Mennonites Don't Dance (24 page)

Penelope tried to think of other ways to help Ada. When one of her friends invited her to see a new litter of kittens, she told them she was busy, so she wouldn't be far should Ada call for her. She also tied lengths of cotton string from a leaky faucet to the drain, so drips would find a quiet way to the bottom of the sink. She made up the beds with fresh sheets on Saturday mornings, careful to run her hand along the entire grid of her mother's linens to make sure there was nothing to make her itch, no bits of hay that made their way through the wash to irritate her skin and scratch their way into her dreams. But no matter how Penelope tried to insulate Ada, her mother's nerves crackled with tension, like naked wires.

Finally, Joseph decided something had to be done.

“I've bought a house in town for you and your mother,” he told Penelope one morning as the two of them sat at the kitchen table, eating bowls of cereal quietly. “She'll be happier. You'll go to a new school come fall and I'll visit on Sundays.”

Penelope stared into her cereal. She thought about how, without her father there, there'd be no one to help remember the toast.

Penelope never wrote in her diary about how she felt. Just that moving to Swift Current, where there were shops and parks, revived Ada for a while. Even though the house was modest, bordered the railway, and had a summer kitchen for a back porch, she was cheered by the sight of people strolling along the sidewalks. Walking for the sake of walking, she said. Because there's more to life than work.

For a full month, and another after school started, Penelope and Ada kept busy cleaning, boarding up mouse holes, choosing wallpaper and fabrics, arranging the wedding dishes and tea set — which were too fine for the farm — in the kitchen cupboards. In the afternoons when Penelope returned from school, they started a new tradition. They had tea together, with cubes of white sugar dissolved in the bottom of their finely-painted china teacups.

“How was school today?” Ada would ask. “Did you make friends?”

“A few,” Penelope would lie, anxious to keep her mother from knowing she sat alone at lunchtime, looking out the classroom window to avoid the other girls. It wasn't their fault. They had tried to be friendly. During her first week they included her in their secrets at recess, giggling at their own silliness. One morning though, Penelope was distracted by the thought that she'd left the stove lit after cooking cream of wheat. And although she tried, she couldn't make herself giggle along with the other girls. She stood as conspicuous as a hat rack while they gradually turned away.

Since then she'd watched them from a way off, wishing she could think of a reason to go over and talk to them again.

“You know Penelope, to make friends, you have to be a friend,” Ada said, perhaps filling in what Penelope wasn't saying. Perhaps just filling in the silence. “Why don't you invite some girls over tomorrow? The house is ready for guests, don't you think? We'll have tea and biscuits.” She looked around, seeming pleased with what she saw. Penelope thought she saw something else though, a familiar darkness that passed like a shadow over her mother's face.

“I don't think — ” Penelope said, but stopped short of saying it wasn't a good idea. “Okay, I'll ask.”

The next afternoon Penelope walked home with two other girls. Susan and Annabelle were “spirit sisters,” they said, although they were as unrelated as pigs and pigeons. They dressed the same for school each day and braided each other's hair with wildflowers and dandelions. Penelope's promise of store-bought cookies, when all they'd ever had was homemade, was more than enough to tempt them. But when she led them up the porch steps and opened the front door, she knew by the tightly-closed drapes that Ada was having one of her spells.

Still on the porch, Penelope closed the door and backed up so quickly that she bumped into Susan and Annabelle. The two were holding hands as though they were Siamese twins joined at the palms.

“Hey,” they said in one voice, stumbling, but not letting go of one another.

“Sorry.” Penelope grasped the doorknob again, trying to think of a reason to go back to school. In the end there was no way out. With a deep breath, she pushed the door open and led the girls inside.

“So, do you live here alone or something?” Susan said loudly as Annabelle went to part the heavy living room curtains. Sharp angles of afternoon light fell across the floor. Neither of them noticed a mouse hunkered down in the middle of the living room. It had helped itself to a dish of stale marshmallow peanuts on the coffee table, but must have frozen when the three girls came inside.

“I think my mom is sleeping,” Penelope said in a near whisper meant as a hush. She was anxious about upsetting Ada. Nearly as much though, she worried that Ada might come downstairs, nightgowned and agitated, and embarrass her in front of Susan and Annabelle.

Penelope made tea, catching the kettle before it whistled. She arranged cinnamon biscuits on an everyday plate, poured milk into a cream jug and set out a bowl of sugar cubes, along with three teacups that no one cared about. Before she could ask Susan and Annabelle whether they preferred lemon and honey, she heard a thump from upstairs, followed by the sound of Ada's voice crying out.

Penelope's heart became a stone in her chest. As calmly as she could, she set down the biscuit box and arranged her face into an apology, then quickly turned to leave the room, her legs as wobbly as cooked noodles.

“You might need help,” Susan said. Both girls stood to follow Penelope, eager as volunteers to clean up after a church bake sale.

“No, it's fine,” Penelope said, but Susan and Annabelle were like burrs on her socks. They stuck right on her heels and Penelope was too flustered to pick them off. “Okay, just wait here,” she said with as much authority as she could when they reached Ada's room at the top of the stairs.

Penelope found her mother bent over her knees on the rag rug beside her bed, a stream of thin, white-flecked vomit spooling out in front of her. On the nightstand were an empty pitcher of water and a tipped-over bottle of Aspirin, the last few tablets spilled out.

“Did you take all these?” Penelope said, trying to keep panic from rising into her voice. She stepped round her mother and knelt next to her.

“Just a few at first,” Ada said, looking up and reaching a cold and trembling hand for Penelope's. “For my head. I had to do something, but they didn't help so I took more.” She turned her face away, rested her forehead back on her knees and quietly began to sob. “I thought I was better.”

