If I Die Before I Wake Page 2

“I’ve put the house up for sale, David, and I’ll be making my home with you in future,” she said. Then she took a deep breath and went on. “I am correct in believing that you will be able to spare me a room in this big house of yours now that I am alone in the world, am I not?”

  That is how she talks, Jane. I remember every word. Father looked as though he’d been struck by lightning. There was this loud silence. Then he answered her. “Of course, Mother. But what about Marta?”

  Marta was her maid who had been with them for years.

  “Marta handed in her notice the day after George died. She’s gone to live with her sister in Orangeville,” Grandmother snapped. “You needn’t worry about Marta.”

  “Well, Mother, you are welcome, of course, if you can stand living in this hurly-burly household. You should have sent me word and I would have come to fetch you. Fee, run and tell your aunt that your grandmother is here.”

  I thought he had forgotten I was there. He took her bag and led her into the sitting room while I ran to tell Aunt. She actually gasped, Jane, the way people do in books. She was sitting at the kitchen table shelling peas and she just sat and stared at me as though she couldn’t believe her ears.

  “He told her she can stay,” I blurted out.

  Aunt gave me the look I like least of her expressions. “What else could he do?” she said. “Would you have him turn his widowed mother away, Fee?”

  I wanted to say yes but I knew better.

  “She could have gone to Uncle Walter’s,” I said.

  “Not if your Aunt Jessica had anything to say about it,” Aunt said, getting up and going to get Grandmother’s room ready.

  She took over the spare room, the big one at the front of the house. It is big and bright and she has it to herself. She filled it with her own furniture.

  We have never discussed it since, but when I told Fanny what had happened, sweet-tempered Fanny agreed with me that Father should have thought of his children and made some other arrangement.

  I am probably crazy, Jane, but I think maybe my grandmother did not ask him ahead of time in case he said we had no room for her. Although Aunt is right. Father being Father, he couldn’t have done such a thing.

  To change the subject, did I tell you that Fanny and I are identical twins like Mother and Aunt? Aunt claims she can always tell us apart but it’s not true. She gets it right when she goes by our expressions or how we behave. If you look at our noses or eyebrows or hair, though, we are the same. But not inside.

  When I think something is funny, I grin. Fan claims it is unladylike to show your teeth. So she smiles with her lips closed. She thinks she is mysterious, like Mona Lisa. She looks ridiculous. Luckily she forgets a lot of the time.

  And she is tidy. She really does have a place for everything and everything in its place. My untidiness is the cross she must bear, since we share a bedroom. I have tried to convince her that I am disorganized because I am far more creative than she and so cannot keep my mind on such petty details as the contents of bureau drawers.

  “Balderdash!” she says.

  We have brown hair that curls, especially when it is damp. We also have big, dark brown eyes. Theo, when he is being nice, says they are the colour of Father’s coffee. (Father takes only a splash of milk.) Other times Theo calls them cows’ eyes.

  As I have said, Fan is sweet-natured. I, on the other hand, am often grouchy or I lose my temper completely and fly off the handle. What “handle” do you suppose that is, Jane? It is an odd expression. I relish odd expressions.

  I do love Fan, Jane. She is my twin and I cannot imagine life without her. But we are NOT the same kind of person. I sometimes think we are not as close as twins are supposed to be and that I care more for my older sister Jo. But I am not sure about this.

  Father and Fanny must be playing ANOTHER game of crib. That means she won and so he has to show her he is still better at it.

  Aunt made us a scrumptious lemon sponge cake for our birthday. I love sponge cake but we have not had it for ages because of the War. Aunt saved up extra eggs and sugar for it. I was so generous I slipped Pixie a bite. She smacked her lips so loudly I was afraid Grandmother would hear, but she didn’t.

  I got the ten-cent piece in the cake, which means I will be rich. Theo got the button, which means he won’t get married this year. Lucky thing, since he is not six yet.

  Jane, your Aunt Fan is here at last. So, my dear daughter, I must put out the light and leap into the bed before my sister falls asleep and lets her big knobbly feet slide over into my half. Her toenails scratch.

