Read Online A Good House by Bonnie Burnard - Free Book Online Page A

Club, courtesy of Archie Stutt. They drank quietly, satisfied with themselves. There were no jokes and the few starts at gossip faded off from lack of worthwhile embellishment.
    Sylvia’s mother stripped the old kitchen wallpaper and burned it in the barrel down by the creek. She stayed with the paper as it burned, used the crowbar to push it down and down again into the fire. Waiting for the fire to do its work, she pulled her thick old cardigan tight and turned to watch the rush of the cold April creek on its way to the lake.
    She repapered both the kitchen and the bathroom with a pattern very close in colour and design to what she’d stripped. It took her three days. She was helped by Margaret Kemp, who let herself off early from the hardware store.
    The bathroom fixtures were pale sandy pink. Because she asked him to, Patrick drove Daphne down to Sarnia and over the Bluewater Bridge to Port Huron to buy two expensive sets of thickpink American towels and on the way home they stopped uptown at Clarke’s for pink Kleenex and toilet paper, which was new on the market and very popular.
    When the bathroom was absolutely finished, the men were invited back one evening for coffee and a slice of Sylvia’s mother’s specialty, double dark chocolate cake. Paul was the one picked to throw open the door on their work. Sylvia sat in a kitchen chair pretending she hadn’t been watching and listening all along, hadn’t already begun to use the toilet. She told them they’d done a tremendous job, said it would be so convenient for her, and, “Tell me, how can I ever thank you?”
    T WO months after its completion Sylvia was standing in the bathroom in the middle of the night, washing her sweaty face and neck, when she fell. She watched herself go down in the mirror. In the few seconds it took their father to get to her, the kids had time to make it only as far as the stairs where they could hear her loudly going after God a dozen different ways and then after their father, telling him in a cold middle-of-the-night voice that he would be doing them both a favour if he would just give up on pretending to understand.
    “Give it the hell up,” she said to him. “It doesn’t help me.”
    And then they heard him helping her up to her feet, trying to soothe her with choked words and his own disciplined sobs.
    Doctor Cooper dropped in twice a day every day after the night of the fall to give Sylvia shots in her hip, telling Bill privately that he should be warned that this drug might alter her nature a bit, there was no telling really, but it was the very best available for now.
    Reverend Walker from the United Church came once a week, usually in the morning. On his first visit, after he had been served his coffee and muffin, he asked Sylvia’s mother if she would leave them for a time and she did so reluctantly, closing the door behind her with perhaps a bit too much force. Bill told Sylvia he’d back Walker off if that was her wish but she said no, it was all right, he was only doing his job. She told no one what they talked about those once-a-week mornings.
    Margaret Kemp began to come directly from work at the hardware to cook supper. She was an exceptionally tall, plain-faced, buxom woman in last year’s low-heeled shoes who took care to camouflage the fullness of her figure with a slouch and close attention to dress patterns and pretty print blouses that she did not tuck into her narrow skirts. She wore just a touch of lipstick and it had never occurred to her to pluck her eyebrows. She would sometimes lick a finger to shape her brows but she would have been surprised to hear this.
    Margaret dug right in. She scoured pots, scrubbed the kitchen floor on her hands and knees, stood Paul up on a kitchen chair to unscrew the ceiling light fixture so she could rinse the long-dead flies down the drain.
    She could cook all right, but with no past experience judging appetites, she had a difficult time getting the quantities right.