“Tell me what I should do,” Penelope said, wiping at tears that sprung onto her cheeks. Her mother said nothing.

When Penelope left Ada's room to fetch a cold cloth for her face, she found Susan nervously chewing her thumbnail. Annabelle had disappeared.

“She went for her mom,” Susan said. “We didn't know what else to do.”

Penelope took a deep breath, went into the bathroom and turned on the tap.

Moments later, Annabelle and her mother were followed into the house by a man whom Penelope mistakenly thought must be Annabelle's father.

“She's fine,” Penelope said, coming halfway down the stairs and standing in their way. “She's in her nightgown. She won't want company right now.”

“I think I'll have to be the judge of that,” the man said, introducing himself as Doctor Westfall. He put out his hand as if to greet Penelope, but when by habit she extended hers, he relieved her of the cloth she was holding and made his way past her, shutting her attempts to follow him into her mother's bedroom.

“Come, dear,” said Annabelle's mother. “My daughter tells me that you made some tea. Why don't we go downstairs and enjoy it before it's hopelessly cold?”

Without thinking, Penelope obeyed. She watched dimly as the woman sent the other girls home, shushing their protests that they should be allowed to stay.

For what seemed like hours, Penelope sat at the kitchen table while Annabelle's mother busied herself with the few dishes in the sink. She swept the floor before starting a pot of soup.

Penelope absently accepted tea and a plate of toast with butter and cheese spread. Slowly she began to settle down. She closed her eyes and took deep breaths.

Some time later, Doctor Westfall came downstairs into the kitchen.

“She purged the Aspirin and I've given her some pills to help with sleep. It's enough for now, but I've also written a script for more.” He looked around, as though unsure to whom he should give the prescription. Finally he settled on Penelope, but Annabelle's mother quickly stepped forward and took the paper from him.

“Thank you, Doctor,” she said. “I'll take care of things here until arrangements are made.”

That evening Penelope's father drove into town, but it was Annabelle's mother who spent the night, and the next three after that. And although she knew better, Penelope began to hope she would never leave.

One afternoon, Penelope's Aunt Gutherie, Ada's oldest unmarried sister, arrived on the train from Winnipeg to take over.

With an enormous carpetbag and hair wound so tightly into a bun that it made her face look as though it was being tightened by a screw at the back of her head, Penelope could already tell that Aunt Gutherie didn't have a bone of nonsense in her whole being.

“Your mother needs quiet. Lots of quiet,” she said once she assessed the situation. Already she'd found and flicked two mice out the front door with a straw broom and installed poison in all the places they might be likely to come back. Now she bobbled her head disapprovingly, causing a generous pinch of wattle under her chin to jiggle with authority. “That father of yours ought to have known better. Thinking he could bring a woman like my sister into the wilds and turn her into a milk maid. Well. It's a good thing I've come is all I can say.”

Within hours of Aunt Gutherie's arriving, a curtain of silence was pulled around the house, quarantining them from the rest of the neighbourhood. Inside, the atmosphere was like a funeral home. Voices were hushed and clutter forbidden, with Penelope sent to her room except when she was needed, or when Ada called for her.

“Don't go tiring her out,” Aunt Gutherie said before she'd give Penelope permission to enter her mother's room. So Penelope sat mouse-like on the corner of the bed and quietly worried the plain hem of her school dress, stopping only long enough to answer her mother's questions. When she fell asleep, Penelope crept slowly, noiselessly, out of the room.

Under Aunt Gutherie's care, Ada began to improve. Not suddenly, as when they first moved into town. This time it was gradual until, after several weeks, she even began to wait for Penelope on their front porch after school, standing and waving when she saw her coming up the block. Together they'd go inside and share a pot of tea while Aunt Gutherie hovered nearby.

Some days Penelope's father would drop by with sacks of flour and sugar, and boxes of fresh fruit, then leave, saying the cows'd soon need to be milked. At the door, Joseph would pull a nickel from behind Penelope's ear. And then he'd be gone for another week.

One Friday, as Penelope was on her way home from school, she saw Ada as usual, standing on the porch, and when she got closer, there was Joseph too, on hands and knees, removing successful mouse traps from under the porch. His overalled legs and manure-encrusted barn boots stuck out from under the structure like half of a scarecrow. At irregular intervals, he flung traps, still clamped around dead mice, onto the grass at his side.

“Hey, there,” he said when he finally emerged and saw Penelope.

“Hi,” she said, looking over his shoulder to her mother.

“Seems you ladies have a few more mice than you need.” He chuckled, a sound like pebbles tumbling, and turned his attention back to the traps. Levering the springs to release the dead mice into a bucket, he smeared fresh daubs of peanut butter on the mechanisms and crawled back under the porch.

“There,” Joseph said when the job was done. “That ought to do you for a little while, don't you think?”

“Probably not,” Penelope said. “It would be better to have a cat around. We have more mice than you do at home on the farm.” She walked up the front steps and left the door open for her mother to follow her inside. A little later she realized her father had left without saying goodbye. Later that evening, after Ada had gone to her room for the night, he returned carrying a box with holes punched into the sides. Aunt Gutherie met him at the door.

“Brought a little something to help out with your mouse problem,” he said. He held the box high and peered over top of the woman until he saw Penelope standing in the kitchen door, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “It was your idea,” he said to Penelope, taking half a step inside. Aunt Gutherie held her ground, but Joseph was a large man and pushed forward until he'd gained his way inside.

Penelope could smell fresh hay, and there were sounds coming from inside the box. Scratching and mewling. She felt her whole face stretch into a smile.

“No. Absolutely not. There will be no animals in my house,” Aunt Gutherie said, folding her arms across her chest.

Penelope's expression collapsed.