Summer Cannibals

by Melanie Hobson

  She yanked the vacuum cleaner from the closet and its cord spilled out all over the floorboards, because whoever had used it last had just dumped it in the closet without spooling the cord properly. Doors in this house, Georgina thought, are always shut tight against mess. Thankful, again, that the home she’d made with her husband was the opposite of that, with everything new and in its place so that day-to-day tasks could be accomplished without having to wrestle them. All it took—she stooped to gather the cord up—was a system. And the will to follow it.

  She plugged the vacuum in without even having to think about where the outlet was, her old bedroom’s geography so deeply imbedded in her, and the machine started up immediately. The power switch was broken. The third-floor vacuum, she thought, would be even worse. Items in that house always seemed to degrade the higher up they got and the entire third floor, with its three huge bedrooms and two hallways and bathroom and storage closets, was a repository for things deemed too damaged to be shown. It was the shut-away space. Jax’s bedroom was up there which seemed, Georgina sneered, about right. Thinking they should probably stick Pippa up there too.

  Prenatal depression, their mother had said. The diagnosis Pippa was flying home on. It was easy for Georgina to imagine how it had gone—her little sister crying over the phone and their mother taking the bait—because Pippa had always been good at that. At manipulation. At getting everyone to do what she wanted them to do. And even though she’d made a life and family for herself in New Zealand, a place Georgina only knew by its lack of anything other than indigenous art, here she still was, making them all jump. Georgina supposed that she had to give her father some points for not having fallen so completely for Pippa’s drama that he’d cancelled the tour. He might have agreed to pay for the flight (how could he not?), but what other concessions had he made? Knowing her father, Georgina suspected the answer was none. Pushing the vacuum head into the corners, she knew she had to give him credit for that. For staying the course. For being, like this house, a well-reasoned edifice—a facade that she liked to think she projected herself. A way in which they were alike.

  How’d she get them to let her fly? Georgina had asked her mother.

  Them?

  The airline, her doctor …

  Oh, you know how well she carries her pregnancies. She didn’t tell them.

  But, isn’t that dangerous?

  Their mother had simply flicked a hand at the suggestion that danger, in this case, was even a consideration. Don’t be silly, was all she’d said.

  5

  Margaret watched her eldest daughter’s car vanish down the driveway, off to the supermarket to stock the house with food.

  That is what’s so good about Georgina. She never has to be told. All I have to do, Margaret thought, is hint and that’s always enough.

  The house was empty now, just herself inside, David still out in the garden, and so she turned and climbed the back stairs as automatically as you might lift a bowl from the sink and place it in the dishwasher rack. These were the times when she worked. When she hid herself away, in that room over the kitchen where no one would ever look for her, to assemble her collages. She’d always worked on them in bits and pieces, in stolen moments like this that wouldn’t raise suspicions about where she was or what she was doing. About why she was unavailable. Sometimes the work went quickly and she finished entire sheets at once but sometimes, like now, she would stand in the middle of all the accumulated material and not know where to start. She’d put a sheet of paper on the desk or at her feet and just look at it, trying to let some sort of impulse take over because this was a compulsion she couldn’t control and even after all this time, years and years and years, she hadn’t discovered a way to trigger it.

  She heard someone cross the drive just then—her husband, probably—and that was all it took. Her hands began picking things up and laying them down, and at her feet the blank sheet of paper began to fill with an urgency that was so focused anyone would be forgiven for assuming that Margaret was following a plan. Was adhering to a set of instructions she’d picked from a rotating carousel for an activity whose end result was meant to decorate your home. But as she worked, the chaos of what she was making became evident, because what emerged was not a balanced composition to hang above a couch, or a flutter of whimsy to brighten a powder room, or simple colourful shapes for a nursery … her canvas was becoming a base for towering stacks of debris that Margaret was overlapping like core samples from a landfill, as if the back side of the paper had been punched and extruded upwards to reveal what it was covering—all those levels of habitation going right down to the limestone that the house was set upon.

  Margaret worked without pause, feeling she needed to finish before everyone was back because their arrivals would only signal the beginning of another layer and an entirely new piece she would have to construct. The whole family, back in that house again, was an event she’d have to put down.

