Read Online Interference by Michelle Berry - Free Book Online Page B

look at Trish as if she’s crazy. Her daughter, Rachel, rolls her eyes. Her husband, Frank, ducks out of the house quickly, desperate to go to work. Charlie, her youngest, ignores her. They rush around, creating chaos, and then they leave to school, to work. And they create chaos at work and school. Charlie with the hermit crabs last year. Rachel knocking the boy flat on the playground: “I learned how to punch from my father,” she said. Trish was beside herself. Looking at everything from beside herself. A siamese twin. One Trish loud and confident and in control, the other squirming and terrified, huddled up like the crabs Charlie released that got into the electrical system. Who knew hermit crabs could move so fast? Who knew it was ice cream day? Who knew one hundred boxes of the stuff had been delivered to the school, put in the freezers, waiting for recess? Who knew soggy ice cream could go bad that quickly? And most of all, who could possibly have known the kids would eat it? Trish separates herself most days and is left to clean it all up, to try to get her life, her house, back together. Trish needs order to get any work done. And she can’t have order when everyone is home. That’s the thing about her, she has to touch everything, even it all out, move it around, in order to make it hers again. This, Trish knows, takes about an hour. An hour to feel that her family are truly gone and she is safe from their wildness, so silent she can hear the house creak, and alone. It’s not the house that’s hers, she tries to tell Frank, it’s the freedom to hear that quiet creak in the stair, the feeling that once again she is something besides mother and wife and problem-solver. She is herself again.
    Frank always sighs when she complains. She knows he doesn’t understand, she knows he doesn’t care. It’s not that he doesn’t love her and treat her well and respect her — although sometimes Trish wonders if it’s more like he puts up with her — but she knows that deep inside he thinks, Women
.
Just that. Women
.
With a little internal
phew
, or even
pfft
, attached to it. That says it all for Frank, Trish is sure of it. “Women.” Deep inside he’s a bit sexist. He got it from his dad, nothing he could do about it. Trish’s father-in-law is all blistering machoness. Even at age eighty-two. “Get me my cane, girl,” he shouts. “What’s for dinner?”
    So this morning, when the knock on the front door comes, Trish does the only thing she knows how to do, she ignores it and hides. There is no other option. Her hour of getting herself together is already up. She has done her straightening, she has re-wiped the kitchen counters, she has put the hair clips on the hall table, ready to be carried upstairs — by her, of course, who else? Trish has opened the curtains and wiped the dog’s nose prints off the back glass door. The morning is hers again — the world is hers — and she’s not letting anyone destroy this peace she has made. Trish refuses even to answer the phone during the day. Instead, she listens to the answering machine and picks up only if she feels the need.
    The neighbours often call. Maria, across the street, panicking about whose turn it is to drive the girls to band Tuesday mornings, or Tom, Maria’s husband, wanting Frank to help him carry something from his car into the house, something heavy that Maria can’t help him with because of her back problems. Their daughter, Becky, comes over every morning to pick Rachel up for school or to drop off the eggs her mother borrowed or to give back the sweater Rachel lent her. In fact, this neighbourhood is a constant flow of back and forth, everyone walking across the street many times a day, dogs rambling around together in back or front yards, phones ringing, people calling out for their kids to come home, get ready for bed, get in the bath now. Now.