Dropped Threads 2 (24 page)

One of
                    a Bunch

Sandra Birdsell

Whenever I’m asked what it was like to grow up in a large family there is nothing I can liken the experience to, so I just reply, “It was interesting.” It was not an event like going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, albeit at times the ride was tumultuous. The awareness that my family was large and I was
growing up
in it was a gradual one; however, the experience must have been more than interesting, because when I was twelve years old I attempted to write a novel about a large family—my family, the Bartlettes. I had four brothers and six sisters and shared a room and bed with three of those sisters. Finding the time and space to be alone with a book seemed impossible, so why I thought I might be able to write one is likely attributed to an inherited trait that my father jokingly referred to as “infernal optimism.”

The house we lived in, in Morris, Manitoba, was rather ordinary, a two-storey, wood-frame affair with a lean-to porch stuck onto the back where, in summer, we would bathe and our mother would set her loaves of bread to rise. In fall and winter it was taken over by a mound of skis and skates, boots, snowshoes and occasionally the carcasses of rabbits and fowl hung from the rafters amid the bundles of herbs our mother had strung up to dry in the heat of summer. There had once been a piano back there, an old Steinway with lifting black veneer and chipped ivories—the ones not pried off by little fingers. The keys were marked with large letters, written in grease pencil by a child determined to teach herself the notes. The house overflowed with a clutter of children’s belongings; its whole appearance was like a boot, an illustration for the nursery rhyme about the woman who had so many children she didn’t know what to do.

I imagined the main character of my novel, the family, as being blocky-shaped, a violet-grey colour with a single head and twenty-two arms and legs sticking out from it. That my parents should be included in this shape hadn’t occurred to me yet. Their lives seemed disconnected from ours and were lived off stage. While we, the Bartlette children, ruled the world, our father worked at his poolroom barbershop and our mother was a shadowy and often muddled person, a head-and-shoulders study framed by a kitchen window. She would call for us from that window, call all our names, sometimes twice, until she eventually hit on the person she wanted or in a sputter of frustration threw up her hands in defeat.

The perception that our family was a blocky, violet-coloured shape with multiple appendages took hold one Halloween night as we went tramping from door to door. When our shouts for treats subsided and the door opened, I began to notice that invariably the person would exclaim, “Oh, look, it’s the Bartlette children! The Bartlette family is here.” I had always thought that our numbers made us special; certainly the size of our family made us different from other families in the small town, and I was proud of that difference. And yet I began to feel resentful. As the evening progressed my resentment grew, and when next we were greeted at the door as the Bartlette Family, I made myself taller, poked my head out from the centre of the troop and blurted, “I’m Sandra.”

If the woman at the door had heard, my declaration didn’t evoke a flicker of response. But from my siblings I felt a sudden stiffness, caught their looks of disapproval, and as we went down the sidewalk their pointed silence left me feeling stranded. We returned home and gathered in the dining room to empty our loot bags on the floor; gradually their miffed tightness dissipated. Under the supervision of the oldest sister, our Halloween treats were divided equally, down to cutting up sticks of chewing gum. I received my share, knowing I’d been forgiven for the crime of wanting to be noticed apart from them. That was when I envisioned our family’s blocky shape and colour, felt that I was melded into the unit, safe, but invisible.

Then a stay in bed for an entire winter with rheumatic fever gave me the opportunity to read novels and entertain the idea that my position of fifth child among eleven siblings afforded the best vantage point to view a family and write about it. A particular brother figured prominently in my first work in progress, selected perhaps for his verve and charm. Unlike my oldest brother, he rode one of those narrow-wheeled bicycles that were just beginning to make an appearance in the windows of hardware stores. My oldest brother had opted for a sturdier bicycle with proper fenders, balloon tires and a wide, sprung saddle. I noticed how one brother was fleet-footed, a rolling stone, while the other went about in a quiet determination to learn to play whatever musical instrument he could earn money to buy.

Beyond my bedroom window, a sister climbed a tree and began her watch for unsuspecting pedestrians coming along the sidewalk. Another sister was content to putter in the kitchen and wondered aloud where our mother kept the pinch salt the cookbook called for. I recorded this all while perched uneasily on the side of the bed scribbling in the notebook, feeling more than a pinch of guilt. The doctor had pronounced my heart to be fit as a fiddle, untouched by “romantic fever,” as my father called it, and my name had been returned to the roster of the many and varied chores.

The chores were assigned according to how we were bent, and I was bent for the outdoors, for tasks that expended an overabundance of energy. I could stack a woodpile as expertly as my father, chop kindling and spade the garden. On Saturdays there were eleven pairs of shoes that required shining, mud to be scraped from the trousers my brothers wore on a day of fishing at the river. Kitchen chairs were to be hauled outside, upended, leg bottoms pared clean with a knife, scatter mats pounded against the house and dragged through the snow to brighten them. By the time my sisters and I had learned to tie our shoelaces, most hours away from school were occupied with these tasks. I thought that my mother must lie awake at night imagining ways to keep us all busy, to keep
me
from realizing my potential to be a basketball champ, a diva, an acrobatic clown.

Music was an acceptable diversion from these chores. When my oldest and most beautiful sister wasn’t hearth keeping, she was at the warped, out-of-tune piano on the porch, playing “Ebb Tide” and wishing for music lessons. Chording to my father’s fiddle-jig music on a Saturday night, my oldest brother would be picking on a banjo and puffing on a mouth organ at the same time. A Saturday bath on the porch, a tub of curdled water tipped onto a flower bed, and the lean-to was transformed into a music hall. I imagined the Bartlette music spilling into the street, across the garden, being heard with amazement.

