Sacrificial Lamb

SACRIFICIAL LAMB

The late afternoon sun worked its way through the filthy attic window and drifted lazily down onto the stack of boxes that loomed in front of me, silently challenging me to get to work. One more chore to check off on the never-ending list. The funeral arrangements, check, flowers, check, notified family, friends...I didn't know my mother's friends and hadn't been about to search her cluttered desk for an address book. That would be too organized for my mother. She likely kept phone numbers on bits of paper, scattered amongst other bits of paper. My sister, Carole, wasn't inclined to search either, so we'd put a notice in the paper, check. Met with the lawyer about her will, check, canceled credit cards, check, and bank accounts, check. Every one item spawned two more, it seemed. And now we were faced with her house; a lifetime of stuff we'd have to pick through and decide what was garbage and what not, check.

That morning Carole had made breakfast for her two children, which seemed to involve a great deal of noise and mess.

“Can I make you something?” Carole asked, as I'd stood in the kitchen doorway watching her bustle from the counter cluttered with Mother's worn and dirty appliances to the table where her children perched on their chairs, squawking about what they wanted for breakfast.

I shook my head. We had decided, once, to never have children of our own. We'd been hiding from Mother, once again furious at her arbitrary assignment of chores, her litany of jobs, her inability, it seemed, to leave us alone. “Maybe she's crazy,” Carole had whispered. I had thought about it and felt it was possible that she might, indeed, suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder. “We can't have kids, you know,” Carole said, “we'd pass it on and they could have it.” I'd said the bigger risk was that we'd be mothers like our own and it would be wrong to inflict that on unsuspecting innocents. And

we'd agreed. Carole, obviously, had not abided by our pact, but I had not forgotten.

As Carole was busy with her children, naturally it was left to me to begin the work.

“I'll go start upstairs, shall I?”

Carole had tossed me a grateful look over her shoulder as she mopped up spilled milk the toddler had tipped out of his bowl of Cheerios. I tried not to wince in distaste. Dad had passed away a few years ago and now Mother; Carole was all the family I had left.

The attic was hot and, as I lifted the first box down, a layer of dust rose and set me to sneezing. I tried to open the window to let in some fresh, possibly cooler air, but it had been painted shut many years ago and wouldn't budge. Mother had probably not bothered to tape before painting. The old feeling of helpless anger arose at the memory of her lack of regard for how things should be done. “It's like you don't care about anything,” I can remember shouting at her at some point in my teens, one of many arguments that would end with Mother looking at me with a little frown, like I was another pile of dust she would choose to ignore. “That stuff is not important,” she'd say. “It's not going anywhere.” And I would stomp up to my room, slamming the door behind me.

What were we going to do with this old house? We'd have to sell it. Carole and I both had our lives in different cities. She in glamorous Vancouver on the West coast with her family and me in rural Smith Falls, alone. I knew Carole was going to try and find a way to dump all of this on me. “You're in the same province, at least,” she'll say. And it's true, but a six-hour drive is not one to take lightly, either. She'd leave me to prepare the house for sale; a good cleaning, paint... another litany of chores to look forward to. Carole hadn't left for Vancouver, yet. She stayed to see if there was anything she wanted, probably.

I looked over the pile of boxes and decided I'd rather take my chances of an asthma attack in the stuffy attic than lug them all downstairs. Stacked against the opposite wall, facing the boxes, was a pile of odds and sods, mostly furniture it seemed at first glance. I found a footstool with frayed, near see-through, upholstery. I supposed Mother had likely intended to recover it. I set it by the window and pulled the first box over to the light, unleashing another fit of sneezing. I opened the pack of tissues I'd been carrying around in my back pocket ever since first hearing she was in the hospital and wiped my runny nose. I hadn't needed it. We'd been so busy. First the hospital and all that awfulness, then arrangements, people to deal with.

Unexpected people, too. I had been so focused on what needed to be done I hadn't thought about all the people who would come to her funeral. Not only people I didn't know, like her friends who showed up in large numbers considering the short notice. We had to press hands and listen to murmurings of — “What a wonderful woman”, “…a treasure lost...” “She was so good to me.” After about the sixth “what a wonderful woman,” Carole and I locked eyes and we had to suppress a fit of giggles. Could these people really have known our mother?

I was surprised, too, by the people I did recognize. Some girlfriends from high school came with their mothers, and Frank came.

We had dated in high school, until eleventh grade. My best friend, Lucy, and I had our friendship torn apart as we fought over him for a term. They were a couple until Frank and I had reunited at university. He'd wanted to marry me, but I'd thought it best to wait until we'd graduated from law school. He did wait, and asked for my hand, but then I turned him down. “It's not you, it's me,” I told him. It was true. How many times had Carole and I sworn we would never marry, have children and, especially, be mothers like our own?

Frank came with Lucy whom he'd married within a year of my rejection. He smiled at me with sad eyes while clasping my hand between his. “If there's anything I can do,” he murmured. He moved down the line to Carole and Lucy took my hand. “So sorry for your loss, Marilyn.” She didn't really look me in the eye.

