to Alice’s mother, and none more so than carpeted ones. Her mother was a small woman, barely five foot two, but she gave the impression of taking up a great deal of space. She was the sort of woman who claimed territory like an animal claims it, leaving mysterious scents and traces behind, so that it was clear to all passers-by that it was hers.
“I don’t feel good,” said Alice.
These were magic words, for Alice’s mother was at her best in a health crisis. She put the back of her cool fingers against Alice’s forehead. They smelled of Jergen’s hand lotion.
“You have a fever. I’ll get the thermometer. Get out of those clothes and into your pyjamas.”
This was stern stuff, for it was only five o’clock. It was forbidden to appear at the dinner table in pyjamas. She was being sent to bed. Oh, she thought, I don’t mind. And then she thought, I must be really sick.
Alice took off her clothes and meant to hang them up but then didn’t; she simply put them on her dresser. Her mother would forgive her. Her mother would make an exception. Exceptions were one of the benefits of being sick. She chose her blue flannel pyjamas, the ones with the flowers on them, the groovy ones, like the flowers Goldie Hawn had painted on her stomach on Laugh In.
When her mother came back, she said, “Let me look in your mouth,” and tilted Alice’s head towards the light so she could see inside. “Oh, dear,” she said. “I don’t like the look of your tongue.”
“My tongue?”
“It doesn’t look right at all. Does it hurt?”
“No. My throat hurts.”
“I’ll get you an aspirin. I don’t like the looks of this.” This was gratifying, as was the concern on her mother’s face, altering her normally somewhat severe expression. “I don’t think you’ll be going to school tomorrow.”
Alice nearly smiled. Staying home and having ice cream for lunch and watching The Dick Van Dyke Show and getting to read from The Girl’s Own Annual – a special treat since it was an old and precious book her mother had had when she was just Alice’s age – was a pretty good deal, as her father said. “You’re getting a pretty good deal there,” was what he said to anything he approved of, from the price of their new Ford Falcon, to those times when Alice was permitted to stay up past her bedtime to watch a special program on television. Which is when she remembered about tonight.
“What about Daniel Boone?” It was Thursday night. Her mother permitted her to stay up later, an entire half hour, to see Fess Parker as Daniel Boone.
Her mother shook the thermometer. “What about it? Open.”
“Can I watch it?”
“We’ll see.”
While they waited for the thermometer to register the extent of Alice’s illness, Cynthia picked up the discarded clothes, sorted them for wash or further wear, and put what was dirty in the clothes hamper in Alice’s closet and what was still clean, she folded, and put away in the drawers. She polished away a smudge on the mirror with the cuff of her blouse. Alice’s mother could never pass by a thing out of place. Kitchen cupboards left open were the undoing of her. “Why can’t you close them when you’ve finished,” she’d say. “They look so messy.” “If you pick things up as you go along,” she’d say, “then you’ll have half your work done for you.” “You’ll learn,” she’d say. “When you’re older. You have to conserve yourself.” A woman of few friends and contempt for “joiners” as she called them, Alice’s mother held the world at bay by swatting a dust cloth at it.
The thermometer clicked against Alice’s teeth. Her mother removed it and frowned. “Oh dear,” she said, and put her hand against her Alice’s cheek. The fingers were hard and icy against Alice’s flushed skin. “I’m going to get that aspirin.”
When Alice’s father came in from work, she heard her mother talking to him in the low voice she used for serious matters.
“I’m sure it’s just another bout of tonsillitis,” said her father.
More murmuring from her mother.
“You overreact,” said her father.
“I do not overreact,” said her mother. “You are under-involved.”
“Don’t start, Cynthia. I just got home.”
“I suspect you started before you got here.”
“Oh, come on now, don’t be like that,” said her father, and there was a moment’s quiet, just the sound of someone being kissed. “I’m sure she’s fine.”
“We’ll see,” said her mother.
Her father came up to see her. He still wore his overcoat, and he brought with him the smell of oncoming snow and the metallic scent from inside the commuter train. “What’s my girl up to?” he said.
“I’m sick.”
“I can see that.” He bent to kiss her and the odour of scotch and peppermints and tobacco floated on his breath. “Ah well, tomorrow’s Friday, maybe you’ll just stay home. How about that?”
“My throat hurts.”
“Ice cream for dinner?”
“Sure. What about Daniel Boone?”
By seven thirty, she was set up on the couch, in her mother’s usual place, under a mound of blankets, with a big pillow under her head. If it wasn’t for the pain in her throat, it would be a very good night. Her father sat in his chair, leafing through the paper. They never talked much in the evening. Her mother generally sat in the corner where Alice now sat, next to the good light and the side table, which was covered in an assortment of straight pins in two pin cushions, some with coloured heads, spools of thread, pinking shears, measuring tape, dress patterns in packages with drawings of the finished dresses on the front, a little hooked instrument that ripped out errant stitches, and an ivory nail buffer with a chamois skin that had been Alice’s grandmother’s. The last time she had sat here, Alice had, for reasons mysterious even to her, cut a few things with scissors – the fringe on the sofa cover, some of the paper patterns, and lastly, and most inexplicably, a hunk of her own bangs. The latter she cut so short it looked as though something had taken a bite out of her hair. She got into a lot of trouble for that and her mother had hit her so hard with the hair brush that she broke the handle. When her teacher asked about the hairdo, Alice said her mother had done it.
Her father put down his paper. “Look at those rosy cheeks,” he said. “Picture of health, right kiddo?”
Alice smiled, but the truth was she did not feel anything like the picture of health. In fact, she wasn’t completely sure she even cared much about Daniel Boone and his faithful Indian friend, Mingo. She knew, however, that it was important to her father that she not be too sick, or if she was, not to show it too much.
Alice’s father, Andrew Cavanaugh Hastings, was a man who did not show pain. He had once fallen off a ladder that tipped as he leaned out too far from the roof while putting up Christmas lights. He lay on the ground for a moment, and then rose, brushed off his pant legs and said he was fine. It was not until four days later, when he was walking around all crinked over, that his wife had insisted he go to the doctor. Three broken ribs. When Alice had asked if it hurt, he’d said, “Only when I sneeze, so I’m not going to sneeze any more.” And he’d winked at her. Mr. Hastings also suffered from ulcers, although he never spoke of it and Alice and her mother only knew they were bothering him when he took to eating more ice cream than usual.
Alice’s mother, on the other hand, made quite a drama of trauma, as her father said, using a phoney British accent to make it rhyme nicely. The traumas, though, were rarely Cynthia’s. Cynthia could sniff out a neighbour’s broken leg, or a dented fender, or a case of food poisoning, or a pending divorce with the acuity of a bloodhound. If she kept the world at bay and preferred to distance herself from the scrutiny of friends and relations,