"Hush" by Darlene Eliot
When friends come over, I tell them the house shakes because it’s on a fault line. I don’t tell them the house is upset. I don’t tell them the trees tap the windows at night and the wind only blows at dinner time and the floor tilts upstairs, so Sis and I have to lean against the wall to get to our rooms. I don’t tell them Mom and Dad walk with their hands out like acrobats to get to their room. Mom and Dad don’t discuss it. They’re from the Islands. They don’t waste time on little things, even if little things wake them up at night. Work hard. Be presentable. That’s what they say.
Sis doesn’t argue. She doesn’t want to stay in her room all weekend. Mom corrects her posture and corrects my grammar. Mom says I’m too Americanized and ask too many questions. Sometimes she puts her hand behind her ear and pretends she can’t hear me. But she doesn’t pretend when she sees my drawings. She looked at the one where I gave the house a face. She said it was unacceptable. She stopped taking me to the museum after that.
Mom and Dad sit like bookends when we eat dinner. They take little bites and put their knife and fork to the side when they’re done. Dad flares his nostrils when the food tastes good. He tells us to chew our food thirty-two times. He got that from grandma who never calls unless Dad forgets to send boxes back home. I looked up who told everyone to chew thirty-two times. Then I raised my hand. When Dad said I could speak, I said, why are we following rules from the 1800’s? From someone named Horace? Dad said the man’s last name was Fletcher, like ours, and that was good enough for him. I looked at Sis. She moved her food around her plate and kept chewing. She won’t raise her hand or look up, unless it’s a quiz question.
Dad quizzes us every night, even when the wind blows and we can’t hear what he’s saying. Sometimes the wind is so bad, I raise my hand and ask him to say it again. Dad asks weird questions about Ecuador and how many people live in Greenland. I don’t know and sometimes I don’t want to look it up. Dad smiles and winks at Mom when we don’t know the answers. He keeps going, even when the wind comes through the cracks and Mom’s hair blows around her face and Sis’ braids move to the left. He keeps talking and we keep chewing. Even though the wind makes his eyes water and his nose itch. He won’t stand up, even when his napkin flies into the air. He just reaches for more rice and peas and oxtail soup and Mom goes into the kitchen to get another napkin.
I don’t invite friends over for dinner. How do you explain napkins flying around the room and the table floating and everyone acting like they’re from the 1800’s? Then there’s the clean-up. Mom says to scrub everything clean, in case visitors come. Even after dinner. She says we should be grateful we live in a nice house; nicer than the one they had back home. One time I said, but you don’t even like this house. She told me to hush. When Sis almost fell through the bedroom floor, I ran to the kitchen and told Mom. She told me to hush. She said she wasn’t superstitious and neither was Dad and only country people believe in duppies. I said I wasn’t talking about duppies, I was talking about the house. She told me to send Sis downstairs, but she didn’t care if I fell through the floor. I went back upstairs and leaned my head against the wall. Then I put my hand on the bubbly wallpaper and rubbed it like it was a puppy’s tummy. It was quieter that night. And Mom didn’t cry when she went into the bathroom.
Mom said I came into the world too early. Maybe the house came too early and they hammered it too hard and turned it into something tall and lopsided. Sis doesn’t like it when I talk like that. She sticks out her arm like a crossing guard. She won’t admit she lifted off the floor while she was studying. She says she fell asleep and just had a bad dream. I told her I was awake and saw it and she was awake and she knows it. Mom was awake when the wallpaper ripped after she fixed it three times. And we all heard her scream when the tree came down—crack—on the driveway. Dad said he’d handle it, then kissed his teeth like grandma. He fixed his face, then made a bunch of phone calls.
I said we should go to a hotel where nothing moves except the elevator. Mom told me to hush. So, I told the rest to Sis. I said we’d take the elevator to the roof and look around. We’d eat junk food and drop water balloons and not get in trouble because we were too high up. We’d invite our friends over and look at the lights and the cars and all the Americanized people. Then Mom and Dad would calm down and smile like they used to when they talked about fresh-picked mango and festival bread. Sis would dance and I would ask everything I wanted to know without raising my hand or scrubbing myself clean.
Darlene Eliot was born in Canada and grew up in Southern California. Her work has appeared in Bellingham Review, Heavy Feather Review, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere.
