Deafening Read Online Free PDF

them up on purpose. Let Tress be as grumpy as she wants to be. Grania will invent her own language, and no one, not even Tress, will be able to understand or interfere.
    But she needs Tress. Without her, she won’t know what is going on.
    She follows her sister back to the swings and climbs on and pumps her feet. Her shadow swings beneath her, fat-thin , fat-thin , and every word she knows drops away. She allows the words to fall, one by one, and pulls into the place where her silence lies, the place where she is safe. She kicks her feet at the sky.
    “THEN BEGAN A TERRIBLE FIGHT.” Three children at a fence are watching a cowboy who is trying to stay on a bucking horse. The horse’s body makes an arc; its back legs kick straight out behind.
    Grania knows the word fight. A short word that spills into the air with one lip movement. Mamo tells her she pronounces it only too well. They practise the caption until Grania is able to repeat every word correctly.
    Mamo closes the Sunday book for the day. “When the children taunt, fight back,” she says and puts an arm around Grania.
    But what Grania reads from Mamo’s lips is taught.
    When the children taught, fight back.
    Grania can make meaning from any word, right or wrong. Sometimes she carries a sentence in her head for years before she understands her mistake.
    When the children taught , she is going to be ready to fight.
    When Mr. Eaton’s new catalogue arrives by mail from Toronto, the old one may be pillaged for play. Grania and Tress sit on the rag rug, each with a pair of Mamo’s sewing scissors. Carefully, they separate whole pages from the binding. They begin to cut out their family, trimming carefully and closely around necks and chins, elbows and toes. The ladies they prefer are the ones wearing drawers and chemises, or long walking skirts. On these models, other clothing can be fastened once the ladies have been pasted to cardboard. The ladies have tiny waists and bountiful hips that tilt back curvaceously, and this makes them look as if they will fall forward on their correct and smiling faces. The ladies have to be propped, to stand.
    The sisters make tiny nicks in the ladies’ hands. They give them mirrors to gaze into, and broad hats with turned-up rims and feathers that sweep to the side. They dress the ladies in gowns that spill regally around the floor at their feet. If the ladies are travelling ladies, they are draped with opossum capes and fox muffs. Or marten collars that have heads and claws that meet backs and tails when a slit is made in the centre and a lady’s head popped through.
    They give their ladies camisoles with widely cut paper tabs to fit over delicate shoulders; they give them lace trimmings and bows. They provide boots for their feet, tea sets to pour, feather dusters to swish, fans to flutter, and mangles with three rollers so they can wash the family clothes. Because the ladies are forced to stretch out straight, they are tilted onto davenports and given the longest beds to lie upon. They sleep in fits and starts because their eyes are always open wide.
    The ladies are given whole families, unearned and complete. First, there is a baby, tied up in a barrowcoat. Tress says that when she grows up, she plans to have two babies, a boy named Pritchett and a girl named Jane. Next, they cut around girls who wear white underwear and have wardrobes of petticoats, wide-collared dresses and pointed shoes. The girls’ feet are always about to step somewhere. “They are stepping out,” Tress tells Grania.
    In the expanding cutout family, there is sometimes a brother and always a man. The man is chosen from the underwear page, which makes the sisters laugh and laugh. The men on this page look like strongmen from the circus. The stoutest man is buttoned to the chin; he wears long drawers and stands on black pointy toes. The toes are so small and pointy they look as if they won’t hold his weight. But he is easy to dress, in top hat and