Authors: Sharon Butala
And then he saw how it would be.
The hills would turn to hoodoos, were half-way there already. His land would lie fallow, he couldn’t tell for how long, but a very long time. He and Frannie would move to the city. Frannie would recover, she would get a job sooner than he would; she was younger than he was, smarter than he was in a quick way, she would regain her old determination, and a woman, she would not mind taking orders. They would have children and the children would be fine. By then he would have a job as a mechanic or a construction worker or a maintenance man in some high-rise building. They would live both better and worse than they lived now. Evenings, he would sit in front of the television with his feet in their grey workman’s socks up on a footstool, his muscles aching pleasurably from his day’s labour. He would grow sleepy, he would doze, and from then on, for all the rest of his long workingman’s life, his dreams would be of the farm.
When I was young, the only family I knew aside from my parents, I was an only child too, were three cousins, two girls and a boy, my father’s half-brother’s children. I say ‘knew’ because they are all three dead now. Antonio committed suicide at seventeen, and I think now there must have been a curse on that family, though it didn’t seem so to me at the time. Then I thought their lives thrilling beyond words, and even though I was often frightened by the things they did, or had apparently done, or that happened to them, I could never understand why it was that none of them happened to me or to my family, but only to theirs. It made me feel I wasn’t quite real, a shadow, destined always to live only on the fringes of the lives of others. And since Morgan, the oldest, was a world-traveller from her first backpacking trip around Europe at eighteen till she disappeared in the Orient years later, and Rhonda, the youngest, changed her name to Pamela Sue, ran away to become a starlet in Hollywood, I even saw her in a picture once, and died from a drug overdose at twenty-four, while I have done what I said I would do, become a writer, and an unwilling recluse, it turns out that my childhood perception, which I spent years trying to shake, was true.
Still, when I was young I was glad to claim them as relatives.
My tales of their exploits gave me an importance among my friends at school that I could never have earned myself. I shared my stories in the girls’ washroom at recess and on our walks to and from school, and it was gratifying when every once in a while, a girl I hardly knew would sidle up to me and ask, bright-eyed, what the latest news of my cousins was, and then listen intently while I told her.
Rhonda was closest to me in age, only a year older, Antonio was five years older and Morgan six, but ages didn’t really matter since their’s wasn’t an ordinary family where the kids played together and went places together. When I visited them it wasn’t to do things with my cousins. Mostly I just skulked about the house and watched and listened and went on my own private and blissfully unsupervised forays here and there on the acreage where they lived a few miles from a city. Every summer for at least a month I visited them and it was when I was there that I experienced the only freedom I knew as a child, for their house was an escape from the cold rigidity and painful, pathological cleanliness of my home, that seemed to me constructed to hide only emptiness, a terrible, emotionless void.
At my cousins’ I slept in an extra room where my cousins had their rooms, in the basement, which had never been properly finished. The rooms were all framed, but they had no doors and the interior walls were closed in only half or three-quarters of the way up, so that the basement was more like one giant room with a lot of unmade beds shoved into it and piles of dirty clothes on the floor or clean ones hanging in closets that were framed and had doors, but no walls. The basement was always gloomy too, since the only windows were small rectangles high in the walls which opened up and out onto the backyard.
I had adventures in my cousins’ household, things were
always happening, secret, nocturnal things mostly, things you couldn’t talk about. I didn’t do them myself, but I was allowed to be present when they were happening. I remember waking to find Morgan sitting on the floor on her side of the half-wall that separated our rooms, a boy beside her, drinking whiskey from a bottle and smoking and giggling in the dark, then, after a lot of panting and moaning, the boy climbing out the window by standing on Morgan’s dresser, and the soft click of the window as it fell in place behind his legs and feet; Morgan offering me a drink from the bottle and my startled, confused refusal.
“It changes everything,” she told me. “It makes everything different,” her voice trailing away in the darkness. By the summer of my story, when I was twelve and Morgan eighteen, she had already come and gone from her home quite a few times, sometimes for a weekend, sometimes for as long as two months according to Rhonda; where, nobody seemed to know or to care. Yet, when she came back, nobody remarked on it either.
