But instead of smiling back, Gwen said, “I think you should be careful not to lord it over people just because you have a big house.” And without another word she stalked out of the house, got on her bike, put on her headlight, and rode off.
Good god.
I stayed in the doorway, staring after her, wondering who was crazy, she or I. Then I ran, got my purse, ran down to the Buick, hopped in, started up the motor, and drove after her. Sure enough, there she was, pedaling along the road for all she was worth. Pulling up beside her and going at the same speed as she, I leaned out and called,
“What in god's name did I do now?”
Saying nothing, merely pedaling, she kept on.
“Look,” I said. “This is a small town and we all have to be on good terms. You'll find it's not like the city; you can't be so choosy. Now what did I say? I don't get it.”
After a time Gwen said, “Just go back to your big house.”
“You know you're welcome in my house,” I said.
“Sure,” she said.
“You are,” I said. “Honest to god you are. What do I have to do to prove it to you? Do I have to get down on my knees and beg you to come back? Okay, if I have to I will. I beg you to come back and talk like an adult and stop acting like a child. What's the matter with you two, are you adults, a married couple, or are you a pair of children?” Now I had raised my voice. “This whole thing is too much for me,” I called to her. “Why can't we be friends? I'm just crazy about you and your husband. How did all this dissension get started?”
After a long time Gwen said, “Well, maybe we're both too sensitive about looking so young.”
“God!” I said. “I wish I looked as young as you. I wish to heaven I looked so young. You're both adorable; you're like something from heaven. We never saw such a beautiful couple before. I'd like to hug both of you—I wish I could adopt you or something. Please come back. Look,” I said, driving as close to her bike as possible. “Let's go pick up your husband, and I'll drive you over to the Western and we'll have a seafood dinner. Have you had dinner? Or we'll go to the Drake's Arms and have dinner there. Please. Let me take you out to dinner. As a favor to me.” I got my most wheedling tone.
Finally, she weakened. “You don't have to take us out to dinner.”
“Have you ever been to the Drake's Arms? We'll play darts—I tell you what: I'll challenge both of you, a dollar a game. I can beat anybody except Oko himself.”
In the end she gave in. I loaded her bike into the back of the car and her into the front seat beside me—she was steaming with perspiration from the exertion of biking—and picked up speed. Now I felt happy, really happy, for the first time in months. I felt I had genuinely accomplished something, breaking down the barriers and getting to these fine, handsome people who were so shy, so sensitive, so easily hurt. In my mind I swore an oath that I'd be more careful and not insult them in my usual big-footed way. Now that I had humbled—in fact humiliated—myself to recapture their friendliness, I did not want to throw it away.
And you know how you are, Fay, I said to myself. You know how your witless tongue gets you into trouble; you always say anything that comes into your mind, without any thought for the consequences.
“When you get to know me better,” I told her, “you'll learn not to pay any attention to me. I'm a crude, vulgar person. I remember one day in the public library I said the word ‘fuck’ in front of a librarian. I could have died. I could have sunk through the floor. I never went back; I never could look at her again.”
Gwen laughed slightly, I thought a little uneasily.
“I pick up language like that from Charley,” I explained, and then I described his factory to her, how many men he employed, what he netted in a year. She seemed to be interested, to some extent at least.
7
The ride up to their house in Marin County made me carsick, due to the sharp turns through Samuel P. Taylor Park. On each turn I thought Charley was going to leave the road. Both he and Fay knew the road so well that they knew exactly how far up they could push the gas pedal on each turn. One mile an hour more and the car would have gone off into the creek. At one time he hit sixty miles an hour. Most drivers would have had to take it at twenty-five, especially those weekend drivers who putter along. And Charley used the whole road, not just his lane; he went all the way over to the shoulder on the far side. He seemed to know whether a car was coming or not, even though I could see nothing but trees. Fay did not show any signs of nervousness, beside him in the front seat; in fact she seemed to be half asleep.
But around me all my goods slid and rocked. What an odd sensation it was, to have them with me in motion, not back at the room. For all intents and purposes I had given up my room; now I was going to live with my sister and her husband, at their house—I had no actual place of my own. It was like going back to childhood, and I felt depressed and uncomfortable. However, the scenery cheered me up. And I knew, from their description, what sort of a house it was; I knew that it was very swanky, with all the latest gadgets.
To keep my spirits up I thought of the animals. At one time during high school I had worked for a veterinarian, sweeping out, cleaning the cages, helping people bring their pets in from their cars, feeding the animals boarded there, getting rid of dead animals. I had enjoyed being around the animals. And long ago, when I was about eleven, I had spent a lot of time catching insects and making analyses of them. I had taken apart those giant yellow slugs. I used to catch flies and hang them from loops of thread … however the weight of the fly's body was usually too slight to close the noose, so I usually had to pull down on the fly. At that point the fly's eyes would pop from his head and his head would come off.
When we arrived at the house Charley helped me carry my boxes of possessions indoors and to a room in the rear that they had decided to present me for my use. Evidently they had used it for storage; we had to carry out one armload after another of garden tools, children's discarded games and toys, even a bed that the collie dog had spent time in.
