“You want to sleep?” he murmurs.
“Yes.” That is her wish, to stay curled into him while he sleeps for several hours. But he begins tracing her nipple and then his hand drops from her breast down across her hip and he begins to draw her nightgown up over her legs, her hips. “All right. Sleep then.” She feels his palm in the small of her back urging her to curl forward so that he can enter her from behind and watch himself make love to her, whispering that she should continue to sleep until their love-making becomes so unbearably pleasurable that she cannot lie still any longer but will moan, or thrust up against him hard, wanting him to go deeper, or turn and straddle him, her lean body becoming a hard straight plane set against his, moving on him until he comes. She believes that Timothy, caught up in his own desire, never
suspects that she feels little. She is certain of this; otherwise she would have to think that he didn’t care.
“No. I can’t. I’m not fixed.” Margaret draws away from his probing.
“Well, go and get fixed,” he whispers into her neck.
“No.” She turns to face him, weeping softly.
“What is it?” he asks, mildly alarmed. He touches her cheek. “Tell me.” Their eyes meet. What does he see when he looks at her without his glasses, she wonders. A featureless blob of jelly wobbling on a pillow?
“I missed you,” she says, though she knows that because of the house renovations, the new appliances, the third child, she doesn’t have the right to say this.
He sighs. They agreed not to speak about their loneliness when they were apart. “When you say that,” Timothy explained once, “it makes me feel guilty. It’s not my fault that I have to be away.” There wasn’t enough business in the hardware store any longer to support two families.
“Hey.” His mouth is warm against hers. “I’m here now.”
“Yes.” She smiles. The wee cry is over. The sound of the rope swing beats against the house, a squealing, groaning metronome, steady, monotonous. “I caught that kid up on the garage roof last night. My heart was in my mouth.” She sees the soft pouches of flesh beneath his eyes that come from squinting against the sun and at the flash of white lines passing through the beam of the car’s headlights.
“Hello.” She laughs lightly and he releases her. She’s grateful for his poor eyesight, that he can’t see her features clearly. He moves away from her, rolls over onto his side of the bed, and falls asleep instantly.
Margaret looks up at a dust mote dangling in a corner and wonders how she will arrange her face while he is home. What will she think about to keep the image of Bill North firmly beneath the
surface? The light in the room has grown stronger and the pale apple blossoms on the wallpaper begin to bloom their dusty pink colour. She hears footsteps in the hall. Jill, she realizes as the bathroom door closes softly. She lies still, barely breathing, forcing herself to stay at Timothy’s side while he sleeps but wanting desperately to be downstairs, her mind engaged with familiar chores. She hears the scrape of the bedroom door against the carpet. George. Amy must have let the cat into the house. She listens to the soft pad of its paws against the carpet and then George springs up onto the bed and creeps across the foot of it, settling on top of Margaret’s feet. She looks down at the animal as it crouches and blinks at her with amber eyes. It’s only an animal, Margaret tells herself. It knows nothing.
Several hours later, Jill, Mel, and Amy cluster around Timothy at the kitchen table. Amy sits on his lap and listens to his voice push through the top of her head and feels his breath stir in her hair. She hears the strange, almost water-like sound of air moving in his chest as he inhales smoke. She has shown him the mark on her foot and he has slathered it with ointment and put on a Band-Aid. “How did you manage that?” he’d asked. “That’s a nifty little surface burn you’ve got there.” She said she didn’t know; she had just wanted him to see it and to dress it because it seems to her that Timothy’s hands possess something Margaret’s don’t and that the burn will heal better and faster if Timothy cares for it. Jill stands behind his chair leaning into it, arms wound about his neck. She rests her pointed chin into his shoulder and begs him to make smoke rings for her finger. Mel sits across from Timothy listening intently as he describes the display of northern lights he saw outside of Regina last night, like the underside of an umbrella, he says, red, green, violet, the colours absolutely streaming down from the centre of the sky. They are drawn to him, all of them, like metal filings to a magnet.
Margaret prepares breakfast and listens to their voices. She moves between the stove and counter, stirring scrambled eggs, buttering toast, catching glimpses of herself in the mirror. She is not satisfied with the look of the green grosgrain ribbon against her auburn hair, and does not recognize the expression on her own face, the eyes are too wide, there is a strange half-smile. She stacks toast onto a plate and is about to put it into the oven to keep warm when she looks out of the window and sees Bunny and Bill’s Fairlane pull into their driveway behind Bill’s truck. Home from church, she thinks bitterly, and notices that Bill is wearing his new dress slacks. “I’m going to be out. The pants will be on the dryer in the back porch,” Margaret had said to Bunny on the telephone and had lain still on her bed hardly breathing as she heard the door open and then close. The telephone rings in the hallway, startling her so that she almost drops the plate of toast.
