![]() The slow realization that came to me was that such a regime could be quite agreeable. Even if he was at his practice next door, or out on a call, things had to be ready for his approval at any moment. The house was his, the choice of menus his, the radio and television programs his. Being sick, sulking, messing up the house, wanting food he didn’t like. Getting in Uncle Jasper’s way, whining for a corner of their mother’s attention. Of course it would have been quite different, my mother said, if they’d had children. But I had not seen before a woman of whom it seemed so true as Aunt Dawn. This was something that was said at the time, and it was not always meant as disparagement. Or, more dryly, “Her life revolves around that man.” “Dawn’s life is devoted to her husband,” my mother had said, with an attempt at neutrality. My brothers, even the one who said he was thinking of becoming a Muslim so that he could chastise women, always listened to her as an equal authority. My mother would talk right over my father if she had something she really wanted to say, and that was often the case. Also hard to think of her as my mother’s sister, because she looked so much younger and fresher and tidier, as well as being given to those radiant smiles. to smile, so it was hard to think of her as being suppressed. ![]() What she did say was always cheerful, and she smiled just as soon as she knew it was O.K. ![]() Even if I spoke to her directly, she would wait, looking at him to see if he wanted to do the answering. She was used to holding back until she was sure that my uncle had said all that he meant to say. This may have been out of habit, rather than alarm at my forwardness. She would have waited until the bristling was over. It was probably then that my aunt picked up her fork and began to eat. “You don’t mean to tell me that? People who don’t say the Lord’s grace going over to Africa to minister to the heathen-think of that!” These words were delivered with fake amazement. Amen.” He wanted to know if my parents said a different prayer, perhaps at the end of the meal. “Surprised?” he said, after “for Jesus’ sake. “Lord bless this food to our use and us to thy service,” Uncle Jasper said, while I held my fork in midair and refrained from chewing the meat and potatoes that were already in my mouth. I had never bowed my head over a plate of food in my life. I was thirteen years old, living with him and my aunt for the year that my parents were in Africa. My uncle started off by teasing me about grace. The boys’ hair was longer than it had been, but not straggling down their backs, and there didn’t seem to be an unusual amount of liberation or defiance in the air. All this happened in the seventies, though in that town and other small towns like it the seventies were not as we picture them now, or as I had known them even in Vancouver.
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