Weirdos are Living in My House

Chapter 16 Dawson Creek again

I was having another happy summer. My last year's summer friend didn't come to stay with her Grandma when I was there, but I found a new one. Her name was Kyla, and she'd moved to Dawson Creek from Vancouver the year before. The funny thing was, she hated Dawson Creek as much as I hated Vancouver! I didn't think anyone could hate Dawson Creek. Except for my mom, of course, who said it had "stifled her potential as a woman and as a person, because no one in Dawson Creek ever read The Feminine Mystique, the book that had changed her life." The women with the short hair and ugly glasses spent a lot of time talking about The Feminine Mystique when we first moved to Vancouver. Those women had thinned out to a few close friends - of my mom's, not of mine - and I didn't miss the absent ones one bit. They were always angry, even when it didn't seem like they had anything to be angry about. Lately, the remaining women had been talking about another book, The Female Eunuch. I knew what a eunuch was. It was a palace guard in the 1001 Arabian Nights stories, so I don't know what they got all excited about. You'd think they'd be all for female empowerment, and equality, and be happy there was a female eunuch.

Mom got The Feminine Mystique out of the library in Dawson Creek, so someone else in Dawson Creek must have read it, even if it was just the librarian. I almost wanted to go to the library and look at the card in the book pocket that showed the names of the people who'd checked it out to see how many there were. I liked to be able to prove that I was right about things. Maybe I'd do it later. It was summer, the sun was shining, and I had better things to do.

My Dad had another of his quotes, but I don't know from where: "Sometimes I set and think, and sometimes I just sets," which perfectly described what I was busy doing. I had carried my blanket and pillow out and put it on the wooden platform, which was kind of like a front step but not attached to a house, that was under the clothesline. Grandma used to stand on it so she could reach the clothesline, but she didn't use it anymore. She usually sent her clothes to the laundry, but since I was there, I took the clothes to the laundromat for her. I'd gotten used to doing laundry in Vancouver, and the laundromat machines weren't much different, except for needing quarters.

The wood was all splitting and cracking, and Grandma said, mind I didn't fall right through because it might be rotten, but it wasn't. So I sat in the sun, on the blanket with my pillow behind my back, setting and thinking, all by myself in Grandma's back yard with nobody bothering me. If there was a heaven on earth, this was it. A bee was buzzing lazily in the neighbour's flowers and it was hot. If I closed my eyes, I could feel myself going back in time, to last year, and before that to when I was little, because I'd sat just like this lots of times before and there was not one different or new thing about it, which made me feel unspeakably happy and content.

Now I thought of how much better off I'd have been if my mom had never read that stupid book and it hadn't changed her life, but I didn't have anyone to say it to. Kyla wouldn't have known what I was talking about, and Grandma might have agreed with me, but wouldn't say that because she didn't like to criticize my mother. She wasn't like my other Grandma, who said: "I don't like to criticize," and then spent the next ten minutes telling you about something she didn't like. Grandma Williamson said: "I don't like to criticize," and then shut her mouth very firmly and changed the subject if you kept trying to talk about it.

My Grandma Williamson had also hated Dawson Creek when she first moved there from Calgary when my dad was a kid, but she got used to it. So that was three people who hated, or at least had hated, Dawson Creek. I didn't know what was the matter with them. Who could hate a nice flat place with no mountains all over the place to block the view? Who could hate the place where my Grandma lived and I felt safe all the time, from the moment the plane left the ground in Vancouver, to the moment I got back on the plane again in Ft. St John to go back to Vancouver?