A Cage Without Bars by Anne Dublin

Author:Anne Dublin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Second Story Press
Published: 2018-06-27T15:36:47+00:00

11

Too Many Pieces to Fix

Once, when I was in Grade 5, our teacher gave us a description to write. We had to go home and describe our house, the outside and the inside, room by room. After supper, when I sat at the kitchen table and began my homework, Papa asked what I was working at. When I explained, his face grew solemn and he took the pencil out of my hand.

“It’s nobody’s business what the inside of our house looks like,” Papa told me. “You can tell your teacher I said that if you want to.”

I couldn’t tell my teacher that. Instead, I told her I forgot to do my homework, and she gave me an E. And a long lecture about being irresponsible, which I didn’t listen to.

On Monday morning, it happens again. Sister gives us a scrapbook project. We are to cut out pictures of different sorts of vegetables and fruits from magazines and from tin-can labels. It’s about the sort of foods that people eat every day, what they have in their cupboards and iceboxes. We can work on it over the Christmas holidays. As she stands at the front of the class explaining, I look around in desperation, knowing that I can’t do this project, either.

We don’t have any cans with labels in our house. We have glass jars in the cellar with wild crabapples in sweet syrup that Maman stewed in the fall. We have jars of strawberry and raspberry jam made from fruit my sister and I spent hours picking in the hot sun at Tunney’s Pasture. The cans in our cupboard are all dented and they have no labels. Maman doesn’t know what’s inside of them, either. She gets them from the market for pennies and takes a chance on what’s inside. Sometimes it’s a nice surprise, like the cherries she used in a pie once. Other times it’s not so nice, like the yucky clams we had to eat in the soup she made from them.

We don’t have any magazines in our house, either. We only have Le Droit, the newspaper that comes every day, and there are no pictures of food in it. And after Maman, Papa, and Arthur read it, Maman puts it in the bathroom so we can wipe ourselves because toilet paper is too expensive. And we have the Eaton’s catalog that comes in the mail, with beautiful new clothes and all sorts of other things Yvette and I love to look at, but not the kind of food pictures I need for this project. But maybe there’s somebody who can help me with today’s problem.

I glance toward Georgette’s desk. The Blondins have tin cans in their cupboard, I know it for certain. And they have magazines too. Georgette even has them in her bedroom. Maybe she can get some pictures for me so I can do the scrapbook project. But Georgette hasn’t come to school today. That seems very strange because Georgette never misses school and always does her homework and gets good marks like me.

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