Shutting myself in the room I began putting my clothes in the closet and setting out my things, trying to give this new room an air of familiarity. With scotch tape I put up various important facts on the walls. I inserted items from my rock collection into the corners. Last of all, for a time I put my head in the bag containing my collection of milk bottle tops and breathed in the rich, sour odor of the bottle tops, a smell that had been with me since the fourth grade. That raised my spirits and I looked out of the window for the first time.
Dinner that night made me conscious of the luxury in which my sister was now living. Outdoors on the patio she had Charley broiling t-bone steak in a charcoal pit, while inside she fixed hors d'oeuvres of minced clams and cream cheese baked on English muffins, martinis, avocado salad, baked potatoes, Italian beans from their freezer that they had originally grown themselves … and, for dessert, huckleberries that they had picked the summer before somewhere out near the Point. They had coffee; the two children and I had milk. And the children and I had whipped cream on our huckleberries.
After dinner I carried the children around on my back, while Fay and Charley sat in the living room having a second martini and listening to longhair music on the hi-fi. In the fireplace they had a fire of oak logs from the cord stacked up near the side of the house. I don't think I have ever enjoyed such comfort, and I threw myself into playing with the girls, getting a great kick out of swinging them around, tossing them high up and recatching them, hiding from them and letting them find me. Their yells seemed to annoy Fay and all at once she got up to go put the dishes in the automatic dishwater.
Later I helped put the children to bed. I read a story to them from the Oz book. It made me feel strange to be reading one of the stories that I knew so well … books so much a part of my life, and these children had not even been born until the 'fifties. They hadn't even been alive during World War Two.
I realized that this was the first time I had eve
r had anything to do with children.
“You sure have nice kids,” I said to Fay, after we had left the children's rooms.
Fay said, “Everybody says that, so it must be true. Personally I find them a lot of work. You enjoy playing with them, but after they've pestered you day in day out for years—wait'U you've got up every morning at seven and fixed breakfast for them.”
Fixing breakfast was one thing my sister hated; she liked to lie in bed late, until nine or ten, and with the girls in school she had no choice but to get up early. Charley of course had to be off to his factory, so he could not take the responsibility of dressing the girls, brushing their hair, preparing their lunches, seeing that they had their books and so forth. After a week or so I found that I did not mind getting up early and setting the table, putting on water for the Cream of Wheat, making the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and filling the thermos jugs with tomato soup, opening the drapes, frying bacon, cutting open the grapefruit, buttoning the girls' dresses, and then, after I had served breakfast to them, clearing the table, washing the dishes, taking out the garbage and trash, and finally sweeping the floor around the breakfast table. Meanwhile Charley got shaved, dressed, ate his soft boiled egg, toast and coffee, and set off for Petaluma. At nine or so Fay got up, took a shower, dressed, carried a cup of coffee and a dish of applesauce out on to the patio, ate, read the Chronicle—if somebody had thought to go out and get it for her—and then sat by herself smoking a cigarette.
Not only did I enjoy fixing breakfast, but I also enjoyed baby-sitting in the evenings, and that was a godsend for Fay. It meant that once again she could begin getting out and visiting people; she could get down to the Bay Area to movies and plays and classes, she could even go three times a week to her analyst in San Francisco instead of only once, and because they did not have to worry about keeping me up late, as they had had to with teenage baby-sitters, they could stay as late in the city as they wanted, going to parties or bars. And on Friday morning I went with my sister to Petaluma and carried the groceries for her, putting everything away when we got home and even burning the leftover bags and cartons in the incinerator.
In exchange for all this I got truly wonderful meals, and I got to ride the horse and play games with the kids. A metal pole had been erected outdoors for tether ball, and the children and I played tether ball almost every afternoon. I got really skilled at it.
“You know,” Charley said to me once, “you missed your vocation. You should have been a playground director or worked for the YMCA. I never saw anybody take to kids so. The noise doesn't bother you. That's what bothers me.” In the evenings he always looked tired.
I said, “I think parents should spend more time with their kids.”
“How can they help it?” Fay said. “Good god, the kids are underfoot all the time. Kids grow up better if adults don't interfere with them too much. They should be let alone.” She was glad to have me baby-sit and play with the girls, but she did not approve of my mixing into the continual quarrels that the girls had with each other. She had always simply let them fight it out, but I soon saw that the older girl, being more advanced intellectually and much heavier physically, always won. It was not fair, and I felt required to step in.
“The only way kids can learn what's justice is if adults teach them,” I said to Fay.
“What do you know about justice?” Fay said. “Here you are up here in my house freeloading. How'd you get up here anyhow?” She glared at me with that half-serious, half-joking exasperation that I was familiar with; she had this way of mixing a serious statement in with irony so that it was never possible to tell how seriously she meant what she said. “Who brought you here?” she demanded.
