take the cartoon back, the flimsy piece of paper tore in two.
Maureen was yelling, Kathleen was crying, and then there was the Sarge, barrelling down over the stairs.
“What in the Joe Jesus is going on down here? It’s three o’clock in the Christlyfied morning and you’ve got all hands . . . ”
Kathleen kept crying. Maureen didn’t care. She’d already gone so far, calling Kathleen a moron—something she’d sworn she’d never do again—she figured she might as well just keep going.
“IT’S NOT ME, IT’S STUPID ARSE. She just wrecked something—I was down here working on something. Why can’t I ever have anything? Why does she have to wreck EVERYTHING?”
The look on Kathleen’s face stopped Maureen in her tracks, and she reached out and put her arm around her sister, drawing her close. The Sarge was still going on at her. “Shure you were always half-cracked, Maureen, but now with that youngster coming, you’re worse than ever. Up all night, in the bunk all day—the whole house up on stilts. You’re liable to do anything. You should be locked up is what you should be.”
“Yes,” said Maureen, smiling at Kathleen. “We should all be locked up in a big family-sized rubber room, where we can’t do damage to ourselves or to each other.”
I am so sorry, she mouthed at Kathleen.