Mostly I was speechless. Overwhelmed by these vestiges of a past, of a self who no longer existed, tendrils that still clung to tug awake feelings, long thought dead. My life was now as I wanted it, without messy quarrels and loose ends and free- floating anger. I had my thriving law practice, my neat house and garden. A lover who escorted me to a variety of cultural events and activities, who slept over Saturday nights and spent Sunday mornings reading the newspaper in bed with me while eating bagels and cream cheese, until he would return to his apartment in the city in the afternoons.

That I could find nothing to say beyond, “Thank you for coming,” didn’t seem to be a problem. It was my mother's funeral, after all, and I was supposed to be overwhelmed with grief.

Now I was faced with the past. Boxes of it. I opened the first one and exposed my mother's unorganized clutter. It was full of photo albums and loose photos she had never bothered putting away in chronological, or any other order. I flipped through the albums, but they were stuffed with loose pictures, of my mother's childhood apparently. I recognized my mother with her parents and brother. Flipping through the stack of photos, they were the only people I could identify. My mother's best friend might have pressed my hand in the funeral line, and I wouldn't have known.

The next box I dragged, sneezing, from the stack over to my seat by the window was also full of photo albums. The pictures had been placed under the cellophane and I assumed they were in some order. Pictures of my mother, young and pretty, surrounded by a group of girls sitting on a bed, in a dormitory room, I surmised. Pictures with the same group of girls with their boyfriends lounging on a lawn in front of a picturesque limestone building, seated around a table at a party, the usual college scenes. I didn't remember if she had gone to university or college, or which one.

In the next box I opened I found pictures of my sister and I as babies. Many, many pictures of babies. These were loosely thrown in, no attempt had been made to carefully preserve them under cellophane, in albums. There were boxes of stuffed animals, dolls, clothes. After cursory checks to verify the boxes were full of children's things, I piled those by the stairs. Carole may want them for her children.

Right on top of the next box was a large red heart. It was cut from red Styrofoam, or had been painted red, and photos had been glued onto it. The photos had been carefully cut, like puzzle pieces, to fit together into the heart shape. I was about to set it aside when a picture of myself caught my eye.

It had been cut round to fit the upper left side of the heart and showed Carole and I in a double stroller, me in behind and Carole, the baby, in front. It looked a lot like I was banging her over the head with a bottle, but maybe I was just waving it around. She probably deserved it, anyway.

The next photo showed me scowling and Carole trying to smile wearing a pink shirt with a big red glitter heart on it. I recalled it was Carole's first day of kindergarten and she wanted to wear my shirt. I was justifiably horrified, but Mother had made me let her. Mother had told that story often, with a laugh and a rueful shake of her head. Looking at that picture I could feel the old anger rise again, the sheer injustice of it that once had me trembling with rage. Mother never understood my anger.

Do we ever outgrow those feelings? I had hoped I was past that, and yet a picture could bring back the memory, complete with emotions. Tempered with time, of course, but still with an immediacy that made the blood rush to my face.

I had to squint to make out the next picture; Mother had crammed three photos into the upper left curve of the heart. My sister and I were sitting on the couch. Carole was crying. I was cradling a kitten with my arms wrapped around him so she couldn't pet him. I remembered that kitten. We had Puffy until I went to university. It's amazing he ever came near us as we used to fight so over who fed him, who played with him. Every time we did, Mother made us clean the litter box. I remembered that all right.

I realized the pictures were laid out in chronological order. The right-hand loop also had three pictures fit into it. Christmas: and Carole and I were sitting in a pile of torn wrapping paper. I was frowning and Carole looked worried. Mother had made us clean it all up, right after. Easter: and we were smiling holding up our chocolate bunnies. The one I held had a princess crown on its head and I remembered at once that I had cried when Carole opened it because I wanted it. She had traded with me, but Mother had still made us do the dishes after our ham dinner. My birthday party: a shot of Carole opening a present as well as me. Because she was younger, they hadn't wanted her to feel left out.

My anger drove me to hop off my stool and pace the small attic. The heart collage was conspicuous amongst Mother's clutter for the care that had been taken with its crafting. Even now, from the grave, she managed to infuriate me, leaving me this... this message, I realized, sinking back onto the stool. And this is what she wanted to show me? That she thought I hated my sister?

In the spring of my seventh year my parents bought a cottage. That summer was the first of a series of wonderful summers Carole and I enjoyed together. Just the two of us hanging out in the woods or by the lake imagining ourselves wild animals, free as the birds we watched return to the same nest under the eaves every spring and care for their family. Unsupervised. How clinical that sounds, a word from a research paper on parenting, yet to us it meant everything. We could escape our mother for a while.

There was a picture of the two of us wearing our rubber boots, standing in the lake at the weedy edge of the shore holding up a jar for the camera showing our tadpole collection. Carole was smiling but I was frowning. I remembered the moment just before the picture was taken. Carole had insisted to Mother that she had caught all the tadpoles, which was rubbish. The moment after the picture was taken, I had burst into tears at the unfairness of it all. Then Mother had made us both pull weeds along the waterline to clear a swimming area. One of her repertoire of chores she could be counted on to charge us with.