“I’ll get it,” Mel and Jill both say at once.
“No, I’ll get it.” Margaret wipes her hands on her apron and goes into the hallway and picks up the receiver. She hears the bright voice of her sister, Rita. “Say, kiddo, okay if Louie and I drive out for supper tonight?” Margaret holds the sound of her sister’s voice tightly against her ear to stop her hand from trembling.
“Amy?” Rita says when she doesn’t answer. “Go and get your mother for me.
Tout de suite
. This is long distance, you know.”
Margaret laughs. “It’s me. Sure, come out for supper. I have to talk to you.”
“Oh.” Rita is quiet for a moment. “I guess you don’t want me to bring Louie, then?”
Why is it that you always take it for granted that I want to talk to you about you? Margaret thinks. She has already said everything there is to say to her sister about the folly of being in love with a married man. She and Bunny have talked to Rita until blue in the face. Let her learn the hard way, I guess, Bunny had said. It was
the way Rita had learned almost everything, which was why discussion in their family always centred around her. “No, that’s fine. Tim plans on working on the jalopy today. Louie can keep him company.”
“Well, that should be fun for Louie.”
As Margaret goes back into the kitchen she hears the porch screen door open. They all turn at once and see Alf, the grounds-keeper, step into the doorway. He wears his coveralls and stands blinking for several moments, looking embarrassed and out of place. He clears his throat and then abruptly thrusts an object in Timothy’s direction. The camera, Amy realizes. “My boy came across it yesterday when he was helping me with the mowing,” Alf says. “I knew it was yours.”
“Holy Toledo,” Mel says and whistles at the sight of the ruined camera.
Amy is jammed between her father’s legs and can’t escape. She watches as Timothy examines the camera. She stands deathly still as everyone’s eyes swoop down on top of her head.
“Ain’t none of my business how she got there. My boy just come across her. A shame.”
As Amy tries to squeeze out from between Timothy’s knees, he holds her fast by the neck of her tee shirt. “Look.” She’s forced to confront the shattered camera which is already pitted with rust. Ashes to ashes, she thinks.
“Thanks for coming by.” Margaret hopes to dismiss Alf, disliking the smell of manure that emanates from his straw-encrusted boots.
Alf nods. “You been talking to Reginald this morning?”
“No, why?”
“He was putting cardboard over the store window when I came by. Seems someone chucked a good-size piece of cinder block through her. Smashed pretty good and then some.”
“Seems like it got broke,” Mel says with a slight scoffing tone in his voice.
“You betcha.” Alf nods, oblivious to the mockery.
“Was anything stolen?” Margaret is thinking about the display she’d arranged in the window the day before, remembering what tools, toys, and kitchenware.
“Reg didn’t seem to think so. So it don’t make a heck of a lot of sense to me.” He turns, about to leave.
“Wait up.” Timothy hands him the camera. “Think your boy would like to tinker with this?”
“Think so.” Alf’s smile reveals teeth stained from chewing-tobacco.
“Perhaps he can fix it,” Mel says. He seldom uses the word “perhaps” and Amy thinks he sounds mealy-mouthed.
“Well, if he does manage to fix it, then bravo,” Timothy says. “I don’t want it back.”
“What on earth is happening to this town?” Margaret wonders aloud as the door closes behind Alf. Mel and Jill exchange a glance and slip from the room. Amy moves to follow them but Timothy holds her fast. He slides a chair out from the table and indicates that she’s to sit down and face the music.
Margaret does not say a word. Although she doesn’t agree with Timothy that they should overlook Amy’s covert behaviour, she goes along with him because she knows the girl too well. The moment Margaret makes an effort to pick up on something Amy’s interested in, Amy discards that interest. Film is cheap, Timothy had once said to Margaret. “She just likes to think she’s pulling one over on us but in the meantime she’s learning something, don’t you see?”
Amy slouches down into the chair, head lowered, and Margaret sees the veins in her stem-like neck which make her appear small, vulnerable. Amy, the shadow between them; the child whose presence while in her belly Timothy ignored, refusing, too, any physical contact throughout the entire pregnancy. The child he never wanted became a delight instantly, the moment he saw her elf-like face.
