1998 short list:
Thin Ice
by Bruce McCall
published by Random House
Excerpt from the chapter entitled "The Prisoner of Danforth Avenue - High School"
Published with permission from the author. This excerpt is copyright protected.
It is late one November night in 1949 in the living room at 2377 Danforth. T.C. is away on another business trip. Mother is drunk again. Certain atmospherics, as usual, cling in memory: the reek from a just-finished apartment repainting, "Blueberry Hill," a current Louis Armstrong hit, on the radio. Mike and Hugh and I are stewing in our bedroom when Mike decides to break the McCall taboo against direct encounters and get to the root of Mothers's addiction, once and for all. Why, why, why this suicidal slide into alcoholism? What is so wrong in her life? Isn't there some way to help, to stop her from continuing to inflict this misery on herself and her family?
Mike leaves the bedroom, determined for all our sakes to pry out the truth. Hugh and I lie in our bunks, hearts thumping, desperately trying not to tune in on the muffled exchange on the other side of the wall. Ten minutes pass, twenty, then half an hour. He must have gotten her to open up, and if he has, maybe he'll be coming back with an idea, a plan, some hope.
He comes back a few minutes later in tears. Panic engulfs Hugh and me. What happened? What's wrong? At first Mike refuses to talk, burying his face in his pillow, but our whimpering beseechings finally wear him down. Swearing us to silence, he spills the secret that spins us into despair. Mother has cancer. She has taken to drinking out of fear and hopelessness. She is going to die. Not T.C., not anybody, is to know.
It's a comment on the dark emotional underworld in which the McCall family functioned that
we were as good as our word. To bring it out into the open, to tell T.C. and beg him to seek medical or other help and at least try to fight it, never occurred to Mike or Hugh or me. In silence, betraying our dread secret by neither word nor gesture, we would have to watch our mother slowly die.
Covertly watching Mother's every move, measuring her struggle against the disease devouring her from within, became the center of my existence. There were ups and downs, good days and bad days, signs of hope - an uptick in mood - dashed by hints of doom - a cough, a headache. I alternated in torturing myself with images of death and bolstering myself with dreams of miraculous remission. Not even Mike and Hugh and I ever openly discussed the matter among ourselves. It would only make the nightmare more real.
Nine months later and Mother still hadn't died or, I began to realize, even appreciably sickened. Then came the August afternoon in 1950 when I found myself alone in an uncharacteristically deserted apartment. A dash to the bedside table in my parents' room where the family secrets were kept. A desperate rummaging, for what I didn't even know. But in a minute or less I found it: a doctor's letter, dated two weeks before. The hysterectomy had been a complete success; and in case Mother might be worried, there was no sign of cancer.
The nightmare faded as quickly as it had come on. I never knew whether it had all been a deliberate lie, a piece of emotional blackmail Mother had cold-bloodedly concocted on the spur of the moment to protect her addiction, or a genuine fear mercifully dispelled. For the first few weeks I was too relieved to care. Afterward, it didn't seem to matter. The drinking continued. The confrontations ceased.