One day a student of music came to visit us. She was from Frankfurt and had come to our town wanting to view the devastation of a recent and terrible flooding of the Red River, as many strangers had done all that summer. A CBC radio producer had also visited and interviewed our mother amid the ruins of our house while we children squatted around tubs of soapy water scrubbing a film of silt from dishes and sealer jars. “Mrs. Bartlette had all the children busy at work,” I heard the interviewer report to the country. Mrs. Bartlette had also been written about in a newspaper, a woman stubbornly refusing to vacate her flooded house, finally being forced to leave it from a second-storey window. And so we were not surprised when the German student came knocking at our door.

At the sound of music, we were drawn from all corners of the house and yard to gather at the piano as the student played a Chopin étude, amazed at the music coming from the old Steinway. It was a riveting moment that transported us from the dirt and filth of the floodwaters and the cluttered porch where we stood listening in awe. In the silence that followed, the wooden lean-to suddenly became less than ordinary, and I slunk away along with the others, avoiding the disquiet in one another’s eyes. I harboured a growing suspicion that the piano and my most beautiful sister, and perhaps all the rest of us, were not realizing full potential. Unless our parents’ budget could allow for special lessons for all, an individual request for such had to be denied.

And yet, I began to notice that we Bartlette children were very different from one another, even the twins who sometimes dressed alike—one had insisted that our father crop her black hair short and feather it in a ducktail, while the other wore her auburn hair in a pageboy style, which she meticulously arranged every morning in front of the only mirror in our bedroom. Photographs the twins had clipped from movie magazines competed for wall space with the artwork of another sister and with my collection of calendars. We bickered over whose taste in art should dominate the walls, whose belongings took more than their share of space in the bureau and closet and whose turn it was to use the mirror. In winter the frozen laundry was brought in from outdoors and hung in rooms throughout the house. Our room became chilly and damp each washday Monday, so one thing that went without any debate was whose turn it was to switch off the bedroom light—a truce became necessary for the sake of needing to snuggle for warmth.

Those thawing bedsheets could also be used as a scrim, illuminated by a flashlight while a sister frightened herself and us with a story of haunting spirits. That one, the storyteller, was scrawny and blond, with warts on the knuckles of a hand. She had already distinguished herself with a summer of hanging upside down from the limbs of a tree beyond our bedroom window, her gobs of spittle—aimed at passersby—spotting the sidewalk below. Then once again, she achieved notoriety by entering and winning a poetry contest. With this sudden vault in status she vacated the sniper’s nest and graciously agreed to assist her classmates master the complexities of rhymed verse.

The warts on the poet’s knuckles were made more apparent by the way she attempted to conceal them, hand tucked into her armpit as she climbed the stairs to the stage of the school auditorium to accept her prize. The twin with the pageboy had dressed the poet’s hair for the occasion, a style that resembled an octopus lying on top of her head, each of its arms fastened down with a rhinestone-bedecked bobby pin. The prize she accepted was a voucher for five dollars worth of dry cleaning and publication of her winning poem in the school newsletter. Her prize was our prize, too, our prestigious moment, until days later, when a classmate suggested that she might have read my sister’s winning poem elsewhere. When questioned, she retreated from her certainty, but by then our poet had been labelled a plagiarist, and the damage had been done.

We fed on one another’s indignation, pumped ourselves into a rage that sent us off on a self-righteous march to take revenge. The wounded poet returned to her perch in the tree, while the twins and I lay in wait for her accuser. When she appeared, we descended on her with mud patties, splattering her crisp white blouse. The crime of slander justified the revenge: the soiled blouse, lawn ornaments going missing during the night, a shrub dug up and replanted in a neighbouring yard. When challenged, the Bartlettes had a kind of solidarity that brings an understanding of how wars might begin.

But there were, of course, finer moments when that esprit de corps came into play: in times of illness, when a sibling was struggling at school, when a pre-schooler needed coaching to get a head start, our assistance was carried out with a Samaritan fervour as intense and self-righteous as the desire for revenge.

All too soon, I discovered that my wide-eyed pondering over the nature of our family was shared by others in the town. The minute details of our household and living arrangements were a source of curiosity that, unfortunately, was less than benign. Where did we bathe, wash and brush our teeth? How in heaven’s name did our poor mother manage to clothe all of us on my father’s income? Mention would be made of a family of two or three children in such a way as to imply that this was a status to be desired, an achievement. And then one day, in my presence, as though I were invisible, I overheard a woman suggest that the reason for our large numbers was that my parents lacked self-control. I began to doubt that we were special and to wonder if we were, in some way, deficient.

The hearth keeper was the first to leave home, and within months I heard her on a live radio broadcast of a
Search for Talent
concert singing “O Danny Boy” in a quavering sweet voice that took my breath away. Then the gadabout brother was gone too, and I was all the poorer for the absence of his laconic wit—and the two bits he’d pay me for shining his shoes before a night out on the town. The eldest brother remained. He’d wait for night, when the house was still, before spreading his textbooks across the dining room table, studying on into the early morning hours. I’d come home, my body shaking with cold and the excitement of a basketball game well played, and find him there. After we had talked and he had given me something good to think about, I sat at the table across from him, going through his medical dictionary and copying the meanings of a list of words he needed to memorize before the night was done. When he acquired his university degree and a president’s medal, he too was gone.

Another sister left soon afterwards, as a married woman, and by that time I had given up scrutinizing my siblings and had abandoned the attempt to write about a family. Instead, like many in their teens, I became enamoured of a more fascinating topic—the topic of me.