The fiction behind my visits was that I would be a companion for Rhonda, but Rhonda was a secretive girl who had little tolerance for my timidity; a wildly imaginative one, who acted parts by herself, made costumes out of rugs or bedspreads or even curtains which never got hung back up again, and danced in the backyard in the moonlight when everybody else was asleep.
Even though I knew my aunt didn’t really like me much and probably would have preferred not to have me around, I kept coming. She would greet me cordially enough, but there would be a wry twist to her mouth, she would inspect me in an amused, scornful way that, for the few seconds it lasted, made my hands sweat. But I was stubborn, I didn’t expect love, my own mother was severe with me, acted often without even fondness, and as long as my aunt didn’t tell me to stay away or blatantly mistreat
me, I would overlook her lack of warmth in order to escape from my mother and to be where I felt I could at last see what I thought must be real life.
My own home was a model of regularity and, as most households were in the early fifties, geared to my father’s schedule and wishes. We ate breakfast together, my father as silent as my uncle was (except that, rarely, my uncle told stories), my mother speaking only to instruct or criticize me. But my aunt never got up before ten and when she did get up she did nothing I could see in the way of housework, so that the house was in a state of chaos all the time and, while my family ate dinner at precisely seven every evening, at my cousins’ meals were eaten when somebody got hungry enough to make them.
If my aunt didn’t like me, she didn’t appear to like her own children any better, and snapped and snarled at them and gave exaggerated sighs or bored, monosyllabic replies when they, very seldom, asked for something. But she didn’t stop them either, from doing anything they wanted to do, so that they grew up restless and daring and filled with arrogance and scorn for the rest of the world.
My aunt had been born in England, the daughter of an actress who, I found out when I was grown, had never been married and who had never given her daughter any kind of family life. Aunt Jacqueline must have had ambitions at one time, although I’ve no idea what they might have been. She spent a lot of time reading magazines, and in the afternoons she liked to drive into the city, never taking anyone with her or telling us where she went or what she did, and though my cousins might have known, I never heard them ask. She didn’t even say good-bye when she left, simply went out the front door, got into her Audi and drove away, returning hours later, not one whit changed that I could see, and usually not even carrying a parcel.
As I have said, she read only magazines, while my uncle was always reading books, strange, heavy volumes, often of poetry, sometimes in other languages. And my cousins were always angry and shouted at each other, except for Antonio, and sometimes even pushed or hit one another. But alone with me, one by one, they revealed an intense interest in everything, they had a dynamic way of viewing the world that was new to me, as if they conceived of themselves as a part of everything, a brilliance would appear in their eyes when they were thinking about things; their fearlessness and the weirdness of their fantasies enraptured me and kept me coming summer after summer.
There were a lot of visitors to the house, people like my aunt and uncle who didn’t fit into the mold of what I thought was normalcy. At our house people came only if they were invited, and not too many of them at once, and they all dressed properly and behaved with restraint. My aunt and uncle’s visitors came at strange hours, they either didn’t speak at all or they talked too much.
One evening we were eating supper in the kitchen when the front door opened and a dishevelled young man in a stained and wrinkled raincoat, though it wasn’t raining, hadn’t rained all summer, came striding through the front room into the kitchen where half of us were eating gummy macaroni and cheese and the rest of us were eating chunks of garlic sausage washed down with water. My aunt was a terrible cook, bored and perfunctory, and made meals only with things that came in cans or were frozen or instant.
He rushed through the doorway, came to a dead stop as if he’d expected to find the room empty, his dark eyes were wild and he stared at all of us as if he were about to speak. We all stared back at him, me, no doubt, with my mouth hanging open. He turned to my uncle, then thinking better of this, to my aunt, threw his
hands up, then turned and rushed out again without having uttered a word. When he was gone, my aunt began to laugh, she laughed so hard we had to slap her on the back and offer her water, and my cousins laughed too, but my uncle only fixed a mild, level gaze on her and finally got up and left the table, though he hadn’t finished eating.
