Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness Read Online Free PDF Page A

Mum recalls, “The other thing—the most gruesome thing—was the Fancy Dress Party. It was awful, being paraded around the deck dressed up in some silly costume. I hated the whole ordeal.”
    “Then why did you participate, if it was so gruesome?”
    “You had to,” Mum says. “You were beaten into it.”
    “With dead fish?” I ask.
    Mum gives me a look. “No. Not unless you also happened to be crossing the equator at that exact same moment.”
     
     
    SO HERE WE ARE: Mum, now in her early thirties, having apparently learned nothing from her experience as a child, dressing Vanessa and me up for the Davises’ annual Fancy Dress, an event I might not have dreaded at all if Mum hadn’t chosen costumes of such agonizing inventiveness that it’s a wonder they didn’t kill us.
    “Why can’t I be like Vanessa?” I asked.
    “Because,” Mum said.
    “But I’m itchy,” I complained.
    Olivia was only four months old, too small to be anything murderous, so Mum had dressed her in a homemade, rainbow-colored, tie-dyed onesie as the Summer of Love. Vanessa was a Rose, hypoallergenic and splendid in a pink tutu, pink tights and pink ballet slippers. I was I Never Promised You a Rose Garden in an old vest and a pair of knickers inside an empty insecticide drum on which Mum had pasted a few pictures of weeds cut from the pages of Farmers Weekly .
    “No one’s going to understand what I am,” I pointed out.
    “The clever ones will,” Mum said. “Now hold still. I don’t want to poke your eyes out.”
    There was the sound of Mum attacking the insecticide drum with scissors.
    “I think I’m getting a rash,” I said. “I can feel bumps.”
    Mum started to sing, “I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden. Along with the sunshine, there’s gotta be a little rain sometime. . . .” There was a pause followed by a couple more violent assaults against the insecticide drum. Then Mum said to Vanessa, “Go to the kitchen and fetch me a knife, would you Vanessa? Ask July for a nice sharp one.”
    “I can’t breathe,” I said.
    “Oh, buck up, Bobo.”
    “Wouldn’t it be easier if I got out?”
    “No, it wouldn’t.”
    “But then you won’t poke my eyes out.”
    “Whoever said anything about poking eyes out?”
    “You did.”
    “Don’t exaggerate.”
    I could hear Vanessa rustle demurely back into the room. “Thank you, darling,” Mum said. She only called one of us darling when she wanted to imply that the other was not, at that moment, darling. “You’re such a big help,” Mum said.
    I didn’t need to be on the outside of my insecticide drum to see the pink ruffles on Vanessa’s tutu puffing up.
    “Now hold still, Bobo.”
    There were flashes from a knife blade and two slits of light appeared.
    “Are those near your eyes?”
    “No,” I said. And then I reconsidered my close escape. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, very.”
    “There we go then,” Mum said. “I’ll just get my Uzi and we’ll be off.”
    I took a deep breath. “I don’t want to go,” I blurted with as much feeling as I could muster out of my nearly eight-year-old self. “I look stupid.”
    “Now look here,” Mum said, “if you aren’t careful, you’ll get a jolly good hiding.”
    While Mum got her gun, I weighed up the cons of a jolly good hiding versus the cons of arriving at a Fancy Dress Party dressed in an insecticide drum. I decided, on balance, that at least there would be Sparletta Creme Soda and Willards Chips at the Fancy Dress Party and that at least the Davises didn’t have frogs in their pool—or only a few. Not like our algae soup of a pool that had wild ducks, scorpions, thousands of frogs, tadpoles and the occasional Nile monitor. Plus, this would be my last party before I was packed off to boarding school forever and ever.
    “Right,” Mum said. I heard her check the Uzi magazine for rounds. We were a year into the worst part of the Rhodesian War, and ambushes and attacks against farmers had