  After they’d married, Margaret had continued to paint. David had his residency and she’d had her art classes, and none of that changed. They moved into an apartment, bought a new bed and some mismatched furniture, and since Margaret was still enrolled in classes it was obvious that she would keep painting. That she’d need a few shelves in the kitchen to store her supplies on, and a corner of the living room for an easel because now, with a husband, they both agreed that she shouldn’t have to work in the department’s studios all the time. David liked it, he told her, when she worked at home. It helps me to understand how beauty’s made, he charmed. And she complied because she was still awed by his pronouncements and still believed they pulled her into a discourse she’d been waiting for all her life. He liked to watch her working, and her canvases, as if to make it easier for him to see from his seat across the room, became progressively larger until she was painting entire cityscapes against backgrounds of hills and vales. When he talked about the Elizabethans and their prodigy houses, her cities became sprawling estates and the hills became walled pleasure gardens full of carnations. When he instructed her on the Edwardians, she started painting hermitages on the shores of man-made lakes and flagstone paths disappearing into the woods as if she’d come to it on her own. A natural overflow of all the ideas they shared. Already, their sex life was so perfectly tuned that it seemed right that their day-to-day would be similarly paired. That they would be the same in everything, reflect one another—her art mirroring his mind. He was rough when he touched her, and she invited that because it was something novel only they could have. On his side, no one else had ever submitted so willingly, and on hers, no one else had ever tried. It had a shock that made their dull surroundings seem more glorious than they were and it gave them, both of them, a claim to something raw. He rarely left a mark on her and even when he did it was always somewhere concealed, just for the two of them. An echo of the boldness and originality they thought they shared and needed.

  When they moved to Hamilton after David qualified, things began to change. And when they bought the house overlooking the city, Margaret knew then that it was finished. Her painting, which had trickled along at their first house when the girls were small, stopped completely at this new house because how could she compete with what was all around her? With that gorgeous complex canvas below the cliff? And so instead, that first winter when the ground was frozen three feet down and the garden dormant, the collages had started. And this time, Margaret knew not to clear a shelf or use a corner of the living room. The serious work of her creations, in that private room upstairs—she knew to keep them to herself. To use what was at hand, to work with texture and volume because those were the things most lacking, and exactly what she would have to provide for herself. In the summers there was the garden—but in the winters there was nothing but the family stuck inside the house. And her husband had surpassed her in fearlessness. His touch, still rough, was now more often inclined to cruelty—and her role had become equilibrium. To keep everything—the family, the household�
�together and functioning. And to do that, sometimes she had to lock herself away.

  Georgina filled the refrigerator and cupboards with food as if laying in provisions for the long haul. There were tins and tins of stew and tuna fish, heads of lettuce, bags of vegetables, every kind of meat, cheeses, breads, chips and crackers, gnocchi, tomato sauce, capers and olives. Coffee, tea, milk, cream, butter … the shelves, she thought as she put the groceries away, a replica of the store itself. More than enough to scratch meals from, to feed everybody, a chore she knew would fall to her because the others looked to her to keep the household running. She was firstborn. Even now it was expected of her, and she was nothing if not dutiful.

  She spent the rest of the afternoon cooking and tidying, sorting through the Tupperware, throwing out mouldy crusts of bread and organizing all the roasting pans and baking sheets. Filling the kitchen with enough noise that her parents, for the most part, stayed away. Her father came to the house to have his lunch but ate it on the porch because, he told her—making a great show of it—he was too dirty to come inside, and it wasn’t worth cleaning himself up because there were still acres that needed tending to. He lingered in the doorway until Georgina, turning from the open cupboard she was sorting through, asked if he needed any help.

  Tomorrow, he said, pleased that she hadn’t forgotten what was most important. Tomorrow I’ll put you to work.

  Her mother drifted in and out, putting the currants and raisins and apricots on to boil and sifting the dry ingredients, easing past Georgina to get the eggs—stretching the making of another cake so that she could impede every task Georgina had set for herself just as she was completing them. Margaret’s timing honed to remind this daughter whose kitchen this still was.

  Early dinner tonight, Margaret said, sliding the cake into the oven and setting the timer. Nothing fancy. You know your father will eat anything.

  Georgina made too much food on purpose so there’d be leftovers for her sisters to reheat when they arrived. Already planning. Already beginning to devise systems to make the whole venture more efficient. Two chickens roasted whole with gravy and potatoes, nothing special, but the way her father crowed over the one she brought to the table, anyone would think they were suckling pigs turned manually on a spit. Commenting, with every downward slice of the carving knife, how succulent and perfectly cooked it was. Skewering the potatoes with his matching bone-handled fork and noting their crisped skins and soft insides; ladling minted peas and parsnips and carrots onto each plate with the flourish of someone doling out treats.

  Yes, he said triumphantly, looking down at his plate. This is a fine meal after a day’s hard labour. He looked at his wife and his daughter, feeling generous, wanting them to share his pleasure because even they had to admit that this was something to celebrate. That there were such good things on the way. And Georgina, even though she knew there was a second meaning to his comments—that his praise was an indictment of the meals his wife cooked for him—couldn’t help feeling appreciated and rewarded for her efforts. Thankful that her father, at least, had recognized her value.

  Margaret bided her time. She waited until he went for seconds of the gravy and meat, and then she asked about the garden tour, how the organizers had reacted to his cancelling, whether they wanted to rebook next summer—surely in June—when the garden is at its best and worth seeing. I expect, she said casually, lining her plate up in the centre of her placemat, that their ticket sales were low anyway. I expect it was a relief to them.