We learned to stay clear of her as best we could, that summer. The next picture was from the same summer. We were leaning over the edge of the top bed of our bunk beds, smiling into the camera, both of us, although just after that, I knew, we had a screaming match over who got to sleep in the top bunk. Mother had made us go out and gather kindling. That, too, was part of her repertoire. By the end of the summer we had a great pile of sticks next to Dad's wood-chopping block. Invariably, during our late-night talks as grown women over a glass, or two, of red wine we'd bring up that pile of sticks and wonder again whether Mother had some sort of chemical imbalance that compelled her to make us work. “Maybe she just liked sticks,” Carole would laugh, more generous than I. We never did burn through the pile.

Mother had added on to her list of things for us to do by the next summer. The picture showed Carole and I holding badminton rackets, standing separated by the net on the patch of lawn Father had so painstakingly cleared and laid sod on so we'd have an area to run where we didn't need to fear underbrush and its spiky hazards, or poison ivy. We'd been fighting over the rules and the picture captured us glaring at each other, our anger practically quivering through the protective plastic. The memory came back, clear as a bell; Mother had set the camera down, handed us a pair of gloves each and told us to dig up all the thistles that had sprouted among the seams between sod rows. How we had hated her. We dug out every blasted thistle and cursed her roundly, although under our breath.

Dad always had a project on the go at the cottage. The first few summers it was the lawn. Then he had to build a shed in which to keep all the lawn equipment. He would let us help him as much as we could. Of course, Carole and I fought over the good jobs. Hammering was fun. Dad would get the nail started and we'd pound it in the rest of the way. He made us little tool belts with little hammers and screw drivers that slid into slots. There was a picture of the two of us proudly wearing our belts. I think Dad took the picture. My belt ended up ruined. I'd specifically asked Carole to put it away in the shed, where there were hooks at just our height to hold them. Dad had accidentally mowed over it and the loops were shredded. I thought it was reasonable for Carole to give me hers, but she said it was my responsibility to look after my stuff, not hers. Mother had interfered and said neither of us could help Dad anymore, that summer. So I guess she was picky about what chores we could do. Only her, not fun, ones. I'd have to discuss this with Carole. Since we'd decided Mother must have had an imbalance of some kind, Carole worried it might appear in her kids. Surely if Mother were selective in her compulsions, she might not have had a mental disorder. Maybe she was just mean, as we had always suspected. Meanness may or may not be inherited but certainly could be learned. Our wine-fueled, late-night conversations could go for hours, as we discussed the ramifications, particularly for Carole, as a parent, and for her children.

The last picture fit into the bottom point of the heart. My sister and I standing on the dock with our arms around each other. I'd be about fourteen, Carole twelve. We were beautiful as all young people are, carefree, with their lives in front of them. We were looking into the camera, though, with such contempt that I felt a shock, like a kick in the stomach. I clearly remembered thinking as I looked at my mother behind the camera, that at least Carole and I had each other. She couldn't take that away from us. I stared for a long time. Imagine a mother whose daughters could look at her like that, I thought. How could she bear it? She'd insisted on taking the picture and right after we'd jumped into the water and swam to our hideout under a willow tree that cascaded over the shoreline and made a perfect hiding spot. She'd called for us for a while. We'd giggled at our cleverness in eluding her.

I no longer felt that we'd been clever. If anything, to look at her like that with such a mix of contempt and triumph, we'd been mean. Perhaps that was the purpose of her message; to show that we'd been mean to her, not the other way around. I frowned, still staring at that last picture. Children don't start out being mean to their mothers. Even I knew that. It was a learned behavior. Was she apologizing? I set the heart down and stared out the grimy window, now showing ominous gray clouds. I was overwhelmed with the urge to ask her what she meant by this, this craft thing that she had labored over, but it was too late to ask her anything. I felt the tears flow.

Downstairs I could hear Carole's children arguing. They wanted to go to the park and she was trying to settle them down in front of the T.V.. It occurred to me that she wanted to occupy them so she could come and help me, that she might even feel it was unfair to stick me with all the dirty work. I wiped my eyes and went downstairs.

“There's no rush, Carole,” I said. “We can take the kids to the park.”

She looked surprised. “I thought you'd be in a hurry to finish up here and,” she waved her hand to take in the house, “and get back home.”

“There's no rush,” I repeated.

As we sat on the park bench with one eye on the kids playing on the structure and one on the threatening clouds, Carole asked me if I was all right. “You look like you've been crying,” she said softly.

It took a moment to articulate what I was feeling. I had never understood my mother. Her message, however, seemed clear. She had sacrificed our love for her so that we would have each other. Carole seemed shaken when I told her what I'd found but surprised me by simply nodding. Big, fat raindrops began to fall and we hollered to the kids that it was time to go back. They ran ahead of us. I thought about how my firm had an office in Vancouver. “Maybe I could transfer out west to, you know, to be closer to you and your family,” I stuttered.

Carole put her arm around me. “I'd like that,” she said. The rain fell harder, and we giggled like girls as we ran to catch up with the children.