Margaret’s secret joy, her relief, gave way to puzzlement in the following months. “She sure is the apple of her daddy’s eye,” Bunny once remarked. “I told you he’d come around in the end.” “Yes,” Margaret said, “I’m glad.” But she felt that she was being punished. Amy’s pug nose, the constant trail of mucus beneath it, the fingernails embedded with dirt, her perpetual determined frown, do not say vulnerable. “Sit up straight, you’ll get a dowager’s hump sitting like that,” Margaret says. But even though Amy listens and pulls herself into the proper sitting position Margaret can still see the veins behind the strands of the child’s wispy hair, and she feels anger. Perhaps, Margaret thinks, it is Timothy’s unreasonable patience with the girl that is the cause of her anger.
“Well, so what happened to the camera?” Timothy asks.
The plastic chair-seat sticks to the backs of Amy’s thighs and so she begins to lift her legs, one and then the other, again and again, and they make a satisfying sucking noise. Timothy must have been in a hurry this morning, she thinks, as she notices that he’s forgotten to do up the middle button on his shirt. She watches his white shirt move in and out as he breathes. She would like to put her hand against it and feel the rhythmic moving, the warmth of his breath.
“I think you should go up to your room for a while. I’ll come up in a few minutes,” Timothy says.
As Amy climbs the stairs she listens to the soft murmur of their voices. She goes over to the shelf of dolls and spies the trap Jill has set for her, the tiny sliver of paper cunningly placed among the folds of the green velvet dress of Melissa, Jill’s favourite doll. Its dislocation will be the proof Jill needs that Amy tampers with her dolls. All right, Amy thinks, as she goes over to the window, I won’t touch your shitty little dolls and I won’t tell you either about the man who can play two songs at once on his guitar. She sees Amy the squirrel dashing across a telephone wire across the street and then her heart lurches as the squirrel stumbles suddenly, almost falling. Then she
sees Elsa Miller standing beneath a tree under the telephone wires, hidden. Elsa wears the same yellow sundress she’d worn the day before. Sunlight reflects off her sunglasses as she looks at the house. Amy sees Mel’s sandy-coloured square head move out from beneath the slope of the veranda roof. Jill limps after him, following him to the gate. They sling their arms across it and turn their faces to the ground as though their main concern is to count ants marching across a crack in the sidewalk. They ignore Elsa.
“I bet she does it with everyone,” Mel says.
Amy hears the telephone ring in the hall downstairs and Mel and Jill turn, hearing it too, and then look down again, two people, one motion. Margaret’s voice rises up from the hall. The telephone call is from her brother, Reginald, who relays the latest news about “that weird bunch” and repeats the gossip concerning the Miller women’s sexual proclivity.
“Elsa does what with everyone?” Jill asks, goading Mel into saying the word.
“Screws.”
“I don’t know about you.” Jill’s voice rises in a haughty tone. “I thought that’s what you wanted.” She flicks the gate’s latch, pushes off, and rides it open, then strides across the street towards Elsa, her arms swinging. Just then Margaret steps out onto the veranda.
“Breakfast,” she calls sharply. “Right now.”
“I’ll just be a second,” Jill says over her shoulder.
“Now.”
“I’ll wait here for you,” Elsa says.
Then Amy sees Timothy’s head appear from beneath the veranda roof. He goes over to Mel and winds an arm about his shoulders. “Hello, Elsa,” he calls. As Jill reaches his side, he puts his other arm around her and draws her away. “This gal’s gotta get some food into her,” he calls. “You know, Mel,” he says, his voice dropping, “I think that girl has a serious crush on you.” Their heads disappear beneath
the roof of the veranda. “Ha, ha, ha, very funny,” Amy hears Mel say as the door closes behind them.
There is a strangeness in the house, a tension, and even though Timothy is home, Amy feels that she must be very careful. She must remember to look inside the closet before she goes to bed. She imagines that the scatter rugs in the hallway conceal gaping holes which she could fall through. She’d read her mother’s journal entry before going to bed last night. “I am a fool,” she had written. That was all, and so there was no way she could determine why Margaret threw the plate of sandwiches at the cat. Or why she was wearing Timothy’s bathrobe when usually she wore it only if the house was chilly or if she wasn’t feeling well. Amy believes that she is somehow responsible for this new strangeness in the house. That it may have entered the house with her the day she was struck by lightning.