Life Among the Savages

  My test, which I shall always believe was supposed to be a test of whether or not I could drive a car, I passed seemingly without effort, and with only one bad moment when, told to stop completely halfway up a hill which may well have been Mount Everest, I realized that the head inquisitor assumed with infinite amusement that I would be able to start again. He was a very patient man, and waited for several minutes, tapping his fingers gently against the window while I scoured my mind for Eric’s directions on starting a car on a hill. (“Swing your wheel sharp? Turn down your lights? Keep one foot on the clutch and one foot on the brake and one foot on the starter . . . ?”) “Well?” said the inquisitor, looking at me evilly.

  I gestured competently with one hand, keeping the other one locked to the wheel in some obscure belief that only my grip on the wheel kept the car from rolling back down the hill. “State law,” I said carelessly. “Child coming, can’t start.”

  He glanced at me briefly and then craned his neck out of the window to see where a boy about twenty was sauntering down the sidewalk. I had hoped to distract his attention, and did, but I then discovered that it is not possible to be surreptitious about starting a stalled car on a hill. I firmly believe that the inquisitor gave me a license only because he was sure I could never start a car and so could never become a substantial menace on the highways.

  Meanwhile, it had been decided who was to ride in front (Baby), I had learned to drive, the lessons had been paid for, and I had a little piece of official paper saying that I knew how to drive. We lacked only a car. This was adjusted by a gentleman who, saying he acted only from pure friendship, sold us one of his cars. He said he was very reluctant to part with it, particularly at that price, he said it was a better car than any of the new ones on the market, he praised its spark plugs and its birdlike appetite for oil.

  “The cigarette lighter doesn’t work,” I pointed out in a spirit of pure critical inquiry.

  “Neither does the clock,” said my husband.

  “And the fender is sort of caved in,” I added.

  “Tell you what I’ll do,” the man said. “I’ll pay for the license plates.”

  “Better get that cigarette lighter fixed right away,” my husband told me, as we surveyed our new car. “And the clock. Best to be on the safe side.”

  “I’ll have to find a place to get them fixed,” I said.

  “Can’t be too careful,” my husband said.

  I got into the car and reasoned out how to start it and drove with great caution, in the middle of the road, to a garage that could be reached without a left turn, and there I talked for quite a while with a young man covered with grease and oil who had “Tony” written across the front of him in big red letters. “Got a nice car there,” he said, after I had told him we had just bought it, and what we paid for it, and had added trustingly that I had just learned to drive and had never before owned a car and knew nothing about cars or motors or, as a matter of fact, driving. “You’re even going to have to tell me what gas to use,” I added laughingly.

  Tony nodded soberly. “But you got a real nice car there,” he insisted, “for the price you paid, you couldn’t get a better one. Needs a little attention, of course.” He laughed. “Wouldn’t be a car if it didn’t,” he told me.

  “Yes, I know,” I said. “The cigarette lighter—”

  “You take that clutch, for instance,” Tony said. He opened the door and pushed the pedal up and down reflectively. “Now I guess you don’t know anything about the clutch, do you?” he asked. I shook my head, and he went on, “Well, it’s a funny thing about the clutch. You go along for maybe one, two thousand miles and then all of a sudden . . .” He shrugged expressively. “You got a repair job costs you maybe two, three hundred dollars. Always better to get the clutch fixed in time, saves you money, expense, wear and tear.”

  “You mean I have to get something fixed?”

  He shrugged again. “You don’t need to, of course,” he said. “But you got to look at it this way. You got small children, you’re driving them around in the car, you’re not going to take chances with them.”

  Nervously I agreed that I was not going to take chances with my small children.

  “Well, then,” said Tony. “Now brakes are important, too.” He pushed the brake pedal down and shook his head sadly. “That guy sold you this car,” he said.

  “Is this going to be very expensive?” I asked.

  “Well, now,” Tony said, and laughed. “But let’s look it over and see just exactly what you need. No sense getting something you don’t need,” he said jovially.

  From then on, as nearly as I can remember, it was wheel alignment and something called camber or clamber or clabber, and wheel work was always expensive because every single car in the world except the make and model I owned had little adjustable pegs which could be fixed for next to nothing, but when Tony had to work with nonadjustable pegs, well, peg work was always expensive. Body work, too, would always set you back plenty, but it was the lives of my children I was taking in my hands if I let the fenders go.

  “You got to regard this as an investment,” Tony said earnestly. “Now, I wouldn’t be treating you fair if I let those spark plugs go, for instance. You’d say I played you a pretty dirty trick if you had to come back a month from now for a big repair bill, you’d say to me, ‘Tony, why didn’t you fix those spark plugs a long time ago before I had to pay this big repair bill?’ You see, it’s an investment now so’s it won’t cost you so much later. Now take the muffler.”

  “Muffler,” I said. Tony pointed to something under the car which I could not see.

  “You see that?” he said. “I guess you didn’t notice it before or you would of called it to my attention sooner. Lucky thing I saw it in time, I wasn’t looking for anything like that.”

