‘Dress, Rehearse’ – by Laura Legge On her mother’s carpet, ridged and dark as a burned peach stone, Farah used to stage revenge tragedies with her older sister Faye. The whole community of Red Wing would congregate to watch, and their mother would fill their cups with a gift both still and sparkling. Now Farah sits on that same pilled carpet, watching wind thrash a window her mother has never curtained, leaving it bare as an exposed nerve. And the pain of this weather rouses her, as if the nerve is hers. After three years in federal, she is sensitive, intolerably sensitive, to wind and to light. Her mother, seventy, elegantly bearded, is on the phone with Faye in the kitchen. A condition of Farah’s release is that she will never again speak to Faye, with whom she committed the crime; and since Faye is suffering through two life sentences, this impossible amputation is, in fact, possible. So the kitchen is an icy island full of lemon curd and silver tins of tuna. Farah does not dare to enter. Better to cross legs on the carpet, where the storm may make her high teeth scream, but at least she is not a housebreaker. When her mother is done on the telephone, she brings Farah a ceramic of smoked tea, charred over pine tar. First we will make your spirit into velvet, she says. Then we will rinse you clean. No report of the kitchen heart-to-heart. She has been ordered to keep her girls’ lives separate. Plumes from the tea plumb her nose, haul at its little hairs. The world is both more muted and more intense than she remembers it being. This is her first view of it in daylight; last night, bitter car seat, blue notes on the radio, high-mast lights smudging at cap and base like wild tempera. They had arrived at midnight. Her mother had bundled her in a fire blanket and wound her down to an air bed in the basement, a place dawn and dayglow could not reach. Farah covers her mouth with a free hand, just as her mother goes to pour smoked tea into it. The result is a scald, a surface wound, and a rash of maternal guilt and irritation. Why did you do that? her mother asks. Everything would have been fine. Everything would have been so good for us. The tea has made a crooked stain on the carpet. Her mother’s voice is a jump rope and Farah has forgotten how the song goes, how and when she is meant to step. It is an old-new kind of talk. For three years, everything had slowed and simpled, you could spend days unraveling stories, you could make a morning of a mouth wash recipe. Anger was just anger, it was salty like a canteen noodle. Everything was so immense that nothing was big at all; a guard would force you to crawl and growl like a mutt, but you were not his only pet, so you could simply speak his name and expect your audience to understand. You said you would rinse me clean, Farah tells her mother. I would like that. With no soap, I would like that. And yes, this guess is precise––her mother wants to be needed. She beams. She gets a rag from the kitchen and tries to absorb what the rug has not already taken. Okay, my treasure, she says. Let’s get you to the laundry room. Surely she is misspeaking. The laundry room has an arctic floor and corners full of cobwebs; it is where clothes go when the bodies are removed from them. She must mean the bathroom, its radiant heater, its portrait of their put-down hound, the hook on the back of the door with its blue housecoat hanging. Maybe she has grown old since Farah last saw her. Maybe she is losing her language. But she leads her younger daughter to the laundry room, where she fills the industrial sink with water, not even pegging her finger under the faucet to check the temperature. She says, Okay, tadpole, the bath is ready whenever you are. Farah removes the institutional grey pullover but stops short of tugging off her shorts, cotton socks and jersey. Her thighs are furred and scarred, her upper arms turned fish-scale by rationed soap. Hives, blood blisters, a purple tick bite––what good could live inside such badly marked skin? Her mother seems, on some level, to understand. She moves to one corner and stands facing the cobwebs. Take some private time, she says. I’ll just be over here. So her mother starts to sing “Little Wheel Spin and Spin,” oblivious to how sincerely beautiful she is making the room, while Farah strips bare beside the industrial sink. She feels under the basin for a flannel cloth and with it scours her seams and hinges. Water itself is softer here. She flinches when the flannel catches open skin, but mostly the sensation is one of revival. Body-time is a birthright. Every woman deserves to be washed clean. Is that better, Faye? her mother asks. And then the room is glacial again, and the pipes are picked bones, and the bodies of deathwatch beetles are choking the floor drain. Farah, her mother says. Of course I meant Farah. It is too late. She has said what she has said, and the cloudland has broken with rain. Farah dries herself on a wool runner, the first piece of cloth she can find. Its tiny spines are barbaric. But she refuses to dress again in the institutional pullover, so she stays wrapped in the prickly runner. Her mother leaves the room long enough for the industrial sink to drain. She comes back with the blue housecoat and holds its sleeves wide open. Baby, she says. Don’t we all make mistakes? Such a cloth does not belong on Farah’s manikin of marks and lesions. Her matted hair, dripping wet, will pervert that perfect shade of blue. But her mother forces the robe around her, and the thorny runner falls to the ground. The silk is painkilling. Until she remembers the fatal stories she tells herself each day, she lives for a moment in that skin-deep pleasure. That evening, Farah ascends the basement stairs in a cotton tunic, clean but with furrow lines. Her mother has crowned the dining table with a ring of gold coin daisies, a ghost orchid in the centre. And adorned it with the tatted table linen, the mill of mustard seeds, all the extraordinary trappings Farah’s presence alone would not merit. This, not a word from her mother, is how she knows company is coming. The butter-notes of a roasted duck come ringing out of the kitchen. A one-two on the front door makes the daisies dance. Can you get that? her mother calls, over the hiss of ice plant in an oil bath. Farah flattens her tunic as she walks toward the door, a failed effort to look decent. Through the peephole she sees the neighbour’s daughter Euclide, who is Faye’s age and who grew up playing jackstones and Mother May I? with her. Euclide was a bramble then, dirty and tangled, while Faye and Farah were tended gardens. Now Euclide has a clean part in her red curls, a manmade path through a rose patch. Farah opens the door. Euclide stumbles backward, catching a corner of the welcome mat with her black-buckled shoe. I didn’t know you would be here, she says. Her tone is not unkind, but simply stark. Farah says, I didn’t know you would be here, either! She does not mean to cover that sentence in sauce. But it comes out anyway, dark, salty, masking her earnest intent. And Euclide, who had seemed on the verge of embracing her, arches her long spine. She walks past Farah into the cloakroom, where she tussles with her tight shoes and her silken cape, knotted tightly around her neck. She leaves both on the slate for Farah to tidy, which she does out of guilt while she listens to her mother rain flattery on their special visitor. They are in the kitchen, her mother and Euclide, Let me look at you, child, you are so beautiful, squash blossoms plunging into batter, Isn’t your face sweet as September, a knife on wood, a fork on a softened root. At the table there are four chairs, three with cushions cross-stitched by her late grandmother, one with a fraying rush seat. Of course, she waits patiently on the rush. A few minutes later, her mother leads Euclide from the kitchen. Euclide is holding the duck, bordered by port and blood oranges, while her mother is carrying a glass bowl of grilled flora––bush beans, squash blossoms, sunset chard. She disappears into the kitchen and returns with a palmful of fried ice plant, then scatters those little blushes onto each ashen plate. Help yourself, girls, she says. Farah should be grateful for this centerfold meal, the brown fowl with its necklace of fat beads, the loving cup of marigold wine. Instead she is nauseated by this breast her mother has carved. Euclide is heaping a mallard mountain onto her own plate, her lips parted as sharply as her hair. This looks delicious, she says, and eats without waiting for anyone’s grace. The conversation feels like a life sentence. Farah’s mother asks Euclide if she is still engaged to Faye’s childhood fling, that half-blind boy who’d always had his good eye on her, and Euclide flashes a fluorite ring.