Read Online Too Close to the Falls by Catherine Gildiner - Free Book Online

huddled against her — the child I’d hoped would come out to play Fox and Geese. There was some sort of creature that looked like a gingerbread man not quite ready to come out of the oven yet, lying in a pool of blood, and there was a cord and a lot of pulpy flesh attached to it. Mad Bear’s wife was bleeding from somewhere below her stomach and had cuts on her face where she had been hit. The little boy started crying again and she leaned over and covered the pulpy thing with the edge of the sheet. She looked at me through her terrified puffy black eyes and I knew we were both somehow in the same boat. She whispered to me, “He said he wasn’t havin’ no more babies.”
    â€œHe’s gone now,” was all I could think to say.
    â€œHe’ll be back,” she said, turned, and faced the wall.

    There was no phone and Roy and I had to do the best wecould. As we silently departed, I noticed the temperature had dropped since we’d gone in and, shuddering, I got into the passenger seat. Roy went straight to the trunk, emptied a box of Upjohn unicap multivitamins and carried the empty casket into the house, leaving it just inside the door. Roy stomped back on the frozen ground and we rode silently back to the store. It was pitch-black but I was too tired to look for war parties on the cliffs.
    We managed to get back to the store before it closed at 9 p.m. and Roy and I shared the unspoken knowledge that we would never tell what we’d seen. I didn’t want my parents to know that things like this happened. I knew I was alone with my own feelings of responsibility and shame. If only we hadn’t been fooling around, eating Christmas fruitcake and drinking Christmas cheer, going to Shim-Shacks and getting so carried away with Cisco and Pancho, we would have gotten there earlier and given Mad Bear his medicine so it wouldn’t have happened.

CHAPTER 4
mother
    My mother was sent by central casting to play the role of the fifties housewife. She could just as easily have been given the role of a spy exploiting her remarkable talent for
fitting
in while not
buying
in. The only giveaway was that her public persona, the typical woman of the Eisenhower era, was a bit too pat. She was like aforeign agent whose English was too perfect for her to have been a native speaker. While she was “the spy who came in from the Buffalo cold,” my father and I made her American-small-town-stay-at-home-1950s-wife-mother caricature possible by providing the camouflage and picking up the pieces that made her impersonation believable.
    She had no tradition to lean on, so she simply refused to participate in what was expected. She did just enough to drift into the Betty Crocker landscape; however, in terms of her behaviour at home, she was more radical than anyone who ever joined the Bader-Meinhoff gang. The strength of her passive resistance put Gandhi and Martin Luther King to shame.
    Mother was tall and thin and pretty. She adhered strictly to all the fashion rules. In the cold weather it was tweed Pendleton wool suits with matching sweater sets or three-piece Butte knits for the meetings that filled her calendar. In the summer she had a collection of cotton flowered shirt-waist dresses. Shorts were for gardening in the backyard only. Straw hats were
de rigueur
for her garden club, with white eyelet gloves and white shoes which she touched up nightly with cakey Esquire liquid applied with a tiny pom-pom applicator. On Labour Day, a holiday my father referred to as a “communist’s day off,” all white garments and accessories were packed away and fall clothes came out of the cedar chest, where each item was wrapped individually in tissue paper. From Easter to May 31, you could wear pastels, and then the whites came out again June first.
    On Labour Day weekend Mother took me on what seemed like an arduous trip from Lewiston to Buffalo, where I picked up my monogrammed pencils for the