  David answered her through a mouth full of potato, deliberately unintelligible. He cut his chicken into small bites and kept feeding himself, swiping each forkful through the congealing gravy, studiously avoiding eye contact with this wife who’d finished her tiny meal and was sitting in her chair, at his right hand, watching this performance of squirming nonchalance. It was obvious the tour was going ahead, that he hadn’t cancelled anything. He’d spent the entire day out in the garden tidying and his hands were so cut up that they looked like he’d held them down in a bucket full of rats scratching to get out. His fingernails were black with dirt and he’d left the wheelbarrow in the driveway, ready for tomorrow and all the clipping and pruning he said still needed to be done.

  Dad, Georgina asked then, attempting to diffuse things before the yelling started. Wanting to rescue him because she thought her mother was being unfair, her father having worked hard all day. Already so beaten down. Can I use your car to pick Pippa up? In case she has luggage. Mine’s so small.

  David didn’t answer without pausing first, because every one of his girls had wrecked a family car. He still didn’t know what he’d done to deserve, or create, such recklessness.

  All right, he said like a judge giving his ruling. You did cook an exquisite meal.

  Why wouldn’t she have luggage? Margaret said, looking from her husband to her daughter as if they’d missed the essential truth of it. She is coming to stay, after all.

  There, thought Margaret to herself. That trumps your bloody garden tour.

  6

  It was hard not to think of high school every time Georgina drove this way. The road leading to the cut down the mountain, which would take her out to the highway and to the airport north of Toronto, went right past the campus. When she got a red light at the top of the hill, as she did now, she had to sit there and stare at it until the light turned green. Stare at the ten acres of athletic fields rimmed with clipped hedges; a shell of English public school gravitas. Headmaster, prefects, even a dining hall and chapel, as if the windows looked out onto a heath rather than dandelion-laced North American grass that was deep in Canadian snow four months of the year. The pupils all belonged to houses named after Scottish rivers that translated, Georgina had always thought, into something too grasping and desperate to be proud of: Earn, Ore, More, Tilt. This, after all, was the place where she’d been taught that art was something you did for fun. Relaxation. Art therapy. Highfield-Strathclyde College was an incubator for doctors and lawyers, fundraisers and philanthropists, captains of industry—for young adults to become fully formed productive members of society, not pariahs who bled the system dry. Because art, she’d learned, wasn’t worth a second look unless it was sanctified by history.

  Georgina braked before accelerating into another curve in the road down the escarpment. The idea that she should make art had never even been held out as a possibility. It wasn’t something you built an adult life around. It was, her teachers had told her when she pressed them, a selfish act. The sort of choice someone from a lesser school might make; someone without her advantages and opportunities. Someone out to waste her life. Highfield-Strathclyde had preached the responsibility of the few to the many but not, Georgina had only come to realize as she got older, in a democratic sense. Not to give power away, but to keep it. Not to take your riches and divide them among the poor, but to keep accruing them so that the bastion of a higher society would endure. Because, their model taught with its prefects, house captains, head boy and head girl, the world must have its shining examples of success. Its hierarchy of wealth.

  And art? Architecture, perhaps, but not art. And especially not today, when the word was attached to superficial acts of expression that were dumped on an audience without any provenance of thought. Colourful vomit on a canvas—just because. A silent vigil in a gallery—why not. A tangle of cotton in a corner like lint in a giant’s laundry room—ironic. Instead, Georgina had placed herself right in the solid centre of verifiable masters—Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, Derain—like a custodian.

  And yet … she had an invitation, there in her purse, to a former graduate student’s opening at a gallery downtown. Somehow, Georgina thought, that young woman had managed it—to enter the academy, but then to step away and produce her own works and offer them up to be judged. It might not be the Louvre but it was happening now, and Georgina couldn’t help feeling that there was something to that—something she’d missed. Something she hadn’t been brave enough to try.
Maybe … maybe it wasn’t too late.

  If she could see past the forested greenway on her left to the western edge of the city, Georgina would see the university she’d spent her entire career at—from undergraduate to associate professor—with only one fleeting year spent in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, where she’d taken classes in buildings that were enlarged versions of the house she’d grown up in. It had been her only extended time away from Hamilton, and sometimes she found herself looking at that line on her vitae and trying to remember what it had felt like, living somewhere else. There were isolated memories, corroborated by the few photographs she had of that year, but even they were becoming unreliable and the whole experiment in living abroad—which her father had championed and bankrolled only because it was Mother Britain—was fading away, and her entire life seemed wrapped by this town and the house that presided over it. More so, even, than the house she shared with her husband and their son, which felt somehow provisional. A sort of camp.

  The black maples and sumac and birch on either side of the narrow road taking her down the escarpment had the weary August appearance of leaves that have taken on too much. Too much wind and rain and heat and pollution, and their stems, if she could stop and get out and look, would be thinned and getting ready to drop. Some of the trees, in the valleys where the sun only peeked, were already turning. Summer, Georgina realized, was almost over. And what had she accomplished?