“Maybe it’s just as well,” my husband said. He broke off to address Laurie. “Slide, you lunatic, slide,” he yelled. “Thinking about it,” he went on to me, “I’m not so sure you would have liked her, after all.”
• • •
Laurie’s baseball team came in second for the summer, and Laurie and Billy and Artie and a dozen others graduated officially from the Little League because they would be too old to play another year. Everyone went off for the first day of school, bright in new shoes and jackets. After the first few mornings of fruitless railing at the alarm clock I became reconciled to getting up at seven again. One evening at the end of the first week of school I was sitting in the study unhappily fidgeting with a tooth which had contained a gold inlay until an entanglement with a salted peanut about five minutes before. My husband, who has no gold inlays, was eating salted peanuts and trying to read the evening paper. Laurie was up in his room with all the doors shut between him and us, practicing “When the Saints Come Marching In” on his trumpet. Jannie was playing the first line of “Flow Gently, Sweet Afton” over and over on the piano, making the same mistake each time. Sally was in the front room off the study watching a children’s program on television; every now and then a hoarse, inhuman voice would rise in a shout of demonic laughter and announce, giggling, that all the little girls and boys watching the program must be sure and tell their mommies that they wanted only some crispy crunchy oh-so-good delicacy at the store. A little red caboose named Barry passed through the study regularly on his bicycle route, which went from the kitchen through the dining room through the hall through the study and back to the kitchen again.
I took my tongue out of the hole in my tooth, and said to my husband, “What I would like more than anything else in the world is about three days in a hotel in New York City. Where it’s quiet.”
I spoke in the low, vibrant voice which will carry best at that hour of the evening, and my husband answered me in the same tone. “You probably ought to get to the dentist,” he said.
“If I went to New York I could go to the dentist, because the dentist who put that gold inlay in in the first place is in New York.”
Jannie lifted her hands from the piano keys, the trumpet stopped, the television set snapped off, the bike crashed into the kitchen table and stalled, and my voice rose clearly through the sudden silence. “In a hotel in New York—” I was saying, before I stopped.
“What was that?” Laurie called down from upstairs.
“Hey,” said Jannie, swinging around on the piano bench.
“Mother was only talking,” my husband said hastily, but Laurie was leaping down the last five steps and Jannie had reached the study and Barry, hopping, came in from the kitchen and Sally was already hanging over the back of my chair.
“We can see some movies, and maybe Dad and I can get to one of the last ball games if we write for tickets now, and never mind about the first few weeks of school, because we don’t get report cards until—”
“And Mom and I can go shopping—”
“We’ll get a big room in the hotel, because six beds—”
“Wait, wait,” I said.
“What about Sally and Barry?” Jannie asked Laurie.
He considered. “They’re pretty young,” he said. “The dog can go stay at the kennel, and I’ll ask Rob to come over and feed the cats, but I suppose Sally and Barry—”
“Sally will have to get a new hat.”
“Oh, we’ll all have to get clothes. But never mind about clothes. Mom can just stay in the hotel room until she gets something to wear, and Dad and I don’t need much for ball games and things, and the little kids must have a lot of junk to wear. But the Statue of Liberty—”
“It’s too cold,” I said. “And in the first place I was only speaking to your father, and in the second place any mention of New York was with reference to my going to the dentist, and in the third place—”
“We can’t afford it,” my husband said.
“And maybe we can get in to see a television show being broadcast,” Jannie said to Laurie.
“Mom can’t drive down, that’s for sure,” Laurie said. “Not with all of us in the car.”
“Barry,” Jannie cooed, “would you like to ride on a train?”
“Yup,” said Barry.
“I’m going to have sirloin steak and chocolate ice cream every night, boy.”
“Hah,” said my husband.
“Sally, would you like to go to New York and stay in a hotel?”
Sally lifted her chin sleepily from my shoulder. “Go where?” she said.
