People You'd Trust Your Life To by Bronwen Wallace

Author:Bronwen Wallace [Wallace, Bronwen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55199-673-8
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2001-10-23T00:00:00+00:00

Or take Tracey Harper, for example. She’s just come home from her Saturday afternoon shift at Harvey’s. The kitchen is scrupulously clean, as it always is, and on the table, in exactly the same spot as last Saturday and the Saturday before and every day after school for as long as she can remember, is a note in her mother’s thick, wavery writing: “Your supper’s in the fridge. Just heat and eat. Love, Leslie.”

In the living room, the television is on full-blast, as always, “Wheel of Fortune” is half over and Leslie is sprawled on the couch, sound asleep, mouth open, snoring. On the table beside her, in a row, is a bottle of Maalox, a bottle of Coke, a bottle of rum, an empty glass and an empty package of Export “A”s. If Leslie were still awake, which would be unusual, she would light a cigarette, take two drags, put it in the ashtray, take two sips of rum and Coke, a sip of Maalox, two more drags of her cigarette and so on, never breaking her pattern until she ran out or passed out, whichever came first. It’s by the same rigorous adherence to a system that she manages to keep her kitchen clean and food on the table for her daughter.

In so doing, she has done one helluva lot better — and she would be the first to tell you this — than her own mother. Like Tracey, Leslie came home to her mother passed out on the couch and the television blaring. Where Tracey stands in the doorway and watches men and women win glamorous merchandise and large sums of money on “Wheel of Fortune,” Leslie would stand and watch women’s wildest dreams come true, right there, on “Queen For a Day.” What’s changed (besides the television shows, of course) is that Tracey comes home to a clean kitchen and a meal, whereas Leslie came home to a shithole and nothing to eat. The other thing that’s changed is that she, Leslie, has managed to keep her boyfriends out of Tracey’s bed, which is more than her mother ever did for her.

What hasn’t changed (besides the idea that winning something will improve your life): Tracey’s eyes and her way of standing in the doorway, both of which are exactly like her mother’s. Already she has the look and posture of someone whose parents abandoned her early. It doesn’t matter to what — drugs, alcohol, violence, madness or death — she has that look. That particular sadness which starts in the eyes and goes bone-deep, displacing all traces of the child she was, leaving the shoulders stiff and thin, all their suppleness and softness gone for good. The softness that some of us are allowed to carry (that Marion Walker carries, for example) a good distance into our lives.

So Tracey is standing in the doorway of the living room, waiting for her supper to heat up, watching her mother sleep. Her mother is only seventeen years older than she is, which makes her thirty-four, but she looks about sixty.

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