Free What They Wanted by Donna Morrissey Page B

or chase off them cold winter days when her old bones creaked more than the rafters in a squally wind.
    Yet in Mother’s house I was shooed to the sidelines with the boys, watching as she swept, mopped, and dusted right down to the farthest corner in every room, including the one I shared with Gran. I’d stand resentfully beside my bed, protesting as she polished my bureau or decorated it with doilies and dried flowers, tucking my things—rocks, a bird’s nest, Boots’s tiny, polished skull—into drawers, or worse, into boxes and suitcases that she’d push under the beds or into the closets along with the other things from my old room in Cooney Arm.
    “Take it out when you needs it,” she’d respond to my yelps of protest, and carry right on with her cleaning and tidying. Except those times when she strolled determinedly towards me with a ribbon or clips or some article of clothing. She didn’t shoo me away on those days, but would stand arguing till the sun went down over my refusal to have my hair combed and fixed. During those times, I actually ran outdoors, or to my room, barring myself inside for fear of becoming no more than a thing myself, all prettily polished and tidied and tucked inside a fold of Mother’s house.
    I got no sympathy from Gran. Back in Cooney Arm, Gran had always lauded my swiftness with a dishcloth or a scrubbing rag. Now she sided with Mother and was forever directing my attention—as Mother did—towards homework, or out to the wharf, watching that the boys didn’t fall overboard. Neither was Father much of a consolation. A brooding figure he’d been, those first years in Hampden, hunched over the wharf and looking back towards Cooney Arm, gutted by the loss of the fish, his stage. And instead of lazing back on the sofa when evening came, snoring out the strains of the day with me on his chest, he was now going off to bed, into that room he shared with my mother, whose door was always closed, emitting tiny gasps of cool air whenever it opened as I walked by. When he did settle on the sofa, throwing his feet upon the humpty, it was always Kyle clambering over him, and sometimes Chris. Never me, for under Mother’s critical eye I suddenly felt too big for anything I used to do, all my cozy comforts replaced by big-girl dresses, big-girl ponytails, big-girl ways of sitting in a chair with my knees beneath the table and not comfortably tucked beneath my chin.
    Tricked. I felt like I’d been tricked out of my nice, warm home with Gran and staged in Mother’s, which held nothing of its comforts. All the things I’d brought from my life in Cooney Arm, tucked now into boxes beneath the bed, felt no more than souvenirs of a home that once was. And worse, every time I crept around the house—hoping to escape attention, homework, the boys—and accidentally scared Mother by appearing silently in a doorway, she’d accuse me of sneaking about.
    “Just like when you were small, always spying,” she cried out once.
    “I’m not spying,” I protested.
    “Yes, you are, nobody walks that quietly without they’re up to something.”
    “Perhaps I’d like to be alone for once,” I shouted, and seeing the disbelieving look on Mother’s face, flounced to my room in a fit of frustration. In an effort to prove my innocence, I started walking more quietly at all times, keeping a preoccupied look on my face and pretending I was looking for something, should Mother look up from her cooking or cleaning or reading with a start. Times I feigned a start myself upon a sudden gasp from her. Mostly it was during those quietest of moments—when the boys and Father were outside somewhere, and Gran dozing in her rocker, and the house humming along with Mother as she tidied her kitchen or living room—that I tended to appear. Always, during this silly, repeated exercise, I wore a preoccupied look, then bafflement each time Mother jumped or shrieked in fright. Once, she was so startled she dropped and