Haywire by Brooke Hayward (android based ebook reader .txt) 📕

There were three red barns, as Mother had described in her letters, scattered around the property: the main barn, large enough to contain a hayloft and sheep pen, to which we added a modern annex for milking the cows; an adjacent barn where the tractor and other heavy machinery were kept; and, off to the other side of the house, a third barn, which was a general storeroom for tools, paints, and carpentry equipment. There was even a fourth barn, considered to be a unique feature, because at some point it had been converted into complete guest quarters and linked to the main house itself by a series of interconnecting service rooms. These rooms—a laundry room, a storage pantry, and a dairy room—were, in a form of reverse snobbism, our favorite part of the house. They had a peculiar quality of seeming to be the center, the heart of the house, and at the same time the stillest place in it. The floors were paved with flagstone, ground down by age and wear to a fine cool smoothness, unlike any other surface our bare feet encountered inside or out.

The main house was a rambling colonial structure built in 1781 and skillfully renovated in the thirties. Every room retained its original fireplace or stove, wide-planked pine floors, and low ceilings punctuated with exposed beams. Leading up to the bedrooms were two angular staircases, tilted with age and impossible to go up or down except in single file. Over everything ran a vast attic, cedar-lined and studded with dormer windows that, like a captain’s walk, commanded a 360-degree view of the countryside. The attic was the only place in the house that could resist Mother. She repeatedly attacked it with the intention of transforming it into a playroom for the three of us, but was always defeated by the unbearable summer heat or winter cold that it sucked in from every direction.

She had her way everywhere else. As if lifted from the pages of an exhaustive botanical catalogue, flowers of every color or variety, single-stemmed or in bouquets, were strewn across all the walls of all the rooms; floral chintzes covered every chair and couch, flower-printed curtains hung from every window. The house was filled with braided or hooked rugs, rustic colonial furniture, hurricane lamps, and a second profusion of flowers from the cutting garden—roses, tiger lilies, peonies, snapdragons, sweet peas—bunched on each table in every room.

Father couldn’t stand any of it. The flowers gave him terrible hay fever. We could tell exactly what room he was in by following the explosive sound of his sneezes. “A-a-a-a-choo! A-a-a-a-choo!” They had a unique cadence, starting with a prolonged howl of agony and ending like a violent expletive. Mother teased him mercilessly and called him a hypochondriac as, room by room, he sank limply into one flowered chintz chair or another, wiping his eyes with a soggy handkerchief and gulping down antihistamines by the handful. His legion of allergies had no place in her scheme of things, and besides that, it was important that he set a good example to the three of us, to whom, worst of all, he had passed them on in one dire form or another. Something about Brookfield, Connecticut, not only instantaneously activated them but bred new, unheard-of mutations.

“Just my luck,” Father would moan, secretly pleased at the power of his genes and also the fact that he was not altogether alone in his misery. “A case of god-awful history repeating itself right under my nose—a nose that can hardly breathe any more, by the way, it’s so damned stuffed up, thanks to the fifty different kinds of pollen that have contaminated my respiratory system. Well, it may be too soon to tell whether the three children have inherited any of my good points, but by God it’s obvious by now they’ve inherited all of the bad, poor things—it’s triple jeopardy.”

To Bridget he bequeathed his skin, a skin so sensitive that it would break out in hideous rashes or eczema or hives at the suggestion of an allergen wafting through the air an acre away. Hives were one of Father’s specialties. He got them from eating strawberries or shellfish. Once he was put in charge of Bridget and me for one of our cross-country trips from New York to California (“Make sure they brush their teeth twice a day and wash their hands before meals and change their dresses once in a while and go to bed at a reasonable hour,” Mother warned him), and, in a reckless gesture before assuming his unaccustomed duties, he treated himself and us to strawberry sundaes (“God, I’m going to regret this,” he said); as the train left Grand Central Station, his eyes began to puff up with red blotches and then, inch by inch, the rest of his body. For some reason he had forgotten to bring his ever-ready pigskin suitcase stuffed with pill bottles and ointments like a miniature pharmacy (and outfitted with a collapsible stand on which Father could perch it while he pored over its contents); so, unmedicated, he rolled himself up in a sheet and retired to his berth in our private compartment, where he lay like a caterpillar in a cocoon without saying a word for the entire four days and three nights. Bridget and I had a wonderful time running up and down the aisles and ordering whatever we wanted in the elegant dining car; occasionally we would prod Father into a semi-sitting position, pry his swollen lips open with a soup spoon or straw, and siphon liquids into him. Emily and Bill met us in Los Angeles, and we went straight from the train station to the doctor’s office.

However, it was Bridget who polished off the topic of hives in our family, carrying it to extremes Father had never dreamed of. Inexplicably she got them for the first time at lunch soon after we arrived in Brookfield, gorging on fresh