AS WELL as practising piano, my friend Ona had to help her mother do the housework every Saturday morning. Their house had two sets of stairs, and it was Ona’s job to wash them on her hands and knees with Spic and Span and a stiff brush. Then she had to clean the bathroom and their big verandah with its dozens of windowsills. For this, every Wednesday she got a dime to spend on penny candy at the corner store. I’d beg her for one of her jawbreakers. Sometimes, dazed with pleasure, I’d forget and bite into the bitter seed at their core. The first time I tasted cardamom, a rush of warmth swept me back to that bliss, my blackened tongue and the click of the sweet shrinking ball against my teeth.
Ona’s mom was strict, and their house was spotless. Even their backyard was spotless; it looked as if someone had taken a scrub brush to the sidewalk, the lawn and the daisies and sweet peas Ona’s mom had planted instead of potatoes. Ona’s stepdad was a pig farmer, though, and every night he parked his truck, the sides splattered with manure and straw, in the driveway at the back. In the truck box rested a huge barrel that he used to haul buttermilk for the pigs. Instead of the scent of sweet peas, it was the rancid smell of sour milk and swine that wafted into the neighbours’ yards. And as soon as Ona’s stepdad left his truck and walked towards the house, hundreds of flies rose from the ground to drape the buttermilk barrel with a thick, black cloth that buzzed and shifted. It was alien and creepy, and I always cut a wide swath around it.
My mother had a thing about flies. She’d drop what she was doing if she heard a buzzing in the kitchen and go after it. On the farm, before her mother cooked the meat from a slaughtered pig or steer hung in the cold cellar, she’d send one of the kids down to pick off the maggots. That’s why Mom’s roast beef was cooked to death, all the juices gone into the gravy.
Compared to Ona, I was a spoilt kid. Mom said she didn’t know much about mothering; she just wanted me to have a childhood different from her own. My job was to have fun, she said. All she asked me to do was the dusting once a week. To make sure I lifted every ornament and didn’t skip any piece of furniture, I’d pretend that the Queen was coming to visit in the afternoon, and I’d picture her running her white-gloved finger over the dresser, the coffee table and the chiffonier. “Good job,” she would say in her snooty voice. Then she’d give me a whole quarter to spend on candy. She’d put it heads-up in my palm, her face in profile cameoed into the silvery shine.
Imagining the Queen coming to our house wasn’t such a stretch. A few years after the war, she’d passed through Swift Current on the train. My brother had gone to the station with the rest of his Cub pack, and he’d seen her and Prince Philip wave from the platform of the royal car. Whenever I heard the story, I tried to imagine what a royal car would look like. Surely there’d be red velvet everywhere, even on the ceiling. Though it was rude to think of the Queen having to go to the bathroom, the toilet must have been made from solid gold.
There was more to the story than that, though. When the train with its regal passengers pulled out of the station, my brother refused a ride home with the other parents because my father was coming to pick him up. It was a winter night. Barry stood alone on the empty platform, his Cub uniform too thin to stop the cold, the doors of the building locked up, snow swirling along the tracks as if it were a ghost train pulling winter through every town along the line. Dad showed up an hour late, delayed by another round of beer at the Legion. He took my brother to the Venice Café for an orange pop and a big sugar doughnut. My brother pushed the plate away, he said, and Dad got angry. It wasn’t every day we got a treat like that. As he got older, that was one of two stories Barry told about our father. The other was about Dad hitting him with the piece of rubber hose that hung like a hollow black snake in the doorway to the cellar. That happened when he was around fifteen. I, not my brother, was the one who cried.
Our father had never wanted children. Mom told us this again and again, as if it were an excuse for his selfishness and neglect. If anyone was to blame, she said, it was her, because she had insisted on it. Dad wasn’t a violent man, and he wasn’t cruel, but he seemed to feel a love of children would make him unmanly. Once, shortly after my brother was born, Mom and Dad were driving to her parents’ farm when she had to pee. She asked Dad to pull over on the side of the road, and then to take the baby. As she was walking back to the car from behind the stubby screen of wolf willow, Dad thrust my brother into her arms. A car was coming down the road; you could see the plume of dust half a mile away, and he didn’t want to be seen holding a baby.
It was Mom who spoilt us. Any extra money my father had he spent on himself. “It’s too bad he isn’t rich,” my mother said. “He’d have made a good playboy.” He was never too broke to buy a case of beer or to up the ante in a poker game at Shorty Turnbull’s farm. Sometimes that meant Mom couldn’t buy the things my brother and I thought we needed. Skates, for instance. Second-hand and ill-fitting, mine pinched my toes and made my feet cold. My brother’s skates, also hand-me-downs, fit better because he got replacements every year. I didn’t feel envious about that, because no matter how hard I tried I was never going to be a good skater. My ankles wobbled. And instead of stopping by flashing my blades to the side as Barry did, I had to fall down before I hit the boards.
