Mouthing the Words by Camilla Gibb Read Free Book Online Page B

you bloody well plan on supporting yourself, you idiot?” And then he was calling the waitress to fill his glass again, the ice cubes going clink clink against the backdrop of his sniffing.
    We carried our canvas bags to school for the rest of the year, carried them so the hearts didn’t face out, but carried them with curious pride nonetheless. I was proud because it meant I had a father. But the bound bits of metal that I could never untangle left me unsettled.
    —
    Mum started going out at night with her friend Pam from the office. We’d never known Mum to have a friend and never known anyone like Pam, and we’d certainly never known our mother to smear on thick silver-blue eyeshadow and wear silver slingbacks and go out dancing or to the theatre. Mum was getting “liberated” while Dad was getting drunk and sad, and it didn’t seem altogether fair to me because Dad was all by himself on a business trip and Mum was here with us.
    “I’m thirty-five years old, for Christ’s sake!” she screamed at me between applications of liquid liner. “I’m not dead yet. Why the hell can’t I have a social life, too?”
    Too? Who else had a social life
?
    “But what time will you be home?” I asked pleadingly when she and Pam were sashaying out the door.
    “Relax, honey,” Pam said. “Your mom’s got a right to party just like anyone else,” giving me an affectionate tweak on the cheek.
    I liked Pam although my father would have said she was a flake. She was definitely cool, while my mother was still serving as an apprentice. Pam wore bell-bottomed jeans and Indian cotton shirts and smelled like cinnamon. Everything about her seemed to jingle when she moved. She had big brown breasts, which she liked to flash at me for shock value whenever I said something that struck her as particularly uptight or middle-aged. I said a lot of things then because I didn’t like all the changes that were happening. I didn’t like all this talk about sexual revolution and the battle of the sexes and nations and bedrooms because all I could hear was the sex in it. I had no choice but to appoint myself the guardian of morality. “What’s with your Thelma?” Pam asked my mother. “She seems to have passed straight from infancy to rigor mortis!” she laughed.
    “It’s her paranoid imagination” my mother sighed. “Her grip on things has always been distorted, and Jesus, talk about melodramatic!”
    So Pam took it upon herself to shake me up a little bit and see if she could wring a smile out of me. One rainy afternoon on a Sunday in August, she and my mum and Rudy, who Pam referred to as her ‘salacious lover’, causing me no end of embarrassment, were sitting and laughing over tumblers of whiskey at our kitchen table. The back door and all the windows were open and the wind was blowing a sheet of rain across the blue and white linoleum floor. I was upstairs in my room trying to do my homework, but I was distracted by The Captain & Tennille echoing from the kitchen and by the fact that not one of them had made any attempt to bring in the laundry from the line before it started raining.
    When I came into the kitchen, Pam was braiding Mum’s hair, Willy was doing a puzzle, and Rudy was there with his feet up on the table rolling a big joint.
    “What the hell do you people think you’re doing?” I shouted at no one and everyone in particular.
    “Having ourselves a party, girl,” said Pam. “Why don’t you come on in and join us?” she said, waving her arm majestically toward an empty chair.
    “Because I am trying to concentrate on my homework!” I shouted. “And I can’t work with this awful racket going on!” I said, crossing my arms. “And what’s more, the Lord’s day is a day of peace,” I added.
    “Jesus, Corinn—the girl’s got religion.” Pam turned to my mother in mock horror.
    “What has gotten into you, Thelma? You were a resolute agnostic until yesterday,” my mother asked,