Weirdos are Living in My House

Weirdos are living in my house.

I stood in the hallway, listening. I didn't know I was the personification of mens' subjugation of women in a world wide conspiracy of male domination - whatever that meant. I thought I was a ten year old girl with knobby knees, who would like a snack, if the strange ladies with short hair and ugly glasses would only get the heck out of the kitchen so I could reach the fridge. It seemed unlikely. "Not ladies," I thought to myself - "women," as my mother had insisted to my dad, when we had gone to the airport to see him off, and he said it was nice that she was already making friends, and were they a nice bunch of gals?  

"I have women friends," my mom had said. "Ladies" is a social construct, and none of us have been girls for a very long time - as for gals..." 

"Whoops," my dad said, "they're calling my flight." and he had ruffled Dan's hair and swung me around, and kissed my little sister, Hatty. Then he and my mom looked oddly at each other for a moment, before my mom said, "Well." And he said, "I'll see you at Christmas if not before," and gave her a kiss on the cheek. Sad music came over the intercom system, and he walked down the ramp, turning to wave before he went through the doors. There was big lump in my throat, like when I'd had the mumps, and for some reason I wanted to hold my brother's hand, and not just to prevent him from slugging me.

I blinked back tears. I was not a cry baby, no matter what my brother said, but lately my eyes seemed to leak an awful lot. I thought: If I couldn't get to the fridge, maybe I could sneak around the edges and get to the back door. If I didn't make eye contact, I wouldn't have to talk to any of them. I was supposed to call adults Mister or Missus and their last name, unless they said to call them by their first names, but these ladies - um, women, hadn't said to, and I didn't know their last names. Now one of them was calling my mom "sister." As far as I knew, my mom had only one sister, my Auntie. Surely if there were more sisters, I would know, wouldn't I? And now the strange lady - woman was calling another woman "sister," and I knew that she was just crazy, because there was no way they were all related. They didn't look anything alike, except they all had ugly clothes. How had my neat and trim mother gone so quickly from asking me why my shirt was untucked to becoming so very untucked herself? It was worrying. The conversation kept getting louder and shriekier. If it had been me talking, my mom would have said: "Modulate your voice, please," or "I can't hear you when you use that tone," both of which meant that I should calm down, open my throat more, and speak more nicely. My dad called it "dialling it down a notch," which was, I thought, a much kinder way to say it. Now she wasn't even modulating her own voice. She was as shrieky as the rest of them. A little more of the bottom fell from my world. It was 1968, and the times they were, very unfortunately from the perspective of the knobby-kneed collateral damage, a'changing. 

Some of the ladies - um women - were painting a big sheet of paper with poster paints left over from when my mom painted the window. Something about the painting caught all of their attention, and they clustered around the table to look at it and shriek over it, so I made my break. I eased through the back door and went down the outside stairs to the back yard. It was an ugly backyard. Small and mean, with a rock wall separating it from the alley beyond, boxed in by the larger houses on either side. From my house - my real house - you could see some of the neighbours' houses if you looked through the trees before they got leaves, but they weren't all over in your face, and you certainly couldn't stand on a walkway between the houses and touch two houses at once. You couldn't smell what anyone else was having for dinner or hear bathroom noises. Also, there weren't any trees here, in the yard, or at least any proper trees that had leaves that fell off. There was a Christmas tree growing in the front yard, but what good was that when it wasn't Christmas time? There were no trees worth climbing, that's for sure. Truth to tell, I wasn't much of a climber even when the proper trees had been abundant, but it's one thing to not want to climb a tree and another to not have a tree to climb.