  Good night.

  Sunday, August 4, 1918

  I promised to tell you about Jo and Jemma later and I will begin today’s entry by keeping that promise.

  Jemima and Josephine, called Jemma and Jo for short, are twins, too, except Jemma was born ten minutes before midnight and Jo came along just after the clock stopped striking. So they have different birthdays. They are fraternal twins, which means they are not identical. It is strange because frater means “brother” in Latin. Brothers they are not.

  They just turned eighteen. Nobody has trouble telling those two apart. Jo is much smaller and browner while Jemma is fair and willowy. That’s Aunt’s word. I would have said lanky or skinny. But Jemma would rather be “willowy,” I am sure.

  They both just finished Fifth Form and Jemma is planning to become a teacher. She wants to have a class of infants. She says your first years of schooling are the ones that matter most.

  Jo, if she can wear Father down, wants to be a doctor. He says girls are meant to be nurses, like Florence Nightingale, but Jo brought a girl home from Sunday School — she is in the senior girls class that Miss Banks teaches — who is going into Meds in September even though she is only sixteen. She is awfully nice. She talks to me and Fanny as if we are the same age as she is. Her name is Caroline Galt. I guess it was their both wanting to be doctors that made them strike up a friendship. By now, you would think they had known each other for years instead of only a few weeks. I wonder if Jemma is jealous sometimes. I would be if Fan began to chum around that way with another girl. We have separate friends, of course, but we are still closest to each other, in spite of what I said earlier. Jo and Jemma have always been that way too.

  But Jemma does not seem jealous. She appears to like Caroline almost as much as Jo does. And she has Phyllis Trent and Nancy Spry to chum around with. Nancy wants to be a teacher too, although she wants to teach older children. She is a loud, jolly sort of girl whom children will like, I think. They’d like Jemma too. When she is with little children, she is gentle. When she isn’t, she’s flighty and much funnier and more dramatic than Jo. Phyllis means to stay at home and help her mother until she gets married.

  Caroline Galt is called Carrie by her brothers and sisters and Caroline by her parents. She got her Matric out west where you only have four years of high school, not five years, like here. Her father went with her to sign her up at the university, and persuaded them to let her start in September. I guess they couldn’t say no to a missionary minister.

  About Jo though, I think talking to Caroline and her dad has made Father weaken. He has given Jo permission to go into medical school this fall if it is not too late for her to register. Aunt is on Jo’s side, of course. She thinks it would be good for Jo to have Carrie to chum around with. They don’t want her making the wrong sort of friends. Carrie, being a missionary’s daughter, is made to order. I think they are foolish to fret about this. As if Jo would be chums with a “bad influence.”

  Jemma’s the one they should be worried about. When Fan and I were taking a last spin on our tandem before we came inside, we saw her a couple of blocks from home with three boys, and she was making eyes at all of them and laughing a flirty laugh. When we got home, she asked us to keep mum about the boys and we said we would. You wouldn’t catch Jo behaving like that.

  I will back up now and tell more about the Macgregor family.

  I already t
old you about Grandmother. I suppose Father must love her. She is his mother after all. But they don’t seem close. She likes cooing at tiny babies — but not changing their nappies. She likes well-behaved small children. She likes playing peek-a-boo and waving bye-bye. She used to dote on Theo. But when he grew bigger and sassy, he stopped being her pet. When she speaks of him these days, she calls him “the boy” and sniffs.

  I think I said already that she got the front bedroom. Everybody else, except Father, has to share. Theodore slept in Father’s room until he started having nightmares. When you have a nightmare, Father is useless. When Theo kept waking up screaming and Father could not comfort him, the clever boy marched into Aunt’s room and climbed in with her. Father moved his crib in and Theo has never gone back.

  I already told you about Aunt too but I left out some important things. I cannot understand why she has never married. I put this question to Mother once and she gave me a queer look and said, “Don’t ask, Fee. It is private. And it is not her fault but mine.”

