Free A Good House by Bonnie Burnard

I just don’t know. Is there any way you could…?”
    “Yes,” Margaret said, not because she understood what was expected of her but only because Sylvia believed it had to be a woman, otherwise she would not have asked. And here she was, a woman. “Yes,” she said. “I will.”
    Margaret sometimes showed up with a few groceries and one time books from the library, some light history, a couple of dog-eared mysteries, but none of the books got read. Sylvia did ask for a good atlas, which Margaret drove into London to buy, and she spent some of her hours studying the changes in the world.
    After a few weeks Margaret brought Daphne into her mother’s bed and gave her the tray with the china soup plate and the silver spoon. She stood at the dusty picture window until the soup was half gone, asking Daphne questions about her schoolwork and her friends. She knew who Daphne’s girlfriends were because she often saw them walking on the street together uptown, nudging shoulders as they talked, still a bit playful but serious too, newly careful with Daphne and with each other. You could see it in their posture, in their stern faces, the eyes that brazenly searched another’s eyes with the promise of understanding. None of the girls came inside the house now, the farthest they could be coaxed was just inside the kitchen door, but this was easily recognized as one more clumsy, misplaced, well-meant gesture of respect.
    As Daphne finished spooning the soup to her mother, Margaret asked herself how the boys would feel if she sent them out to the dusty windows with some newspapers and a bucket of vinegar water and then after the dishes were cleaned up she got her Harris tweed coat and her purse, said her goodnights, and let herself out the back door.
    T HE grandparents usually dropped in after supper, after Margaret had left. They were sometimes accompanied by one of Sylvia’s brothers and his wife or by her sister from out of town or by Bill’s brother from Windsor with his cheerful wife and their young children. Kitchen chairs were carried in and placed haphazardly around the room, facing Sylvia. The nieces and nephews were allowed to sit briefly on the bed to embrace their aunt and then they sprawled out on the carpet to play secret little whispering games or snap or jumping jacks.
    The adults tried to talk about things Sylvia might find interesting, Sandy Koufax and the Brooklyn Dodgers, Lassie, James Dean being killed like that, but everyone listened too politely, too attentively to the speaker, almost all of them were too unnaturally quick to laugh or offer agreement. Sylvia heard their words not as sentences deliberately formed to tell a person something but as dull, one-at-a-time thuds against the dull silence that had begun to wall her in. She heard the words as small, well-meant blows against a concrete bunker. Although she did not ever ask, Could they please just shut up and go home.
    Occasionally they would forget themselves and talk just to each other, for which she was occasionally grateful. The most astute among them watched her closely as they talked, recognized for what they were the small, jerking movements of her hands, the slight ducking of her head as if to avoid something flying too low above her.
    Daphne decided it would be nice to use the silver tray from the buffet to serve the cookies or squares the women always brought, and Bill’s father, a heavy, large-boned man who spoke slowly and loudly, made a huge fuss over her as she circled the room with the tray, said she was coming along so nicely. Sylvia’s father, thin and wiry and wheezing with emphysema, paid no heed to the conventions expected of him. He cried openly and said awful heartfelt things like “You were always the strongest,” and “Half a life,” and “Why can’t I be taken instead,” and always when he started the others took a deep, collective breath and prepared themselves to put an end to it.
    The third or fourth time this