Another time, about eleven o’clock at night, an hour when I would have been long since asleep if I’d been at home, the doorbell rang. What was astonishing about this was that the doorbell had actually worked. Another of the peculiarities about the house, one which I found especially satisfying, was that nothing worked, everything was broken or taken apart by Tonio and left that way in pieces. So when the doorbell actually rang, we all turned toward the door in surprise. It opened before anybody made a move to go to it, and a young woman, maybe nineteen or twenty years old, with long, straight, light-brown hair and the smoothest, finest skin I’d ever seen stepped inside. She was very pale and dressed in a peculiar, dark red, shabby cotton dress that ended above her knees showing the baggy cotton slacks she was wearing under it. She had on her feet moccasins with bright beading on the instep. I remember I was fascinated by how small her feet were and how, once she was seated, she couldn’t keep them still.
“Oh, good,” she said. “You’re still up.” She came in and sat down, though nobody had asked her to, on a stool beside the chair where my uncle was sitting. He didn’t appear to look at her, but held his face stiffly, his eyes lowered as though he didn’t wish to give anything away, but if he spoke to her, I don’t remember. I remember mostly how very pretty she was, despite her paleness, her full pink lower lip, how large and bright yet glazed her blue eyes were. My aunt at first sat up straight when
the girl came in, but as she began to talk, my aunt relaxed back in her chair and ignored her.
The girl’s conversation, if you could call it that, seemed directed at my uncle, although she didn’t always look at him, but stared into space and chattered away as brightly as a little bird, and with as little sense. She didn’t wait for anyone to reply, nobody was paying any attention to her anyway, and as time passed, it seemed to me that she began to talk faster and faster, although I’m pretty sure I’ve imagined this part, but she was like a talking doll that had been wound as tightly as the spring would go; she was working at full pitch and would until either the spring broke or the works ran down.
After a while Rhonda said she was going to bed. Reluctantly I got up from the floor where I’d been lying on my stomach pretending to watch television. There was something in my uncle’s posture, attentive, but pretending not to be, that made me want to stay even though I was becoming frightened for the girl, afraid for what would surely happen to her soon: nothing good.
I don’t know whether my aunt went to bed or stayed, but later I was wakened from a deep sleep by what I thought had been a scream, not one of Tonio’s, and by muffled, hysterical weeping. Then a door shut, a car started and drove away and there was silence.
And in the morning things were as they always were: my uncle reading a book while he drank his first cup of coffee at the kitchen table before he went upstairs to his study where he and my aunt had their bedroom too and which was off-limits to the rest of us; my cousins straggling in one by one, grouchy and quarrelsome, Antonio staring around the room with a stunned expression as though he had never seen it before, and my aunt not putting in an appearance till after my uncle had gone
upstairs, and then not dressed, but wearing her embroidered, blue Japanese robe.
There was an atmosphere of strain in that household, of tension, that was separate from the sense of mystery I found there, of unplumbed, dark, subterranean currents. It was perhaps hysteria, or a sense of approaching crisis, as if at any second all the lies might surface and be shown for what they were, all the deceptions, the secrets, the corruption that lay beneath the surface of that family’s life. I articulated none of this as a child, but as an adult, having followed my uncle’s calling, and having developed the writer’s habits of introspection and reflection. I thought a lot about them, and as an adult I realized that what had fascinated me about that family was not the things that happened, but the current of hidden, seething emotion, of passion, that lay below the surface, and the constant possibility of revelation.
Sometimes I have even wondered if Antonio was really a schizophrenic as we were told later, or if that was a fiction the family put out to explain, in a way that would relieve them of blame, his suicide. But then, remembering him, I have to admit he was strange, that he took pills every day, and heard voices, and that if he was absent when I arrived for my summer visit, I was told he was on the psychiatric ward of a hospital in the nearby city, the hazy, blue silhouette which we could see from the front steps, though I was never taken there to visit him, and I never knew of anyone else going either.
He was younger seeming than his years, a loner in a family of loners, secretive like Rhonda, silent like my uncle, and he seemed not to live in the house so much as to haunt it. You were always coming on him when you least expected to: sitting outside on the front steps when you came back to the house at night and the outside light burnt out so that you stumbled over him in the darkness;
getting up in the middle of the night to go to the toilet and finding him sitting on the bathroom floor with the light on, not doing anything, but just sitting there, and if you asked him what he was doing he’d say, “I’m watching the bugs,” although I could never see any bugs or mice or anything else he claimed was there.