bathroom fell silent.
Don’t stare.
The secret voice always gave good advice.
Cathy looked down at her wet bare feet.
The tanned, handsome face of the President of the United States smiled out of the mirror at Adele.
“How are you this morning, Adele?” he asked in his peculiar New England accent.
Adele noticed the faint pepperminty odour of toothpaste in the air. The President was such a nice clean man, such a gentleman. His parents had raised all nine of his brothers and sisters to be such well-mannered kids. His wife was so lucky to have found such a wonderful man, such a good father for her children.
She reached absently beneath the sink and pulled out a can of green powdered cleanser, thinking about him in the beach pictures, lying on his bad back, holding his small daughter in the air. The pictures revealed that he wore plain ordinary white sports socks with two coloured rings at the top, one red, one blue. Socks like she bought her own son, Richard. His millions didn’t mean anything to him. He was just a lovely, ordinary family man.
When she looked up from sprinkling the cleanser onto her toothbrush, she noticed Cathy shivering in the corner of the mirror where the President had just been. Her shoulders were bare and wet, and her folded, goosebump-covered arms held a blue bath towel against her torso. Her dark wet hair, hanging down the left side of her face, partially covered her eye and dripped down onto the towel. Adele narrowed her eyes and stared at the reflection of Cathy’s face. Suddenly, she whirled around and flicked Cathy’s hair aside.
“Huh! Is that all? Big baby. A little tap and you think it’s the end of the world. All that wailing and carrying on over nothing. I tell you, if you think you’re hard done by, you should have seen some of the swats my father doled out.”
She let the hair drop and turned back to the mirror. Cathy kept her gaze down.
“No siree boy,” Adele started up again, “nobody is going to call me dirty, that’s for sure. You should have seen this woman in front of me in the grocery yesterday morning. I tell you, I’ve never seen such dirty teeth in all my life.”
Adele bent over the sink, plunged her brush deep inside her cheek and began to scrub vigorously, talking despite the obstruction.
“Honestly, some people are just born pigs, too lazy to brush their own teeth. I don’t know how people can live like that. Yuck! And when she smiled...”
Here Adele pulled herself up to look directly into the mirror at Cathy.
“You should have seen how all of her gums showed above her teeth. Big wet horsy gums. Ew, I hate that.”
She dropped back into the depths of the sink. Cathy kept her eyes down, watching her bare big toe trace a circle in the pile of the royal blue carpet.
“Brushing off all the enamel, my ass. I don’t need a dentist to show me how to keep clean. I know what feels clean, by God, and this stuff really cleans. It’s people like that woman who need a dentist, not me. Somebody should tie her down and give her a good scrub. God, she was dirty!”
She fell silent, spat, ran her tongue over her teeth and began to brush again. Cathy watched her own toe, listening to the steady, unbroken whoosh of running tap water beneath the chugging rhythm of her mother’s brushing.
“Somebody else who looks like they need a good overhaul, I tell you, is that new helper priest of Father Lauzon’s. What’s his name? Father Martin or something? I ran into Father at the shopping plaza yesterday and he had this other priest with him. The man looked neglected, positively unkempt. He said he came back into this neck of the woods to pick up a few things for his new place.”
Adele removed the red brush from her mouth and held it in the air as if she were going to use it as a pointer.
“Honest to God, you should have seen this man, a priest ... his hair was greasy, his shoulders were covered in big chips of dandruff, and he had these big dirty sores on his face and neck. Whiteheads and boils. Ew! I’ve never seen such a walking mess in all my life. It was enough to make me sick.”
Adele’s voice was beginning to rise and whine. She bobbed back down into the sink and resumed brushing.
“Poor things have been struggling over at that new rectory for almost a month without a housekeeper. Old Mrs. Dupuis died on them, you know. Can you imagine, three men trying to take care of themselves? Father was asking if I knew anybody...”
She stopped to spit, stood up abruptly, and watched herself in the mirror.
“I told him you could fill in during the summer, until they found someone permanent.”
Cathy’s foot froze on the carpet. Her eyes flashed up to the mirror.
“Me? You told them me?”
“Yes you, miss sitting-around-all-summer-with-nothing-todo. It’s time you worked for a living. When I was your age I was already out in the world. It’ll do you good to get out and earn a few dollars. Now that school’s out, I don’t need a big lazy fifteen-year-old lying around all summer getting ideas about boys. What happened across the street is not going to happen in this house. The rectory will be a good place for you. You’re to be there the beginning of next week, early, before morning mass is finished.”
She dropped abruptly from the mirror into the sink, drank from the tap, swished noisily from cheek to cheek, and spat triumphantly.
“Hmm. Wonder what went on across the street?”
Don’t ask, Cathy thought back. “You just have to get their meals, clean the rectory up a bit, make beds, do a bit of laundry. Nothing that’ll kill you.”
Cathy’s eyes dropped down to rest on Adele’s feet puffing up out of their pink feather-trimmed slippers. Adele slurped noisily from the tap a second time, swished, spat, and finally rose. Looking into the mirror, she retracted her lips and brought her bottom teeth forward to rest under the edges of her top teeth.
“See? Look at that. Sparkling clean, white as snow, and all my own, too.”
She held a pose in the mirror. Cathy thought she looked like a chimpanzee.
Adele banged her brush loudly several times on the rim of the sink, sending a spray of excess water in several directions, and then abruptly shot the toothbrush into its nearby holder.
“Let’s see if you can say that, missy, when you’re my age.” Blotting her mouth on a hand towel without removing it from the rack, she pushed past Cathy.
“And don’t hog this room all morning.”
CHAPTER 4
Cathy dried herself off, put her pyjamas back on, and stepped cautiously out into an empty hall. Her mother had vanished and the house had fallen silent again. Hurrying, she opened the hall closet where the cleaning supplies were kept, gathered up what she needed for her chores, and raced up to her room.
“Great news, huh?”
Cathy
