There. Drink!’ Gwen screeches, slamming a too-full glass on to my place mat so that the milk splashes on to my plate, wrists and the sleeves of my polka-dot tunic. I wipe the back of my wrist dry with my napkin and then everyone watches me as I sip at the milk. It’s whole milk and has been sitting out; close to room temperature, it tastes like cream to me. Our family only ever drinks skimmed milk and only ever ice cold and usually only with cereal anyway. I sip some more and the milk curdles on my tongue and makes me even thirstier. I shovel a forkload of sweet corn into my mouth.
Gwen waits until all mouths are full and bulging before announcing, ‘Family rap!’ Her parents exchange wholeheartedly unenthusiastic looks. ‘Whose turn is it?’
‘I don’t know, Gwennie,’ her mom says, lowering a soggy crust from her lips. ‘Is it yours?’
‘You wish. No, I think it’s Dad’s actually.’
‘Not tonight, Gwen. It’s been a long day,’ says the dad.
‘All the more reason. And it’s your turn.’
‘Not tonight.’
‘Tonight, tomorrow night, every night, Dad.’
‘Burt, maybe you should make an effort,’ urges the mom.
‘Hell, whaddya want me to say?’
‘Tell us what happened to you today.’
‘You don’t want to hear about that.’
I have to say, I really don’t want to hear about that and it doesn’t look much like Mom or little sis do either. But Gwen forges ahead and manages to wheedle an appetite-numbing story out of her father about some small humiliation from his too-long day. From what I can gather, Gwen’s dad’s a section manager at some manufacturing plant and today he tells his team they can have fifteen extra minutes for lunch because they’ve been hammering or welding or sawing away so hard, but then the big boss shuffles down at the end of the usual lunch hour and sees these guys hanging about, drinking from their Thermoses and chomping on apples and whatnot, and he says to Gwen’s dad, ‘Hey, what the effing eff are these guys doing hanging about.’ So the big boss overrules Gwen’s dad, sends the whole team back to work and docks them five minutes apiece off their next break.
‘How did you feel about that, Dad?’
‘How do you think I felt?’
‘I don’t know, you tell me.’
‘I felt like an asshole. All my guys think I’m a sorry, good-for-nothing asshole.’
‘That’s great, Dad, that’s really great,’ says Gwen, squeezing his knuckles in encouragement. ‘Thanks for sharing.’
‘Can I watch Happy Days tonight?’ asks little sis as she pulps the remains of her sloppy joe bun with her fork.
‘You know you can’t.’
‘I wanna watch Happy Days. Mom, why can’t I watch Happy Days?’
‘No TV, not while we’re in the house,’ Gwen reminds her, jerking her thumb in my direction. ‘And stop saying that name.’
‘It’s not fair. I never get to watch any of my shows any more. Dad, it’s not fair.’
‘Them’s the breaks,’ declares Gwen.
‘I wanna watch Happy Days! I wanna watch Happy Days!’
‘Trish, I’m warning you, you’d better shut up and you’d better stop saying that druggie name or I’m going to report you and you’ll hear about it in the next sibling rap.’
‘Quiet, Trish,’ pleads the mom, all hushed and hurried.
‘No TV,’ Gwen bangs her knife on her plate like a gavel. ‘And you’d better not turn that radio of yours on either. Don’t think I don’t know when you do that. I can hear it through the wall.’
‘It’s not fair.’
‘Quiet, Trish,’ says the mom.
Directly after dinner, Gwen says it’s time to get ready for bed. She leads me into the bathroom for my ablutions – one of your all-time favourite words because it sounds like a body sneezing and burping at the same time, you used to say – and I wait for her to leave but she doesn’t. She squirts Colgate on her toothbrush, which she sticks in her mouth as she also drops her pants and plops down on the toilet.
‘Don’t just stand there,’ she says through a mouthful of foam, ‘we haven’t got all night. There’s a spare toothbrush on the counter. The blue one.’
The blue one’s gnarled and obviously used, but I don’t want to risk asking for another. As I lean down to wet the toothbrush beneath the tap, Gwen spits into the basin. I close my eyes and brush.
And I hear Dad reciting the dental care mantra in my head, like he used to do when we were little and he’d stand at the bathroom door to make sure we were doing it right. Up and down, up and down, to the back then to the front then to the back and up and down. Then, don’t forget, kids, floss is your friend. You always hated flossing, it made your gums bleed; so sometimes, when Dad wasn’t watching, we’d skip that part. But I wish I had some floss now. With so much foulness passing through my mouth today, I could do with a good floss.
Gwen’s a brisk brusher – oh how Dad would disapprove – and she gives her face only the most cursory scrub with the washcloth and one pump’s worth of hand soap from a sink-side container. I’m hoping she’ll beat a quick retreat after that but she doesn’t, not even when it’s my turn for the toilet.
Our bedroom, which I’m marched into next, is not technically a bedroom because there’s no bed. There are two mattresses and a neat stack of sheets and comforters against one wall, but no other furniture to speak of. It’s a room as empty as the day you move in. Gwen doesn’t even call it a bedroom.
‘Inspecting the phaser room!’ she bellows as she hands me and my belt loop over to her dad. Then she drops to her knees and rakes through the bare carpet with her fingers. She crawls from one corner of the room to the other tearing into the synthetic weave, poking down the sides by the skirting boards, getting eye level with the windowsills. She checks the door to what I assume is the closet and seems satisfied to find it locked. Turning her attention to the mattresses, she peeks to see what’s sandwiched between them (nothing) then lets them plop down on to the floor and leaps on them, one springing step each, like a trampoline. One of the mattresses, the one with the deepest sag in its belly, is kicked into the corner farthest from the door. Next Gwen shakes out each sheet, each frilly comforter, each sad pillow, and tosses them in equal measure on to the separated mattresses. As she makes her way back towards me, her eyes remain on the floor, scanning each step, each inch.
‘All clear!’ she reports. Her father rolls his eyes and backs away without a good night.
The mattress in the corner is my bed for the evening. Rammed in the corner like that, it makes me feet like a dunce, like I should forget how to spell and sit on my own till teacher calls time, like I should wear a big pointy white cap.
Gwen undresses, twisting off her Velcro-strap sneakers as she yanks down the bottoms
