The Alphabet Sisters by Monica McInerney

Author:Monica McInerney [McInerney, Monica]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780345484437
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2005-05-16T14:00:00+00:00

The following morning Lola let Ellen sleep in. If she had been her child, the little girl would definitely have been back in school the next day. But Anna had insisted. So a day off it was.

They spent the morning together. She and Ellen had their breakfast in the motel kitchen, then Ellen helped the cleaners do a couple of the rooms, carrying in fresh linen and new packets of biscuits. Ellen seemed bright enough, Lola thought, watching her playing, but there was a tight quality about her. Tension, imminent tears.

Anna arrived home late that afternoon, driving at great speed into the carpark. Ellen had been listening for her. Lola watched with interest as she changed moods in an instant. One moment she had been playing very happily with her dolls—some complicated scenario involving one set of dolls trying to book into a motel the other set of dolls were running, but not liking the rooms. Lola had started to lose track. Then, at the sound of Anna’s car, she started crying and ran out to her mother, wailing at the top of her voice, “Mummy, Mummy.”

Anna pulled her tight and held her close, the two of them staying like that for some time. They ate dinner together, Ellen still teary, needing to be fed like a toddler. The evening before she had used a knife and fork without any problem, Lola recalled. She nearly needed to tape her mouth shut to keep the comments in. Ellen was Anna’s daughter. It was up to Anna to raise her as she saw fit, she told herself. But what if there is another, possibly better, way to approach this? she also asked herself.

Once Ellen was in bed, a tortuous enough exercise, with more tears and tantrums, Lola made a pot of tea and took it into the bar, where Anna was alone, curled up in one of the big chairs, looking at the TV, but in a dazed way. She was still a picture, Lola thought, but so slender these days, fragile even. “Anna, darling, some tea?”

Anna smiled gratefully. “You’ve come to lecture me, haven’t you? Tell me where I’m going wrong with Ellen. What a bad mother I am. That I’ve made the wrong decision taking her out of school.”

“I think you’re a wonderful mother. I think Ellen is a wonderful child. But there might be other ways to approach this situation.” She told Anna about her conversation with Ellen the previous day. As she expected, Anna wasn’t happy.

“Lola, I don’t want you to call her Princess Scar. It’s not funny.”

“It’s not meant to be funny. It’s a new psychological treatment. The more you expose someone to something, the less frightened they are of it. I read about it in the paper. They do it with spiders, slowly expose someone to—”

“I don’t care if you have the backing of the Harvard Medical School. I don’t like you calling my daughter Princess Scar.”

“What about Scar?”

“Fine. You call her Scar and I’ll tell her to call you Great-Grandmother.

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