Chapter 6: Monday

A loud rustling sound in my room woke me from a deep sleep. I bolted upright in my bed, convinced I was being attacked in my own bedroom. I quickly discovered that my light was on and there was Mum, dressed in her long flannel nightie, spreading plastic over my carpet and belongings. I blinked against the light, trying to wake up, and squinted at my clock. It was four in the morning!

“Mum! What the heck are you doing?” I bleated. I also swore a bit, but I did that inside my head. Mum hates people swearing and I wasn’t silly enough to swear right at her, even after being woken up in the middle of the night.

“Hush dear, go back to sleep. You don’t have to get up yet.”

“Mum, it’s the middle of the night! What are you doing??” I asked again in the vague hope I might get some sort of rational answer.

“When I was in here yesterday, I noticed the wallpaper in this room is far too young for you. You’re becoming a young woman. You need a bedroom to match. I thought we could start by painting the walls. How about that nice soft lemon color we used in your sister’s room. Would you like that? We have some spare tins of that color paint so it’s no trouble.”

I looked at my walls. Okay, so the wallpaper was covered with little unicorns and mermaids and stuff like that. It had been there when we moved into the house and I remember saying at the time that I liked it, so it got left as it was. Sure, now that I was nearly thirteen it wasn’t so cool. It would be nice to have new walls, but it was hard to think clearly at that time of the day.

“Mum, it’s four o’clock in the morning. Couldn’t you have waited?”

“Hush dear. I decided to start early so I could get it all done in one day. That way you don’t have to put up with too much disruption. Now lie down and go back to sleep.”

With that, she spread a big plastic sheet right over my bed, with me still in it. I scooted out from underneath the plastic and stumbled to my feet. I was too sleepy to argue and I suspected I wouldn’t get anywhere if I did. I thought briefly about asking for a different color but despite her questions, Mum didn’t seem too interested in my opinions. My best plan seemed to be to get out of her way and let her do her thing. Dad had said she might start painting. I think we all figured she’d go out to her studio and paint pictures, not charge into my room and paint my walls. I tucked my pillow under one arm and hauled the blankets off my bed.

I sighed and plodded out into the dark of the living room, trailing blankets behind me. I dropped onto the couch, dragged the blankets over me and buried my head in my pillow. A brief thought raced through my brain, something about putting paint on top of wallpaper, but I was asleep before the thought actually made it to anywhere useful.

This time I woke when a heavy weight dropped on top of me. It took me a moment to figure out that I was on the couch and the wriggling, giggling mass on top of me was Angie. Okay, she wasn’t that heavy but her jumping on me when I was fast asleep had scared the sh ... um, scared the stuffing out of me. There was light filtering in through the curtains from outside, even though the sun wasn’t up yet, so that meant it was nearly time to wake up, but I really wasn’t ready to face the day. Angie gave me a sloppy, wet, good morning kiss, right on my mouth and gabbled for a moment about something. Sometimes you really have to concentrate to figure out what she’s saying and I wasn’t in a fit state to listen that hard.

I groaned and rolled onto my stomach with my face firmly buried in my pillow, hoping she would take the hint and go away and leave me in peace to sleep a bit longer. I guess I was being too subtle for a three year old because she grabbed the remote and switched on the TV and then expertly changed the channels to her favorite cartoon station. Then she sat down right on top of my blanket-covered back, wriggled her butt a few times to get comfortable and leaned back to watch some animated blobs chase each other around the screen, all the time swapping between giggling at the TV, poking me in the back, and telling me in some detail what the characters on TV were doing. I think she decided she needed to tell me since I was so obviously not watching.

Next thing I knew, Dad was in the room, lifting Angie off the top of me and plopping her down on the floor. The cartoon had changed so I must have dozed off, despite everything Angie was doing to stop that from happening.

“Good morning sunshine, what are you doing out here? Is your bed not good enough for you any more?”

“Morning, Dad,” I muttered sleepily, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes. “I got kicked out of my room when Mum decided to paint my walls in the middle of the night.”

“Ah is that where she got to? I wondered where she was.” Dad paused to straighten his tie that Angie had pulled to the side, before wandering off in the direction of my room to look for Mum.

I rolled myself off the couch and staggered to my feet. I was standing there trying to wake up when Dad returned. He scowled at the sight of me standing there in my pyjamas. “You better go get yourself dressed. I’ll go start getting breakfast organized. What do you want?”

I grabbed my blanket off the couch and wrapped it around myself. “Cereal is fine. Thanks, Dad.” I turned and headed to my room, half the blanket trailing behind me on the floor like the train on a wedding gown.