  I asked what she meant, of course, but she would not explain. She told me instead that it was not my business and to forget what she had said. It was strange. She did not sound like herself. I have forgotten so much since she died, but those few puzzling words stuck in my memory like a cocklebur. Have you ever noticed, Jane, that the minute somebody tells you to forget something, it becomes impossible? My mind, anyway, grips the bit of whatever it is all the tighter. This is especially true if there is something mysterious about it.

  The older I get, the more I wonder what she meant.

  It was as though she almost told me a secret and then changed her mind, deciding I was too young to be trusted. Well, I was only seven. I’ve always had trouble keeping secrets. But I’m not seven now. I have almost decided to try to ferret out the truth. I can’t believe Mother would mind my knowing after all this time. But I can’t ask Aunt herself. Mother made that plain.

  Fan and I were born six years later than the Almost Twins. When we were seven and Jo and Jemma were thirteen, Theodore came along.

  Mother died just three days later. I don’t know why except that she was sick beforehand and “burning up with fever” afterwards and they “could not stop her bleeding.” Nobody told me this, of course. They don’t tell children such things. But I overheard Aunt talking to one of her friends about it.

  It is almost enough to make you decide not to have children, except there are so many mothers around who have their first baby and then go right ahead and have more without seeming the least bit worried. It is a puzzle.

  Bedtime

  We went for one last ride on our tandem after supper. People turned and pointed at us. It is such a perfect present for twin sisters. Today is windy, too, and I loved feeling my hair lifting off the back of my neck and blowing out behind me. I wanted to sing so I started in on “A Bicycle Built for Two.” Fan was shocked for a second and then joined in. She always has to decide whether or not she is being ladylike. I know I am not ladylike so I don’t have to bother thinking about this.

  Writing the diary this way makes it easy to pick up and put down. It is like talking to an invisible chum. Someday, Jane, you will stop being invisible and that will be lovely even though I will have to grow up before we meet in the flesh. You will be relieved to hear that I do like babies.

  Theo believes Aunt is his mother. He keeps calling her Mama and she has almost given up correcting him. It sounds right. After all, he never knew Mother the way the rest of us did. To him, Mother is like someone in a story. Aunt and Theo are Mama Bear and Baby Bear, I think. I will confess to you, Jane, that it sometimes feels as though Aunt is my mother too, though I would never say so out loud.

  I remember our real mother singing us to sleep. I can still hear her soft voice singing “Lullaby and good night” and “Sleep, my child, and peace attend thee, all through the night.” I was afraid of the dark back then and she knew it. She left a light on to comfort me. She smelled like flowers. At first, after she died, I used to go into her closet and smell her dresses and it seemed as if she were still there. Then, one day, they were gone and I cried but couldn’t tell Father why.

  But now, if I try to call up her face on purpose, it blurs and I cannot hold onto it. I have to depend on quick glimpses my memory gives me.

  After she had Theo, she held him up for Father to behold and announced, “At last, David, I have given you a son.”

  I can see her laughing face then. And hear his voice answering.

  “You make me sound like Henry the Eighth,” he said. (Later on, in History class, I learned that Jane Seymour was Henry VIII’s wife and the mother of his only son.)

  It is high time I told you about Theo properly. You’d think we girls would hate our baby brother, but he is the one thing everybody in our household agrees about. He is a darling. Most of the time. He has a mop of fair curls, enormous blue eyes and a smile that would melt the heart of an ogre. I think the blue of his eyes is the colour of chicory flowers. He is just plain nice. I heard Aunt call him “quaint” once and that is true too — if I am right about what “quaint” means.

  I can’t believe I have already written such volumes in this diary. Never before have I let my pen run away with me like this.

  One thing I haven’t mentioned, though, is that our country is at war. You would think I would have put that on the first page. But the news is always so terrible and the fighting seems far away mostly. I heard this afternoon though that Calvin Anderson was killed in the fighting. His younger sister Prudence is in my class at Jesse Ketchum. I don’t know her well and I don’t like her much. She’s too prim and preachy. A real goody two-shoes! But tonight she must be heartbroken and I feel sorry I don’t like her better.

  Father still thinks the War must end before long. But I have been hearing that for years and years, and it is still going on. It started just a week before my eighth birthday. Theo has never lived in a world at peace!

