Eaves
In my family, which is middle-class, white, loving, and mildly
claustrophobic, I was the child known for contentedness. A perfect middle
child, as my mother often referred to me, a buffer between Janet, who is
two years older than I and who tortured us all with her sulks and moods
and whims and silences, and stormy Lucy, two years my junior. Unlike Janet
or Lucy, I could be counted on to share, to give way, to make room, to
forgive, to take the broader, longer-term, higher-level view. My parents,
both of them also as it happens middle children, had the same equanimous
traits, so Janet and Lucy were a daily reminder to them that one does not
always get the children one deserves. I have heard them describing having
children as a lottery, a game of chance. They do not approve in any way of
gambling.
As a very small child, my sister Janet, the oldest of us three girls,
refused to eat anything other than dry cereal, cold whole milk (but not on
dry cereal), finely chopped tuna, tinned applesauce, and mangos cut in
half and sliced crosswise in their skins into the shape of diamonds, with
the skins then turned concave, so the smooth fruit took on the appearance
of an orange hedgehog. Her excessive fastidiousness with food continues to
this day. She has, she sometimes pridefully reminds us, a highly sensitive
gag reflex. A fleck of red in the yolk of a boiled egg makes her shudder.
Anything left sitting out uncovered for longer than a minute gives her a
horror of contagion. Her teeth are set on edge by even the smallest lumps
left in cream soups or mashed potatoes or porridge. She turns pale when
faced with food that has parsley on, in, near, or under it. Carrots must
be cooked to just a precise point of resistant, tender firmness. If they
are cooked past this point they feel, to Janet’s sensitive tongue, she
says, as though they have been lightly coated in a particularly revolting
organic slime.
As the youngest daughter, Lucy’s parlor trick was to refuse to sleep. Her
bedtime tantrums were remarked on by our neighbors, against whose walls
and ears her cries of outrage reverberated. She taught herself to read
when she was four – both of my sisters are very quick and clever – by
leaning over my shoulder, demanding that I speak each word aloud as I
deciphered it. Within a few weeks, she no longer had any need of me; she
had discovered how to decode the marvelous marks on the pages on her own.
From then on my mother left Lucy’s bedside light switched on after tucking
her in at night. Lucy would read a book – she usually helped herself to
whatever I happened to be reading at the time – until midnight, and then
switch off her light herself. To all of our amazement, she would be up
ready to fight her way through another day by seven the next morning. It
was impossible to sort out after that whether her relentless ill temper
was due to sleep deprivation or was simply her natural character, since
there was never a well-rested Lucy against which to compare our daily,
combative version.
I was sometimes allowed to overhear my parents’ baffled speculations about
the source of the bad dispositions of two of their three children. My
parents had provided the same environment for all three of us, the same,
unstinting measures of constant love, guidance that was gentle and founded
on principles of fairness and reason, wholesome food, sturdy clothing,
bright, educational toys, weekly trips to the library, liberal schools,
excursions, diversions, and medicines when needed. But still I was
rational and levelheaded, and Lucy and Janet were querulous, quarrelsome,
and discontented.
Ancestors were hauled out of the attic for scrutiny, their histories
examined closely for signs of inheritable ill temper, egotism, or
willfulness. My father’s grandfather, Hiram O’Sullivan, had been a Book of
Revelations-obsessed hellfire-and-brimstone preacher from a particularly
acid-soiled, rock-infested, bog-damp patch of Ireland. Hiram moved to
Aurora, Ontario, in 1881 to take charge of the white clapboard Church of
the Rose of Sharon. But his admonishing sermons, two and three hours long,
taxed the patience of the practical farmers of his new community. They had
nearer goals than the heavenly gates – another quarter-acre, a new plow,
a two-storey brick house – and little time in any case to stray from the
straight path. Or it might have been that their enchantment with the
larger, better, and new made them resistant to the sulfurous anxieties
with which old Hiram sought to bind them to his thrall and that his
crabbed ministry was predestined to whither under the boundless skies of
the hopeful new world. Ousted by a civil but resolute committee, Hiram
returned home to Ireland to await the Day of Judgment – surely imminent!
– only to find that the flock that he had abandoned there had
irretrievably (and no doubt gladly) scattered to more genial churches. His
comely wife (several photographs of her survive as evidence: she had thick
fair hair piled soft and deep, wide dark eyes, a conscienceless brow, and
a smooth chin that was round and downy and cleft as a peach) proved
unexpectedly willful. Amelia refused to return with her dour husband to
his stony land. Instead she moved their four children, the oldest nine and
the youngest (a girl, Charlotte, who would grow up to become my
grandmother) only a year or so old, to a house in the High Park area of
Toronto, neatly solving the growing problem of how to pay the rent by
putting it about that her husband had been sadly drowned on the way back
to Ireland, declaring herself to be a widow, and marrying the elderly
landlord in a brief civil ceremony at the old city hall …
(Continues…)
Excerpted from The Sad Truth About Happiness
by Anne Giardini Excerpted by permission.
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Fourth Estate
ISBN: 0-06-074176-7