In my room, Mum had made some impressive progress. One wall was completely painted and a second wall was half done. Mum was perched on the chair from my dresser, reaching up to paint the section of wall above my mirror. She had spots of paint on her face and in her hair. There was also a big streak of lemon-colored paint down the side of her nightie. Mum didn’t even acknowledge my presence. She kept slopping on the paint. I pushed my blanket into a pile under the plastic sheet spread over my bed. Then I raided my closet for an armful of clothes and headed out of the room. Glancing into my mirror as I passed it, I could see enough of myself around Mum’s legs to cause me to do an about-face and go back to my dresser. At my dresser, I grabbed my hair brush and slipped a hair band around my wrist.

Pausing briefly to bang on Tara’s door and yell at her to get up, I locked myself in the bathroom to change. I was dressed, had brushed my teeth and had started to brush my hair when I heard Tara thump into the other side of the bathroom door. I quickly dumped my pyjamas in the clothes hamper and scampered out of the bathroom to finish brushing my hair in the living room. Angie wanted to help but her hands were sticky and I had to keep moving around the room to keep her sticky hands out of my hair. Finally I was done and could tie my hair back with the band I had earlier slipped around my wrist.

During breakfast, Dad said that he would phone Mum’s work when he got to the power plant and let them know she would be unavailable for a couple of days. Mum does graphic design stuff for an advertising company. She only actually goes in to work occasionally; she does most of the work from home and sends in her designs over the internet or by courier. That means that normally she is home to look after Angie during the day. Today Dad wanted us to take Angie to daycare for the day on our way to school. Dan offered to drive us to daycare then on to school, provided we didn’t make him late for his first morning class. Dad left for work while we were finishing breakfast.

I made a bowl of cereal for Mum and took it in to her but she just grunted and waved at my dresser with a dripping paintbrush. I put the bowl of cereal on my dresser and hoped she wouldn’t forget it. By this time, Mum was down on her knees beside my mirror, carefully painting up beside it. It’s a full length mirror fixed to the wall. Dad put it up for me when we moved in. Since then, in all that time, I’ve probably only spent a total of ten minutes looking at myself in it. I know what I look like! I don’t need to remind myself by looking in the mirror.

Imagine that! A girl who doesn’t stare at herself in the mirror! Shhh! Don’t tell anyone or they’ll kick me out of the girls’ club!

Looking at Mum painting away, I made a sudden decision. I raced out of my room and grabbed the key for Mum’s studio from its hook in the kitchen. Slipping on my shoes, I headed out the back door and down to the shed at the bottom of the yard. Inside, about half the space was taken up with Mum’s drafting boards and the computer for her graphic design job, plus a play area for Angie for when Mum was working in there. The other half was the space with her easels and stuff for her painting. Her painting is her hobby. She’s pretty good, but not like a professional. Every so often she gets to sell one of her paintings at a local show. It’s pretty exciting when that happens.

The one she sold for the most money so far was a portrait of Dad, wearing blue jeans and no shirt, holding me when I was about five. I have no clothes on at all and my butt is hanging out for the world to see. Mum talks about how it’s a lovely contrast of my pale skin and soft lines against Dad’s darker skin and the hard muscles on his chest and arms. Dad looks pretty buff, but all I see is my naked butt! There’s a print of it up in the house, but I make The Parents keep it in their room. It’s too embarrassing to have it where people can see it. It gives me the creeps thinking that some anonymous person has a painting of my naked, five year old butt hanging on their living room wall. The funny thing is that I can’t imagine Dad ever actually stripping off his shirt and holding a naked me like that. He doesn’t do stuff like that. Maybe Mum painted it from her imagination.

Once I got into Mum’s studio, I grabbed some of her painting clothes that she keeps in a cupboard out there, and then I headed back indoors. I made sure to re-lock the studio door, of course. Back in my room, I got between Mum and the wall and pushed her firmly away from the wall so she had to stop painting.

“What?” she asked, looking confused.

“Let’s get you out of this nightie, Mum! It’s got paint on it already and we don’t want to let it get ruined.”

Mum stood there, the paint brush held out from her side, with paint dripping onto the plastic. I gently took it out of her hand and put it down on the lid of the paint tin. Then, I undid the buttons down her chest and lifted the nightie off over her head. Mum stood there and let me undress her like a child. With the nightie off, she stood there in just her panties and looked over at the wall she’d painted. Mum wasn’t wearing a bra, and I glanced at her breasts, remembering the comments Dad had made about them yesterday. Like he said, they were fairly small compared to those others on the web site. They were round and sagged down a bit but I figured they looked pretty nice. Then I felt a bit weird when I realized I was standing looking at my mother’s naked boobs. I grabbed her painting shirt and carefully guided her arms into the sleeves. Finally I was able to button up the shirt, covering up Mum’s boobs with a little sigh of relief.

The whole time, Mum hadn’t reacted at all. She was now looking at the wall she’d painted with her head tilted a bit to the side. I grabbed the scarf I’d brought in and tied it around her hair, then carefully got her to step into an old paint-speckled pair of slacks. Mum made some comment while I was concentrating on doing up the zipper on her slacks.