  Father just looked in and asked me if I had written my thoughts on this morning’s sermon in my journal. He is teasing, Jane, because I laughed out loud in church. It is too long a story to tell now but I will tell you in the morning. My hand feels stiff from writing so much.

  Monday, August 5, 1918

  Here is the story. I was sitting in the pew watching Theo. He had quietly produced a tiny toad from his pocket and was playing with it. While I was spying on him out of the corner of my eye, it got away from him and jumped right into Mrs. Barber’s enormous black purse which she had opened to get out her handkerchief just as the minister started on the long prayer, the one where you ask God to bless the king and everybody. It is even longer now, what with praying for the troops and victory. She did not notice the toad because she had her eyes shut, of course.

  I hardly ever shut mine because my keeping them open annoys Grandmother. She says you have to shut your eyes, bow your head and fold your hands to pray properly. I asked Father about this and he said the Almighty cared about your prayer, not your posture.

  The toad did not reappear and I suddenly thought of it jumping back out and leaping onto the collection plate when she got out her offering. Can you blame me for giggling??

  At lunch yesterday Aunt asked me what was so funny, but I could not tattle on Theo so I just said it was a private joke. Father shook his head at me and Theo shot me a look of pure thanksgiving.

  Grandmother says I should pray for strength to resist the sin of levity. She did not see the toad. I don’t think the minister even noticed my laughing. He went right on praying for the whole world, person by person.

  See you later, Jane. Fanny wants to go for yet another spin around the neighbourhood on Pegasus and show him off again. I am happy to oblige.

  Bedtime

  I forgot to say that Carrie Galt and Miss Banks came in after Sunday School yesterday and heard Fanny singing. She does have a lovely voice. Aunt says she gets it from Mother. Aunt and I have deeper voices that are sort of husky. That is one way Fan and I
are not identical.

  Because of Fan sounding like a lark, Miss Banks has invited all four of us to go along with them to sing to some of the wounded veterans in the hospital. They have not told us the date we do this. It has to be arranged. I feel scared inside but I don’t think it showed. I hope we don’t see anyone actually suffering or have to hear moaning or screams.

  I wonder if Fanny is nervous, too. You would never guess it from looking at her face, calm as a mill pond.

  I wonder what is so calm about a mill pond. Mill ponds must get ruffled on windy days. Wouldn’t “calm as a cabbage” be better? Cabbages stay placid even during slam-bang thunderstorms.

  Maybe Fan would dislike being compared to a cabbage though. How about a vegetable marrow? No. “Calm as a sleeping baby.” Good. She’d like that.

  Placid as a pudding?

  Tuesday, August 6, 1918

  This morning, Aunt announced it was cod liver oil day. The doctor who told Aunt to force every one of us to swallow a walloping great spoonful of the disgusting stuff every week, and to drink a glass of orange juice and castor oil once a month, should be shot. I told Fan what I thought. Gentle Fanny Macgregor, famous for her kind heart, said, “Being shot is too kind. He should be boiled alive in cod liver oil after having been forced to drink a gallon of castor oil.” I was shocked!!

  We did not know Theo was sitting under the table until his little voice floated up to us, sounding so serious. “Off with his head! That would be best,” he said.

  After supper

  Jane, we have a dog! We have begged for a dog for YEARS. Always we were told not to be so silly. “We have a dog,” Father would say, pointing at Pixie.

  Pixie is definitely a dog. She is Aunt’s Boston bull terrier. She came here when Aunt did, just before Theo was born. She was already eleven years old. Now she is sixteen. And although we are fond of her, she loves only Aunt. She is black and white and she must have been a cute little pup once upon a time. She is so old now, that every breath she takes wheezes as though she has asthma. She doesn’t want to play with any of us but only hobbles around on her spindly bow legs after Aunt. When her mistress sits down, Pixie gives a great sigh and thumps to the floor to catch a nap before Aunt rises, forcing her to move again. If Aunt goes too fast, Pixie sounds as though she is breathing her last. She is not an enjoyable pet.