Melanie Kissworthy was getting ready for bed after a late night out. Standing in front of the full length mirror in her long dressing gown, combing out her long, honey-golden hair, she wished it had more curl. But mommy refused to let her put chemicals and stuff in it; or to do anything really interesting with it.
“Wait until you need it, Hon. You have such beautiful hair,” her mom said.
At seventeen years old, Melanie Kissworthy was the Lennox County Fair Dairy Queen for 2010. Okay, it sure didn’t sound too glamorous, but it was a start. Maybe the start of something big. While her mom was pleased as punch at her uncertain victory, even her dad, so remote and distant at the best of times, took notice.
“I’m real proud of you, honey,” he murmured in his faraway tone, and then just as promptly returned to his evening paper.
Still, it was something. Perhaps even enough. And he was paying more attention to her lately. She was almost sure of it.
Yesterday, when she passed the creamed corn, he distinctly said, “Thank you,” momentarily raising his eyes and making a kind of brief eye contact.
She was shocked at the sadness she saw there, briefly troubled because she didn’t understand the reason for it. Her dad had been so withdrawn, for so long, she assumed it didn’t apply to her. Still, he seemed to come out of his shell, even if it was for only the briefest of moments.
And this morning, when she asked for thirty bucks so she could go to the movies with her friends, he didn’t complain, but smiled ever so slightly and then his hand moved to the hip pocket. Or last week, when pressed to come to her dance recital, he didn’t rule it out entirely, using the tired old excuse of, ‘work.’
Daddy looked her right in the eyes, and said, “I’ll try, honey,” and she believed him.
Melanie had learned to love dancing. In the beginning it was fun, to be the centre of attention for her parents, and other girls; and their parents as well. She was actually pretty talented, even if she did say so herself.
But she was just a little girl back then. Now she was a woman. Presumably, she was a woman. Is this what a woman feels like? Dancing was fun, but she was neglecting it for other interests.
She realized that this involved some kind of decision.
She wondered if this was like maturity, or something.
Theoretically, she was a woman. Intuitively, she knew that she would wake up some morning and there would be no doubts. But in the meantime, it was enough to be growing up, and looking forward to a life of freedom. An exciting life, romantic, not all drab and boring like her own family. So ordinary, so…she remembered an expression of her Aunt Wilhelmina’s, ‘So bourgeois…’
Like peasants in a nineteenth century farmhouse, mostly concerned with their bellies, debt and repayment, births, deaths and marriages, and those innumerable church feast days. Melanie found home life to be stifling.
What would her life be like? A baby. She wanted a baby of her own to love and to hold, and to watch him grow up into a big strong man, kind, and honorable, and just.
Truth is, she didn’t know what she wanted, but of course she had a few ideas. She could admit that parental concerns, and school concerns, and social concerns like her huge circle of friends and acquaintances were quite secondary. To a girl her age, the most important thing in the whole world was boys.
Did they like her?
Did they see her?
Did they think about her? She felt funny for a moment, oddly self-conscious.
Almost as if someone was watching through a crack in the blinds while you had a shower. Did boys think about her when they, ah; masturbated?
Of course they must. Someone must.
She wasn’t that bad.
A momentary grin lit up her face, giving her a weird, momentary premonition of the face of the future woman she might become.
Interesting.
She smiled at the thought of little Todd Garisson, all four-feet-nine inches tall and with that funny little upturned nose, and a harelip, and buck teeth, and a lazy eye, and a withered arm. His parents didn’t believe in inoculations and he got polio. Todd, in bed; wearing those big thick glasses and masturbating while he thought of her?
Todd had the biggest crush on her in grade five.
“Oh, God,” she thought.
She thought of his stammer, “Oh, b-b-baby, I’m c-c-c-coming!”
Funny and not funny at all. Disgusting, really. She felt a moment of sadness for Todd, and then just as promptly forgot him. The victory at the pageant opened up a whole new world of self-analytical soul-searching. Everyone was always telling her to make the right choices.
What did she want?
What did she want in life? And what did the other sex want out of life?
Did they want her? Did she occupy boy’s minds, the way they occupied hers? The most important thing in the world to a girl her age, was she attractive? Sure, a few boys paid her some attentions, why; skinny Mark Watson, with his bookish ways and false-adult mode of speech walked her to school every day. She was not entirely unaware of the gleaming blue eyes behind their silvery wire-rimmed glasses; and Mark’s sidelong glances at her leotard-clad legs. Even back in grade six, when he first started calling at her door at a quarter after eight every morning, she suspected something was up.
He was a nice enough guy, of course. But in the words of a recent history lesson, ‘familiarity breeds contempt.’
That was harsh. He was a nice enough guy; he just didn’t turn her crank, as her daddy used to say before he became quiet, and began to disappear every evening after supper for a few hours out in the garage. There was nothing in the garage. Only to come in and watch the news, and then take off again for a very long drive to the store around the corner and not come back for forty-five minutes or even an hour and a half.
Like last Sunday night. Mommy seemed not to notice or even care.
She put it out of her head. If mommy accepted it like it was natural, why should she question it? Still, she was curious.
Did daddy have a mistress? Delicious thought, yet she ruled it out. Daddy was too much of a stick in the mud, a dried up old fuddy-duddy. In the final analysis, while certainly not a prude…they’d had her right? Daddy was too sexless. Maybe drugs, certainly not booze. She was familiar enough with his beery breath, and he always seemed to be in a jolly, happy mood when he drank beer with Uncle Al and Bo, the guy next door.
Was she attractive? Was she beautiful? Was she beautiful, seductive, mysterious enough to attract a man? Not that she was interested in men. She liked cute guys.
She heard a funny noise outside, and then it happened.
The window smashed in and shards of glass showered the carpet around her bare feet. She started to scream. She was stamping her feet, running on the spot, slapping her feet in hysteria. Oblivious to the pain and the blood; she waved her hands and arms up high, up by her face. She was sobbing and crying as something big and yellow and nubbly-looking came in the window. It swept past, barely missing the front of her nightgown before withdrawing with a sibilant hiss. Through her tears she heard a horrible wet sucking noise, then a grunt.
She couldn’t breathe. Gasping for breath, she was rooted to the spot in front of her window. Shouting noises came, from outside her door and over in the direction of the living room. There was pain like she had never known, and the splash of blood from her feet.
“Oh…mommy,” she moaned and sucked in a fresh, shuddering breath as something came slamming in the window again and grabbed her shirt-front and pulled her out, stuck to it like glue. Mercifully; she lost consciousness when her head hit the top of the frame on the way past, leaving a spattering of blood, gobs of bright red blood, hot and wet and gooey.
Her parents ran screaming into the room.
But she was alrea
dy gone.
Not too far away, a giant mutant salamander, the result of too many years of industrial pollution, nuclear waste spills into local waterways, and high environmental levels of growth and sexual hormones, and endocrine disruptors; moved through the cool dampness of the clinging underbrush, momentarily sated with the good feeling of fresh, warm, sweet meat in his belly. And all was well with the world.
Chapter Forty-Five
Brubaker sat in his chair, watching the Weather Station…
Core Values Page 44