In my own mind I had no guilt. I was giving back plenty for what I took; I did a great deal of Fay's housework for her, and by baby-sitting I made it possible for them to save a lot of money. On an average, baby-sitting alone had run them three dollars a night, and over a period of a month this sometimes added up to sixty or seventy dollars. All these figures I recorded in my notebooks; I calculated how much I cost them and how much I saved them. The only real cost that I added to their budget was that of food. But I was not eating sixty dollars worth of food a month, so by baby-sitting alone I earned my keep. I didn't add appreciably to the heating bills, or the water, although of course I did bathe and wash, and my clothes had to be put into the automatic washer. And I went around turning off lights not in use, and lowering thermostats when people left rooms, so in my estimation—such a thing is admittedly very hard to estimate— I actually saved them money on their utility bills. And by riding the horse I prolonged his life, since, not being ridden, he was getting overly fat, which put an unnatural strain on his heart.
More than anything else, however, and something that could not be calculated in dollars and cents, I improved the atmosphere regarding the children. In me they had someone who cared about them, who enjoyed playing with them and listening to them and giving them affection—I did not consider it a duty or a chore. I took them on long walks, bought them bubble gum at the store, watched “Gunsmoke” with them on tv, cleaned up their rooms.
And that's another thing: by doing heavy household work such as scrubbing the floors I made it possible for Fay to let Mrs. Mendini, her cleaning woman, go. Consider that Mrs. Mendini's presence had always annoyed Fay; she felt that Mrs. Mendini was listening to everything anybody said, and Fay had always liked privacy. That was one of her major motives for desiring a large house isolated in the country.
One Saturday afternoon when Fay had gone into San Rafael to shop, and the two girls were over at Edith Keever's place playing with her children, Charley started talking to me out in the field by the duck pen. He had been running a new pipe to the ducks' water trough.
“Doesn't it bother you to do housework?” he asked me.
“No,” I said.
“I don't think a man should do that kind of stuff,” he said. Later on he said, “I don't think that the girls should see a man doing it either. It gives them the idea a man can be bossed around by a woman.”
To that, I said nothing; I could think of nothing pertinent.
Charley said, “She can't get me to do her god damn errands.”
“I see,” I said politely.
“ A man has to keep his self-respect,” Charley said. “Doing housework robs him of his masculinity.”
I had noticed, almost as soon as I had moved in with them, how touchy Charley was with her. He seemed to resent her asking him to do anything, even helping her around the garden. One night, when she asked him to open a can or a jar for her—I didn't see it clearly, although I came in from my room to watch—he blew up, threw the jar down on the floor, and started calling her names. I noted that in my records, because I could perceive a pattern.
Once a week or so Charley would go off by himself, usually down to the Western Bar, or a bar in Olema that he liked, and get tanked up on beer. That seemed to be his system for getting his resentment of my sister out in the open; otherwise it merely simmered away down inside him, making him quarrelsome and moody. But when he had had a few drinks he could threaten her physically. I never saw him actually hit her, but I could tell by her response, when he came home from the bar, that at such times she was genuinely afraid of him. I don't think she realized why he drank, that he was releasing stored-up resentment; she thought of it more as a character defect on his part, and possibly a defect common with all men.
Each time he went off drinking she became more businesslike with him. She shafted him with quiet, rational upbraiding. Over a period of time she managed to convince him that there was something wrong with him for going out and drinking and coming home and taking a few swings at her; instead of viewing it as a simple means of working off steam she chose to consider it a symptom of some deep pervasive—even dangerous—malformation in him.
Or possibly she only pretended to think that. In any case it was her policy to regard him as a malformed man, one who
should be matched, and by talking along this line she made hay from each of his binges. The more he resisted her by going out and getting drunk and coming home and taking a swing at her, the more she built up this picture of him, and it was a picture that when not drunk he, too, had to accept. The household was pervaded by this atmosphere of a calm adult woman and a man who gave in to his animal impulses. She reported to him in great detail what her analyst, Dr. Andrews in San Francisco, said about his binges and his hostility; she used Charley's money to pay Dr. Andrews to catalog his abnormalities. And of course Charley never heard anything directly from the doctor; he had no way of keeping her from reporting what served her and holding back what did not. The doctor, too, had no way to get at the truth of what she told him; no doubt she only gave him the facts that suited her picture, so that the doctor's view of Charley was based on what she wanted him to know. By the time she had edited it both going and coming there was little of it outside her control.
Like any slob, Charley grumbled at her going to the doctor and at the same time took as holy writ whatever she reported. Any man who charged twenty dollars an hour had to be good.
Sometimes I asked myself what she was up to, if anything. I had nothing to do in the early afternoons, after I had done the lunch dishes, and I now and then sat around and watched her mold clay pots or knit or read; she had turned out to be a good-looking woman, although she had little or no bust line, and she had this big modern house, with ten acres, and all the rest of it—beyond any doubt she was unhappy. But she wanted something she lacked. After a month or so I came to the conclusion that she simply wanted Charley to be different from what he was; she had a deeply ingrained image of what a husband should be like—she was always very choosy—and although in some respects he met her requirements, in others he did not. For instance, he had enough money to build this house, and he did most of the things she wanted. And he was reasonably good-looking. But for one thing he was a slob, and there has always been this aristocratic, disapproving, judging tendency in Fay. It showed up strongly in high school when she began to work toward going to college; she took courses in literature and history and felt that the girls who took cooking courses—and the boys who took shop courses—were the riffraff of the world.