Karen thinks about Pinky, running around the barnyard with no head, the grey smoke of her life going up from her and her rainbow light shrinking to nothing. Whatever else, her grandmother is a killer. No wonder other people are afraid of her.
xxxv
It was Labour Day. That was when Karen’s mother was supposed to come on the train and take Karen back to the city. Karen had her suitcase all packed. She cried, in her narrow bed, under her chenille spread, under her pillow. She didn’t want to leave her grandmother, but she wanted to see her mother, who—already—she couldn’t remember clearly. All she could remember was her dresses, and the smell of Tabu, and one of her voices, her sweet voice, the too-sweet voice she used on the Grade Twos.
Her mother didn’t come. Instead there was a phone call from Aunt Vi, and Karen’s grandmother said there had been a hitch and Karen would be staying a little longer. “You can help me put up the tomatoes,” she said. Karen picked tomatoes and washed them in the pantry, and her grandmother scalded them and peeled them and boiled them in jars.
Then it was time for school to begin, and still nothing happened. “There’s no point starting you at that school,” said Karen’s grandmother. “You’d just be in and out:” Karen didn’t mind. She didn’t much like school anyway, it was hard to pay attention to so many people in the same room at once. It was like the radio when there was a thunderstorm near: she could hardly hear a thing.
Her grandmother brought the Bible out of the front parlour and stood it on the kitchen table. “Let me see, said the blind man,” she said. She closed her eyes and poked with a pin. “Psalm Eighty-eight. I’ve had that before. ‘Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness.’ Well, that’s right enough; it means I should get ready to go, myself, pretty soon. Now you.”
Karen took the pin and closed her eyes, and her hand followed the strong current that pulled it downwards. “Ah,” said her grandmother, squinting. “Jezebel again. Revelations, Two, Twenty. ‘Notwithstanding I have a few things against thee, because thou sufferest that woman Jezebel, which callest herself a prophetess, to teach and to seduce my servants to commit fornication, and to eat things sacrificed unto idols.’ Now that’s a strange thing, for a little girclass="underline" ’ And she smiled at Karen, the smile of a withered apple.
“You must be living ahead of yourself.” Karen had no idea what she meant.
Finally it was Aunt Vi who arrived, not Karen’s mother. She didn’t even stay at the grandmother’s house. She stayed at the one hotel in town, and the grandmother drove Karen in. Karen didn’t sit in the back of the truck this time. She sat in the front seat with the dog hairs, wearing her dress, the same as the day she came, looking out the window and not saying a thing. Her grandmother whistled softly.
Aunt Vi wasn’t all that pleased to see Karen but she pretended to be. She gave Karen a peck on the cheek. “Look how tall you’ve grown!” she said. It sounded like an accusation. “You’ve got her suitcase?” she said to the grandmother:
“Viola, I’m hardly senile yet,” said the grandmother. “I’m not likely to forget her suitcase. Here you go,” she said to Karen softly. “I put a wishbone in it.” She crouched down and put her bony arms around Karen, and Karen could feel her square body, solid as a house, and then her grandmother wasn’t there any longer.
Karen sat on the train beside Aunt Vi, who fussed and fussed. “We’ll have to get you enrolled in school, right away,” she said. “You’ve missed almost a month already! My goodness, you’re brown as a berry!”
“Where’s my mother?” said Karen. She couldn’t think of any berries that were brown.
Aunt Vi frowned and looked away. “Your mother isn’t well,” she said.
When Karen got to Aunt Vi’s house she went into her usual room with the orange-and-pink flowered curtains and opened up her suitcase right away. There was the hen wishbone, wrapped in a piece of wax paper, with a rubber band around it, from her grandmother’s jar of saved-up rubber bands that was kept beside the sink. She took the wishbone out. It smelled sour, but rich and full, like a hand with dirt on it. She hid it in the hem of one of the curtains. She knew that if Aunt Vi found it she would throw it away.
Karen’s mother is in a building, a new flat yellow building that looks like a school. Aunt Vi and Uncle Vern take Karen to visit her. They sit in the waiting room, on hard chairs covered with a nubbly fabric, and Karen is frightened because Aunt Vi and Uncle Vern are so solemn; solemn, and at the same time avid. They are like the people who stop their cars and get out to see when there’s been a car accident. Something is bad, something is wrong, but they want to participate in it, whatever it is. Karen would rather not, she would like to go back right now, back in time, back as far as the farm, but a door opens and her mother comes into the room. She walks slowly, putting a hand out to touch the furniture as if to guide herself: Sleepwalking, thinks Karen. Before, her mother’s fingers were slim, the nails polished. She was proud of her hands. But now her hands are swollen and clumsy and there is no ring any more on her wedding finger. She’s wearing a grey housecoat and slippers that Karen has never seen before, and also she has never before seen her mother’s face.
Not this face. It’s a flat face with a dull shine on it, like the dead fish in the white enamel trays at the fish store: A fading light, silvery, like scales. She turns this face towards Karen; it’s expressionless as a plate. Eyes of china. Suddenly Karen is framed in those eyes, a small pale girl sitting on a nubbly chair, a girl her mother has never seen before. Karen brings her two hands up to her mouth and breathes in, a gasp, the reverse of a scream.
“Gloria. How’re you feeling?” says Uncle Vern.
Karen’s mother’s head swings towards him, a ponderous head, heavy. The hair on it is pulled back, held with clips. Karen’s mother used to do her hair up in pincurls, and when she combed it out it would be wavy. This hair is plain and straight, and filmed over, as if it’s been kept in a cupboard. Karen thinks about her grandmother’s root cellar, with its smell of indoor earth and its rows of preserve bottles, bright berries glassed over, powdered with dust.
“Fine,” says Karen’s mother, after a minute.
“I can’t stand it,” says Aunt Vi. She dabs at her eyes with a hankie. Then, in a firmer voice: “Karen, aren’t you going to give your mother a kiss?”
Aunt Vi’s questions are like orders. Karen slides off her chair and goes over to this woman. She doesn’t put her arms around her, she doesn’t touch her with her hands. She bends her body from the waist and places her lips against the woman’s cheek. She hardly presses at all, but her mouth sinks in and down, on the cheek that is like cool rubber. She thinks of Pinky without a head, collapsing in the barnyard, becoming ham. Her mother has the texture of luncheon meat. She feels sick to her stomach.
Her mother receives the kiss passively. Karen steps back. There is no red fight around her mother now. Only a faint mauve-brown shimmer.
In the car on the way home, Karen sits between Aunt Vi and Uncle Vern instead of in the back where she usually sits. Aunt Vi wipes at her eyes: Uncle Vern asks Karen if she wants an ice cream cone. She says no thank you, and he pats her knee.
“I felt so bad, my own little sister; but I had to do it,” Aunt Vi says, on the phone. “It was the third time, and what could I do? I don’t know where she got them! Lucky the empty bottle was right there beside her so at least we could tell the doctor what she took. It’s just a wonder we were in time. Something in her voice, I guess; well, it’s not like I hadn’t heard it before! When we got there she was out cold. She had bruises on her mouth for weeks, they had to pry it open to get the hose down, and today it was like you wouldn’t of known her. I don’t know—shock treatments, I guess. If that doesn’t work, they’ll have to do an operation,” She says operation in that solemn voice, the voice she uses for saying grace, as if it’s a holy word. She wants it, this operation, Karen can tell. If her mother has an operation, some of that holiness will rub off on Aunt Vi.