Colette Maitland - Keeping the Peace
Grocery bags hang like ballast from Sybil’s wrists as she treads across the five patio stones that lead from the curb to the front door of her cheaply built, hastily rented townhouse. It took Sybil less than twenty-four hours to regret her signature on the twelve month lease—the length of time it took for her to discover that there was no soundproofing between the units.
A young couple with a baby, Lisa and Taylor, live in the unit to her right. They argue all the time. Lisa spends too much goddamn money, Taylor doesn’tmake enough. He pays no attention, what so ever, to his own son, she spoils the kid rotten. Why did she have to go and get herself knocked up in the first place? How stupid do you have to be in this day and age to let something like that happen? Stupid is as stupid does. What the fuck is that supposed to mean? Go to hell, Taylor. Go straight to hell! So far, Sybil has not seen or heard anything that would require her to place an anonymous call to the police—no black eyes or bruises, no furniture smashed against the common walls of their housing unit. And the baby is beautiful.
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She gives them six months.
The plastic handles of the grocery bags are digging trenches into her wrists by the time she hoists them onto the kitchen counter. Normally, she would have made two trips to the car, but it is almost eleven o’clock and she doesn’t want to miss the start of the televised memorial service. Armed with a brand new box of tissues, Sybil slips into the living room.
“Gwen?” she calls.
No answer. She must have got the job. Good.
Sybil locates the remote beneath a pile of newspapers. She pushes a red button and tunes in to collective grief.
A new century, a different mission, another country, and still the same old story. Two Canadian soldiers this time: a private and a corporal—with two wives, one ex-wife and five children back at home, killed in their sleep by a rocket propelled grenade which punctured the tin can wall of their temporary barrack—their ‘little home away from home,’ as Martin used to call
it—before blowing them to bits.
The families sit in the first few rows: spouses, children and grandparents, brothers, sisters and in-laws, aunts, uncles, and cousins. The politicians take up the row directly behind—a sandbar in a sea of sadness, they separate family from friends.
“It’s really sick that you watch these things, you know,” Gwen would say if she were here right now. “Wasn’t living through it once enough for you? God!” Then off she would go, stomping upstairs to her room or out to the local piercing salon to have another hole put in her face.
Martin’s death was singular and pre-911, before grief became everybody’s business. No one asked to
televise it. No politicians came forward at the end of the service to hug Sybil or to touch a hand to the top of Gwen’s French braided hair. The truth is that Sybil can remember very little about Martin’s funeral service, other than holding tight to Gwen and feeling an overwhelming thirst. Sedatives have a way of doing that to a person.
She doesn’t know why she watches.
