When I was little, looking into Sylvia’s face was like looking into a sun: hot and blinding and full of joy. She was forever folding Nicky and me into her long arms, squeezing us between her knees, our hands buried deep in hers.
We played a game where Sylvia lay on her belly, her face buried in her arms, and Nicky and I ran around her, jumping across her hips, skipping between her legs — swiftly at first, keeping our distance, then daring more as she stayed still as a rock. We flopped on her back, feathered her neck with fingertips, scratched her scalp, wet-willied her ears until she shot a hand out around one of each of our ankles and took us down in a shrieking, giggling mass. She flipped us on our backs and straddled us, covering our faces with her hands, tumbling our bodies around until we all three lay in a pile, exhausted, exhilarated and panting. We begged Sam to join us, tugged his pant cuffs and pulled down his socks, but he rattled his newspaper, shook his head and stretched his legs up onto the couch. At odd moments next to my writhing brother, my chest trapped under Sylvia’s knee, I’d look over at Sam and my laughter caught for one breath then came out flat the next.
Sylvia took us on walks along the side of the road to look for beer bottles in the ditch and into the woods by the river to collect driftwood from uprooted trees for her crafts. She put Nicky and I in charge of bagging pine cones and milkweed pods while she scoped out debris from decaying logs — the more gnarls, loops and twists the better.
When Sam came, he taught us survival techniques like how to make a toothbrush by removing the downy head of a cat-tail and where to find the tasty larva of the fish fly and how to listen for frogs to find water. He told of an Indian brave who saved himself from thirst by imitating a mouse he’d seen licking dew off a rock.
More than anything, Sam said, he wanted to be an Indian when he was growing up. He used to spend hours in the bush behind their place in Drag County, snuck out there after his father had left for the hotel — when his mother didn’t care what he did as long as he stayed out of her way. In a library book, he’d read that Indians could walk through the woods without making a sound — quieter than wolves even. They didn’t snap twigs, crackle leaves, crunch gravel. When he went hunting he practised Indian-walking in the bush. Nicky and I weren’t very good at it but Sylvia was excellent. She could be talking to us one minute, loosening bark or sawing a piece of wood free, and slip off soundless into the trees the next, gone no matter where we searched, then back, just as swift: silent and grinning.
When Sam wasn’t around and we were alone with Sylvia, Nicky sometimes danced. He didn’t need music, said he heard rhythms in his head, and when Sylvia was looking, his feet performed intricate steps — ball, toe, heel — that sent him whirling through two or three rooms, one after the other. Often Sylvia laughed, the clapping of her hands like heavy boots with taps on a wooden floor.
We’d seen Sam and Sylvia dance in our living room when my uncles came down for a fish fry at the arena. Larry and Sam were drinking rye and gingers with Reese and his fiancée Shanelle. Reese was watching his mouth then with his wedding date not set. Sylvia was getting dressed in the bedroom while Nadette cleaned up Larry Jr. who had yet to successfully toilet-train. Nicky and I kneeled on the floor in our pyjamas playing Snap. Sam stood as Sylvia strode out in a white halter top and pleated black palazzo pants. In her gold sandals she was as tall as Sam who hugged her in tight at the waist and danced her forward with his thighs. He sang along with the kitchen radio — Roo-oo-bee, don’t take your love to town— then Reese pulled Shanelle up too and I watched from the floor and hoped.
Sylvia reached over Sam’s shoulder and snagged her Peter Jacksons from the top of the buffet. As Sam sang into her hair, she rummaged for a cigarette and pushed it between her lips. Larry jumped up to light it then stayed standing in the middle of the room while his brothers two-stepped their wives around him. Sylvia gestured toward the table and Larry handed her a tumbler. Sam’s palms held Sylvia’s hips while she rested her wrists on his shoulders, taking alternate drags and sips. Her red lips glistened through the shroud of smoke. Larry looked about to tap Sylvia’s bare shoulder before Sam steered her away. When Nadette came in, Larry gulped his drink.
“You two look more alike than twins,” Nadette said. “It’s not normal.”
I nudged Nicky as if it was us she was talking about but it was my parents and Nadette was right. Sylvia puckered her lips and blew a smoke ring at Larry and everybody laughed. With a twist, Sylvia freed her hips from Sam’s hands and sat on the couch, the black crepe spreading like a cape as she crossed one long thigh over the other.
Sometimes when Nicky danced, Sylvia took him by the hands, slid her bare feet under his toes and, counting out the steps, calibrated him in precise squares around the room.
With me it was different. The light around Sylvia was safe and warm, true, but structure was what I needed. Sylvia had rules — was full of them in fact, more than Sam, who hid behind newspapers and seemed not to care which rules Sylvia made and whether we followed them, as long as they were there and he was disturbed as little as possible about settling disputes.
Dinner was on the table at six, fifteen minutes after Sam got home from work, and Sylvia served our plates from the stove. Sam preferred the staples: pork chops, venison steak or chicken drumsticks with mashed potatoes and buttered white bread on the side. Sylvia added canned peas or creamed corn so we’d have a vegetable and insisted we all three ate everything on our plates. When she was feeling creative she made casseroles from her magazines: macaroni with peas and cream of mushroom soup, spiced with paprika and topped with a crust of crushed potato chips, or turkey pot pie with frozen carrot medallions and happy faces cut in the Tenderflake crust. Dessert was butterscotch ice cream with corn syrup, or bananas cut up in brown sugar and evaporated milk.
We said “please” when we asked for a condiment and “thank you” when it was passed. We sat with paper serviettes unfolded on our laps and rested our forearms — and never our elbows — on the edge of the table. Our mouths were closed while we chewed and no part of my body was allowed to touch any part of my brother’s or vice versa. No kicking the chair or drinking while eating or slurping or playing with food or interrupting. Sam talked about his clients and Sylvia talked about how she’d made the meal and, if it was new, where she’d got the recipe and what changes she’d made. She told about whatever project she was working on too, the teak beads she’d found for the macramé owl hanging, the scratching technique she’d learned in pottery class, the lamp base she’d wired out of shellacked driftwood.
There were math games with Sam asking Sylvia for an equation then competing with us to find the answer fastest without writing anything down. Sylvia smiled close-mouthed while the three of us clamoured to shout the right answer first, the numbers often tripping over our tongues and coming out incomplete or backward in our haste. Sam loved the language of geometry — hypotenuse, vertex, congruent, isosceles — and had a particular fondness for the Pythagorean Theorem. He started us off — “The square of the hypotenuse…” — and we raced to see who could finish reciting it first: “…of a right-angled triangle equals the sum of the squares of the other two sides!” Cards roused a similar fierceness: cribbage or rummy with Sam was a madcap contest to add points for runs and pairs and sets and fifteens. It was rare that Nicky or I was swifter than Sam but we were neck and neck with each other. Sylvia always claimed she’d figured the answer before us but didn’t need to bother with shouting it out.
On Sundays Sylvia walked Nicky and I down the hill to the United Church. She dressed me in homemade jumpers fastened with wooden buttons over white blouses and white leotards with two-toned brown shoes we’d found at the Salvation Army store. I tied my hair in braids with matching yarn ribbons. Nicky wore an orange shirt tucked into stretchy plaid pants with a paisley clip-on tie and desert boots. We stayed for the first part of the service, through two hymns from the choir and announcements, until Reverend Green called all the children forth to sit at his feet for a Jesus story then sent us down to the basement for Sunday school.
There were three others in my Sunday school class: Susan Baker from up on the highway