My brother excelled at any physical activity, but his best sport was hockey. From the time he was a little kid, people called him a natural. When he joined his first real team, he went to practise in his jeans with nothing to protect his lower legs. The other players, boys from around our neighbourhood, had hockey pants and shin pads. He asked Mom to buy a set of pads for him, but she said we couldn’t afford it. She flushed and fidgeted when the coach of the team knocked on our door and spoke to her in the kitchen about her son’s talents and the likelihood of injuries if he wasn’t properly equipped. My brother never knew how she got the money out of our father or what it cost her, but before his next game at the rink he strapped shin pads over his jeans.
My father would fix a leaking tap, or chop firewood, or repair what was broken, but like most men of his time, he never helped with cooking or any household tasks. When my mom’s whole family, all fifteen of them, came in from their farms for Christmas dinner—an event she hosted until her mother died—it was she alone who got up early to stuff the turkey, peel potatoes and turnips and make the pumpkin pies. To get us out from under her feet after we’d opened our presents, she sent Barry and me to the outdoor rink a block away. We’d trudge up the alley, our skates drooped by the laces over one shoulder, snow falling through the early morning darkness, as if we were still in bed and had sunk inside our feather pillows. At the rink, we’d sit on an outdoor bench to pull on our skates. Barry would help me tie mine tight. It was too early for the skating shack, with its pot-bellied stove and its wide-planked floor cut by blades, to be open.
Sometimes my brother would have to clear a path with the big iron snow shovel stuck in a drift by the boards. Then we’d glide onto the bare ice, the only ones there, everything else still and sleepy, one or two houses in the neighbourhood lit. Stars shone bright and cold above us, as if bits of ice had shot from our blades and pierced the blackness. In the soft snow-quiet of early morning, we’d race, he backwards and me forwards. My brother would always win. But I loved the speed when he’d grab my arm, twirl me around like a spinning top and then let me go.
After our Christmas dinner, which we ate around four o’clock, Mom and my aunts cleaned up. My brother, cousins and I and all the men were free to do what we wanted. We kids played with our new toys in the hallway or in my parents’ bedroom. Mom had set up the kitchen table in the living room for the turkey dinner. Now that it was done, the men hunched around two card tables, where the youngest kids had sat to eat half an hour before, and played whist. The women joined in only when the last plates sat clean in the cupboard and they had made turkey sandwiches with Mom’s homemade buns for a late-night lunch. One aunt sliced dill pickles, and Mom spooned cranberries into the mustard dish her older brother had sent from England before he died in the war. His ship had collided with an Allied boat in the cold Atlantic night, and he and all of his crew went down.
Like Ona’s mother, Mom set Saturday morning aside to clean the house. And every Monday—no matter what happened in the family, the town or the world outside—was washday. Monday mornings my mother woke up and took note of the weather, though not even a heavy rain or the temperature falling to thirty below could stop the washing from getting done. As she pulled on her housecoat, she hoped it would be sunny and there’d be a wind. But not too much of one, because then the clothes could be yanked from the line.
For hours in the cellar, she’d run one load after another through the wringer of the washer with its two laundry tubs, then trudge up the narrow wooden stairs with a basket of wet laundry and out the back door to the clothesline. Some days it was so cold she had to wear a parka with a hood. She never asked me to help, and like a princess from a storybook, I felt put out when I had to walk across the cellar to get a jar of preserves from the shelf, the floor slippery with soapy water from the draining tub. On washdays, though, I knew better than to complain about anything, even an upset stomach or a cold coming on. My mother had a don’t-you-dare-bother-me look about her, and if she spoke at all, her voice was taut and barbed, like a wire fence meant to keep you out.
After taking Dad’s frozen shirts from the line, my mother would prop them on the couch to dry. At first, stiff from the cold, they held the shape of a body, the torso of a soldier with his legs blown off. When the bloodless arms, chests and shoulders began to thaw, the shirts collapsed, the breath gone out of them. No matter what the temperature, when my brother and his friends came home from school for lunch, they’d play war in the yard in trenches they’d dug out of snow. They built guns out of kindling and lobbed spruce cones that exploded when they hit the ground. Banished from the game because I was a girl and so much younger, I’d watch them from the window.
After a while, bored with the battles in the yard, I’d cut ladies from last year’s summer catalogue, trying to find a whole one I could use as a paper doll. These ladies didn’t wear housedresses, like my mother and the other women on our block, but fancy suits or dressing gowns. When you could see their feet, they were elegant in high heels or slippers with puffs of pink fur over the toes. In the snow, my brother and his friends staggered, died, then got up again. To the side of the house, my mother hung the next load on the line, sheet after sheet and then the towels, her hands red, one clothespin, then another, clenched between her teeth.