The Petty Details of So-And-So's Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

loving hand over his mouth to shush him and leaned forward to listen more carefully. The granny’s nose was whistling a song:
Summertime, and Niagara is sleazy
—
    Emma already knew that she would prefer the winters, when the place was whitewashed by wind and ice. She imagined the Falls frozen into the most gigantic icicles on the planet, she and Blue tobogganing down their slippery slopes on their bellies.
    When the bus pulled into a station, Emma worried that this might be the end of the line. Blue had kerplunked in his pants by this point, and was squirming uncomfortably beside her. He was still holding her hand. When he felt her grip tighten with worry he began to blubber. She offered him false comfort as sweat bubbled on her forehead. The bus hurtled forward again and she breathed a sigh of relief.
    This was their first journey, and like every other journey that was to follow, Emma was never certain where to get off. She hoped that one day, when Blue could speak, he’d be able to tell her.

The Language of Home
    Emma’s sixth birthday party. The obligatory snapshot. The children from her grade one class are lined up in a row along the corrugated tin fence in the backyard and none of them look remotely happy. The girls wear long skirts and look like they’re picking cake out of their hair, and the boys stand with their legs apart and their eyes cast downward. Emma is not wearing a skirt and Blue’s hair is far too short for 1975, and the two of them look pale, nervous, and embarrassed.
    Oliver and Elaine had tried, but the games were all unusually complicated and the loot bags were filled with articles for personal grooming instead of technicolour jawbreakers, Good and Plenties, and cinnamon-flavoured toothpicks.
    Emma had just begun to realize that their father was different from other fathers. Having a father who was different wasn’t all bad. Having an inventor at home was something to brag about in the schoolyard and Emma had learned such useful skills as how to distinguish an eighth-inch drill bit from a sixteenth before she had finished first grade. She, in turn, had taught the difference to Blue because Oliver constantly lost patience with his son.
    She remembers their father poised with a hammer at Blue’s temple. After arriving in Niagara Falls, Oliver had had the ingenious idea of financing his creative endeavours by selling “antiques” to tourists. A sandwich board dominated the front lawn and invited curiosity and ridicule. The “Emporium” was the garage. The “Antiques” were chairs and tables Oliver whacked together out of scrap and then set Emma and Blue to work distressing with toy hammers, barking orders like, “Bash the fuck out of it, you two layabouts!”
    At Emma’s sixth birthday party he offered a prize to the child who could do the most damage with a hammer in half an hour. Much to Elaine’s embarrassment, Emma, with her considerable experience, won the prize, propelling a whole garage full of children into tears of envy and defeat. Emma had refined her technique: the trick was in the breathing. She’d inhale deeply as she raised her hammer and exhale like a burst balloon upon contact, a method that seemed to produce the biggest dent with the least effort.
    While Emma was quite content banging inanimate objects, Blue developed an unfortunate habit of employing his toy hammer as a defensive weapon against smaller children and the occasional animal. “Boys will be boys,” Oliver had initially shrugged, but when Blue took a swipe at Elaine’s fat red goldfish, Oliver raised his voice and said, “Llewellyn. Now you’ve
really
crossed the line.”
    Blue’s eyes welled up with tears and he stammered out an apology, saying he should have taken the fish out of the tank first, rather than trying to hammer its head in through the glass. He was sorry about the mess of water soaking into the carpet. Oliver