  “What would have happened?” I asked him nervously.

  He shook his head. “Can’t ever tell,” he said. “Nothing might have happened—for a while. And then one day you’re going up a hill, car full of children . . .” He shook his head again. “And the brake lining,” he said. “And the ignition system.”

  I then made one of the bigger mistakes of my life. “How are the tires?” I asked.

  Tony laughed. “You call those tires?” he demanded. “Why, let me tell you, one day I saw a guy, had his two little children with him, and I said to him—”

  • • •

  Two weeks later I had my car back and we had managed to borrow enough extra money to pay the bill, upon which Tony had presumably retired to a little home in the hills to grow hollyhocks. The car looked and acted almost exactly the same except that the tank full of gas I had left in it was down almost to nothing. Tony said that was because they had to drive it in and out of the garage so many times.

  I took everybody, including the dog, for a ride, and we went around the block four or five times, congratulating one another upon our new mobility. I discovered that my former usual attitude of timid acquiescence was not consistent with someone who could drive a car, so I fell gradually into a new personality, swashbuckling and brazen, with a cigarette usually hanging out of one corner of my mouth because I had to keep both hands on the wheel. We began to make plans for driving across the country to visit Grandma and Grandpa in California.

  Some time later, while I, cigarette in the corner of my mouth, was stirring butterscotch pudding at the stove, and Laurie was glueing a model airplane at the kitchen table and Jannie was making double marshmallow chocolate ice cream pineapple coffee cake at her stove, Laurie raised his head and asked, “We’ve got a car now, haven’t we?”

  “We have,” I said. “Why?”

  “Why’d we get a car?” Laurie asked. “We never had one before.”

  “Daddy still walks for his haircut,” Jannie said to her stove.

  “That’s because he’s scared to get in the car,” Laurie said.
br />   “You know what I wish?” Jannie said. “I wish we had a airplane.”

  “Hey,” Laurie said, interested. “That would be good. I could ride on the wing and Baby—”

  “I could ride on the wing,” Jannie said immediately. “I’m—”

  “And what would I be doing?” I asked in a deadly voice.

  They both turned and looked at me, their sweet trusting little faces confident.

  • • •

  At this time, Laurie was seven and a half, Jannie was four and a half, and Sally was one and a half. We had been in our big old house for four years, and space which had at one time seemed vast had contracted into little more than enough to hold us and the children and the cats and the dog. We had a car, and we had taken to telling one another that we couldn’t imagine how we had ever got along without it. One of the left-hand pillars had begun to tremble during storms, and it was necessary to have it reenforced.

  It was when Jannie was very nearly five that the question of her name became desperately important. When she was born her father wanted to name her Jean and I wanted to name her Anne, and we compromised upon an arbitrary Joanne, although I frequently call her Anne and her father very often calls her Jean. Her brother calls her Honey, Sis, and Dopey, Sally calls her Nannie, and she calls herself, variously, Jean, Jane, Anne, Linda, Barbara, Estelle, Josephine, Geraldine, Sarah, Sally, Laura, Margaret, Marilyn, Susan, and—imposingly—Mrs. Ellenoy. The second Mrs. Ellenoy.

  The former Mrs. Ellenoy—I have this straight from my daughter—was a lovely woman, mother of seven daughters, all named Martha, and she and Mr. Ellenoy used to be very angry with one another, until one day they grew so very angry that they up and killed each other with swords. As a result my daughter is the new Mrs. Ellenoy and has inherited all the Marthas as stepdaughters. When she is not named Jean, Linda, Barbara, Sally, and so on, but is being Mrs. Ellenoy, her daughters are allowed to assume these names, so that there is a constant bewildering shifting of names among them, and it is sometimes very difficult to remember whether you are addressing Janey Ellenoy or a small girl with seven daughters named Martha.

  Since there is enough confusion in our house anyway, no one worries excessively about anyone else’s name. Laurie has recently taken a flat stand on being called Laurie, and insists upon being addressed as either Laurence or Sir. Sally was named Sarah when she started, got shortened to Sally, and immediately got into trouble with Sally Ellenoy, so now we call the one Baby and the other Sallyellenoy. Baby is unmistakable, as is Dog for the dog, since his name is Toby and Baby renamed him Bowowby and Laurence renamed him Trigger and Mrs. Ellenoy generally calls him Child. The two cats look exactly alike, so we call them Kitty, generally. I myself use two names, a maiden name professionally and a married name, and my husband, who is addressed in all variants of father from Pappy to Da, now answers to almost anything, even—being a man not easily thrown off balance—Mr. Ellenoy.

  In places where we have specific locations, such as our beds, or the dinner table, it is easy enough for us to address one another by facing the place we want. Equally, particular questions may be identified and caught by the person they most concern, so that something like “Did you know the bank called about that overdraft?” or “Didn’t I tell you to change into a clean dress?” or “Do you want to go outside again?” or “Did she eat up all her nice cereal?” can easily be answered by the correct character, without all the trouble of trying to remember a name, or the rudeness of pointing. It is only on such a general question as “Well, who hasn’t washed for dinner?” that the bitter matter of identification comes up.

