“Thought I wouldn’t find out, didn’t you? Who is it? That O’Neil kid across the street? Huh? You might as well tell me because I’ll find out who it is.”
Like a missile, the yardstick suddenly flashed past Cathy’s face, landing with a brittle smack against the hot water tank beside her. At the sharp sound of wood cracking against metal, Cathy peed herself. Instantly, she squeezed herself as tightly as possible to stop the flow. Tight, tight, tight.
Please God, not now.
She choked the flow in time. Nothing ran down her legs. Her cotton underwear would blot up what had escaped. Now, though, her stomach really began to churn. She parted her lips slightly, cautiously, to breathe through her mouth. Pores on the surface of her skin dilated. Her mouth flooded with saliva. She was going to vomit.
“So. It’s starting already, is it? Every mother’s nightmare. A slut of a daughter.”
While her mother’s voice rose in pitch, Cathy’s sense of the present suddenly became distorted; everything began moving at half-speed. Her mother, in slow motion, wagged a white index card in front of her. There was a coin taped to a corner of the card. The words that her mother spat out floated past her.
“I told you no boys in this house until you’re finished school. Do you hear me? You go to school for one reason and one reason only, and that’s to learn. There’ll be no hanging around after school, joining clubs and teams and other nonsense and walking home with boys just to be popular, let me tell you.”
Her mother’s glazed, frenzied gaze looked right through her.
Cathy let her school bag strap slide off her shoulder and fall to the ground. Her bladder continued to threaten. She was going to have to run.
“I’m watching your every move, young lady.”
Had her mother seen her wave to Janet and mistakenly thought it was meant for one of the neighbourhood boys?
“By God, you should have had my father for a parent. Then you’d understand discipline, my dear.”
Her mother’s teeth flashed wet and shiny as she spoke, and little bits of spittle flew about, some landing like cold little pinpoints on Cathy’s face. As Cathy raised an arm to wipe her face, her mother slapped it away, buried her fingers in Cathy’s hair, and jerked her face up to greet her own.
“I want to know who this secret admirer is, right now. Tell me or I’ll tan your hide until the skin blisters off of it.”
Cathy heard the wheezing breath squeezed out of her mother’s asthmatic throat, a sign that she might have been shouting recently.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mom.”
“Don’t remind me that I gave birth to you. The President with that obedient, angelic little girl and what do I get?”
Adele pushed her backward, letting go of her hair. Then, with an abrupt flick of her thick wrist, she presented the white card again, so closely that it almost brushed the tip of Cathy’s nose. Pee began to trickle down the inside of Cathy’s thighs. She jammed her legs together, tightly crossing one knee over the other.
“Who’s this secret admirer of yours sending you things through the mail, then, if you haven’t been up to anything?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t just get mail from strangers, young lady. Who sent you this?”
“I don’t know. What is it?”
“This. Right here. It’s addressed to you.”
“I didn’t ask anyone to send me anything in the mail.”
“Well somebody’s got your address from somewhere, missy, and I want to know where. This boyfriend thing is going to be nipped in the bud right now. Do you hear me?”
Cathy bit her tongue hard to halt the advance of tears and clenched her thighs together, desperate not to wet herself further.
“Caught you, haven’t I, miss? Mrs. De Finca told me about it at the plaza.”
So that was it. She’d been out to the plaza and run into Mrs. De Finca! It was impossible to know what Mrs. De Finca had said to set her off. It could have been a disagreement between the two about the length of hems this season or which way a daughter should be taught to iron—starting with the sleeves first or leaving the sleeves to the end. Or it could have been something that one of Mrs. De Finca’s daughters did that she didn’t do. Or the reverse.
It didn’t matter, really. In the end, her mother would have stormed across the parking lot of the shopping plaza, thrown her parcels into the back seat, and jetted her car out into the traffic, driving in a rage, grinding the gears of her Volkswagen, talking loudly to herself all the way home.
Cathy slowly hooked a hank of hair behind one ear and bent down to remove her shoes, carefully avoiding putting any extra pressure on her bladder. A foot away from her face the tip of the yardstick twirled on the plastic runner. She watched it from her bent position. It rose and fell with her mother’s words, ticking nastily, leaving small pocks in the plastic’s surface.
“How is it that Louise De Finca knows you’re up to something if she didn’t hear it from Sandra? Huh? Answer me that? How do you think I felt, standing there, listening to that woman tell me about your antics? That woman was laughing at the whole family behind our backs because of your behaviour!”
Tick, tick, went the yardstick.
Cathy pushed her shoes carefully to one side with a stockinged foot and straightened slowly, keeping her eyes down. Very soon, she would pee down her legs onto the plastic.
Her mother had advanced as far into the room as she could, and now she manoeuvred herself into a position that left Cathy no option but to cross in front of the twitching yardstick.
“Get your little arse up to your room right now, miss.”
Tick, tick. Time was up.
Cathy dashed past the twitching stick. It caught her, landing regular stinging whacks on the backs of her calves as her mother chased her through the main floor of the house to the foot of the stairs. Through the blur of tears, she noticed a buffet drawer hanging open as she passed through the dining room.
The sound of the phone ringing in the downstairs hall of the Mugans’ suburban household was lost amid the overlapping claps of thunder outside and the loud spraying of wind-driven rain against the windows. The maple trees in the backyard flailed violently as the wind tore at them, ripping away their silver-backed leaves and driving them in helpless wet, green clumps against the downstairs windows, making sudden dull thwacking sounds against the glass. All around the house tree branches repeatedly raked and beat against the roof; the sound travelled through the empty attic like a restless knocking from another world.
When the lights flickered momentarily, died and revived, Adele lost her rhythm and halted in mid-sentence. Her bright red face was wet with perspiration and her heavy bosom heaved up and down rapidly. Only as she paused did she notice, for the first time, the dishevelment that lay around her on Cathy’s bedroom floor. Glancing critically at it, she called Cathy a dirty pig and ordered her to clean up the mess. Then she spun out of the room in a dissipating eddy of rage.
Cathy crouched behind her open bedroom door, listening, despite the thunder, making sure that the footsteps really were dying away down the hall. When she was certain that they would not be returning, she quickly pushed the door across the blue shag carpet and pressed it silently into place. She controlled the doorknob carefully, letting the glass ball spin beneath her hand in short, hesitant measures, so that the latch would slip noiselessly into the socket.
It was the hairbrush that had caught her under the left eye,