The Romantic Read Online Free Page B

our clothes, aside from underwear, socks and pyjamas, to the cleaners; anything too soiled for the cleaners she tears into rags or throws out. Easy come, easy go, and lucky me I’m not slapped when I spill grape juice on a white dress, but I am unsettled by how smoothly she slides from worship to indifference. A nice new sweater,that’s what you live for. The same sweater with a stain on it never existed.
    When I show her the muddied lime-green sweater, she stuffs it in the metal wastepaper basket and sets a match to it. “See how it burns?” she says. “Sizzling like hair? There’s nylon in the weave, I knew there was. I knew that pure-virgin-wool label was crap.”
    The next day, in front of Maureen, I deliberately smear my pink chenille jacket with grease from a bicycle chain.
    ‘You’re a mental case!” Maureen cries, but at least I have graduated from contemptible to alarming.
    After that I occasionally poke a pencil through a skirt, pour finger paint on velvet. My mother is irritated only by what seems to be the onset of a clumsiness from which I, the daughter of a woman whose many beauty-queen trophies include two for comportment, should be exempt. The carnage to my wardrobe she almost welcomes, since it necessitates buying the replacements. Here, of course, is the catch. Every time I ruin something (and if you ruin a blouse, you might as well throw out the matching skirt) I have to try on a half-dozen new outfits before she decides on the one that doesn’t make me look like a pinhead.
    What are these clothes for? My mother’s, I mean. She leaves the house only when she has to, to shop for groceries, get her hair done, occasionally to take me to the dentist’s or doctor’s. Unlike everybody else’s mother she doesn’t attend church, she isn’t a member of any committee or club. Her friend, Phyllis Bendy, always comes to
our
house for coffee.My mother is a woman who goes nowhere, both in the sense of being a homebody and then, when she packs her bags and leaves, of heading off to a place so undiscoverable it may as well not exist.
    But the clothes don’t accompany her. Even the police detective is flabbergasted by what she abandons—“Is that real mink?” She takes her jewellery, her beauty-queen crowns and trophies (which, alone, must fill one suitcase), a framed picture of her father as a young man in his soldier’s uniform (chosen over the photograph of me as a baby that hung next to it) and the white satin bedsheets. It’s my father’s conviction that she has been enticed away by a “smooth-talker,” “a fancy Dan lady’s man.” And yet how can this be? When I am grilled for possible candidates, I can only come up with the Eaton’s delivery man and Mr. LaPierre, whose first name is Daniel and who kisses her neck at our charades parties.
    Every year up until the year my mother disappears, on the Saturday night nearest to January eighteenth, we invite people to our house to play charades. These people aren’t neighbours or friends (my mother hates our neighbours, and she has only the one friend), they are the men my father works with and their wives, and January eighteenth is no monumental date unless you’re my father and then you celebrate the birthday of Peter Mark Roget, the compiler of the first thesaurus. My father loves synonyms. He himself can hardly ever say “love” without adding “cherish” or “adore” but his delivery tends to be self-mocking and theatrical, he makes people laugh. My mother laughs when the words lean toward the racy or ridiculous. Nowand then she surprises us with her own string of synonyms, a sarcastic burst. I remember her cooking eggs one morning, and my father asking,“Are they scrambled?” and her slapping his portion onto a plate and saying,“No, as a matter of fact, they’re mixed up, confused, rattled,” and so on, all the way to “stark raving mad,” by which time my father looked petrified.
    Ordinarily, though, her forays into his