  I know what they all look like, of course. The dog has four feet and is far larger than the cats, who operate as a two-part unit anyway. The boy is dirty and wears a disgraceful pair of blue jeans. The father looks worried and a little bit overwhelmed. The older daughter is larger than the younger daughter, although there is an uncanny shifting of identity there, since the smaller wears the clothes the larger wore a short while before, and they both have blond curls and blue eyes. But as to trying to remember, for instance, which two out of three have already had chicken pox and which one was innoculated for whooping cough and whether any given one of them got all three prescribed injections or one of them got nine, and, worst, which of the Ellenoy girls got spanked for breaking Laurence’s six-shooter and who told on her, I go all to pieces.

  For example: I glanced out of the kitchen window one Sunday morning and found my older daughter up to her knees in a mud puddle. “Joanne,” I said sharply, rapping on the glass in traditional manner with my wedding ring. She turned and smiled and I dried my hands on the dish towel and made for the back door. “What are you doing in that mud?”

  My daughter looked at me, amused. “This is Mrs. Ellenoy,” she said. “I’m over there.” And she pointed.

  One trouble about all this is that it is extraordinarily easy to be taken in by any particular statement.

  “Joanne,” I said, addressing the empty air where she was pointing, “get out of that mud puddle this minute.”

  “Get out at once,” Mrs. Ellenoy added emphatically. “Joanne, I’m ashamed of you.” She turned to me. “I don’t know what we’re going to do with her,” she said. “Joanne,” she added again, “you heard your mother. Get out of that mud puddle right now.” She nodded reassuringly at me. “She’ll be right in,” she said. “I’ll stay out here and wait for her.”

  I went back inside, talking to myself, and after a minute Mrs. Ellenoy poked her head in through the kitchen door. “Martha’s out here,” she said, “and she won’t stop crying till you give her a cookie.”

  “I’m not giving a cookie to any little girl covered with mud,” I said.

  “Martha’s not covered with mud,” Mrs. Ellenoy said reasonably. “That was bad Anne. Martha’s been playing quietly under the apple tree all this time.”

  There was the frightful moment in the restaurant when all seven Ellenoy girls tried to climb onto Mrs. Ellenoy’s lap just as the waitress was putting down a plate of soup. “You can’t get into my lap now, can’t you see I’m having my lunch?” Mrs. Ellenoy said crossly, and the waitress gave me a startled look and retreated, backing directly into Laurence’s spurs. There was the black morning the census taker spent at our house, since she arrived before I was dressed and my daughter entertained her until I came down. There was the uncomfortable incident when my daughter trotted in to me and said, “There’s a lady outside named Mrs. Harper and she wants to know will you give her a dollar?” and I replied absently, “Tell Mrs. Harper she may take the penny off my desk and not to bother me any more.” My daughter told Mrs. Harper and Mrs. Harper went away furious and a little frightened, and I was entered on the P.-T.A. books as refusing to pay my dues.

  Or there was this most touching incident which has really exposed my husband; as I say, he is a man not easily thrown off balance.

  I glanced into the study the other morning and found my older daughter settling herself on the couch next to her father, who was reading the paper. She had The Wizard of Oz under her arm and as I passed by, smiling fondly, she asked her father, “Will you read for a minute to me?” In my subsequent wanderings through the house I frequently passed the study door and heard the comfortable drone of my husband’s voice plowing his way toward the Emerald City. Finally, looking in and seeing him still reading aloud, but alone, I said in surprise, “Still reading?”

  “I’m reading to Marilyn till Jean gets back,” he said, not looking up from the book.

  I went outdoors to where my daughter was sitting drawing pictures under the apple tree and said conversationally, “Dad’s still reading to Marilyn.”

  “I know,” said my daughter, nodding. “I got too restless so I left.”

  We played a game of croquet and picked some flowers for the house and ordered the groceries and my husband was still reading.

  After a while my
daughter went back into the study, said softly, “Move over, Marilyn,” and settled down to hear the rest of the book.

  “Dad was reading out loud to himself all morning,” my son observed as he sat down at the dinner table that evening.

  “No, I wasn’t,” said my husband. “I was reading to Marilyn.”

  “I thought you were reading to yourself,” Laurie said.

  “Marilyn doesn’t brush her teeth,” Mrs. Ellenoy said. “None of my girls brush their teeth,” she added wistfully, “but all of them were dancing this afternoon. All the girls were dancing in the garden. There was Martha, and Sallyellenoy and Janey and Linda and Margaret—”

  “You know what I wish?” Laurie demanded of his father. “I wish I was in Texas right now on a horse.”

  “—and Estelle and Barbara and Josephine and they were all dancing,” Mrs. Ellenoy continued. “And all us Ellenoys, we were dancing too.”

  “Did you call the bank?” my husband said, raising his voice to be heard.

  “All dancing,” said Mrs. Ellenoy happily, “all the girls were dancing.”