In terms of actual physical transportation, getting to New York from our home in Vermont is almost unsurmountably difficult. Even if I could drive to New York with the children in the car, I could certainly not drive in New York, due to an uncontrollable tendency toward wiggling the wheel back and forth when I find myself surrounded by cars traveling in different directions. Naturally people are leaving our town all the time, going everywhere, and even sometimes coming back again, but none of them, we found, will answer a direct question about transportation. There is no train coming or going from our town; the nearest train is in Albany, fifty miles away. There is a bus which goes from our neighboring town, which is only six miles away, but that bus only goes farther into Vermont; occasionally a rogue bus gets off toward Albany, but of course it would be pretty silly for six of us to go sit in the bus station hoping that a bus might be going to Albany that day. Our local taxi would take us to Albany, but then, after we got to Albany, we would have to turn around and come home again, having run out of money. Finally, after a good deal of family discussion, in which the only fact that emerged clearly was that Barry was going to ride on a train, my husband remembered a fellow coin-collector who was desperately anxious for an 1877 Indian Head penny, and who agreed to drive us to Albany in return for the one in my husband’s collection. All of us except my husband were amused at the notion that it was only going to cost us a penny to get to Albany. Laurie suggested that the coin collection be doled out, coin by coin, to pay our expenses in New York, and his father said gloomily that it was probably going to turn out to be like that, anyway.
Although none of us had any clothes to wear in New York, we took five suitcases. I also had a little black bag holding candy, handkerchiefs, crayons, coloring books, six volumes of fairy tales, the latest handicraft magazine, two jigsaw puzzles, and a bottle of cough medicine. Barry had Dikidiki. Sally had a new gray knitted hat with a fringed tail hanging down the back. Laurie and Jannie had looks of pleased anticipation.
It has long been my belief that in times of great stress, such as a four-day vacation, the thin veneer of family unity wears off almost at once, and we are revealed in our true personalities; Laurie, for instance, is a small-town mayor, Jannie a Games Mistress, Sally a vague, stern old lady watching the rest of us with remote disapproval, and Barry a small intrepid foot soldier, following unquestioningly and doggedly. The two nervous creatures hovering in the background, making small futile gestures and tending to laugh weakly, are, of course, unmistakable. They are there to help with the luggage. These several personalities began to emerge in the car driving to Albany, and Sally’s hat began to unravel.
So long as we were within familiar territory, the circle of about ten miles which I cover regularly and of which I know every path and house, I was fairly comfortable, remarking at intervals, “I’m sure no one will get into the house,” and, “Does anyone remember whether we finally put in the little black bag?” When we got out into the world, and the hills were no longer at the same angle and the road turned past bewilderingly strange trees and houses, my hands began to tremble, and I said things like, “Hadn’t we just better go back and see if—” and, “I’m almost sure I forgot to—” My husband kept asking Barry, “Well, are you going on a train?” and Barry kept saying, “Yup,” and clutching Dikidiki tighte
r. “Are you going to ride on a train?” I asked him, and Barry said, “Yup,” but Dikidiki turned pale.
Jannie and Laurie, smooth and sleek in their best clothes, devoted themselves to reassuring the rest of us; halfway to Albany my husband stopped asking Barry if he was going on a train and started asking me if I had remembered to find out what time the train left, and I kept telling him that I thought I had left the light on in the cellar. “Don’t worry,” Laurie said repeatedly, “it doesn’t matter; is this a vacation or isn’t it?”
“Now everybody smile!” Jannie cried gaily.
Sally is so often silent that no one thought to watch her particularly; if I noticed the little slip of gray wool in her hand it made no impression on me. As a matter of fact, I had gotten the time of the train wrong, but we made it, and the conductor was very nice about catching my husband’s arm. We put Barry and Laurie in one seat, Sally and Jannie in the next seat, and then Barry had to move to sit with Jannie so Dikidiki could sit between them, and by the time Laurie had his coat off and up on the rack Sally had gotten herself somehow wedged between the two seats with her coat half off. While I was untangling Sally, Jannie and her father were taking off Barry’s coat so I took off my own coat. There was by now no room to put it up on the rack over our seats, so Laurie took it across the aisle to where there was an empty space on the rack, and when he tried to put it up, it fell down on an old man reading science fiction. When everyone was sitting down again, Dikidiki decided that he had to sit next to the window, so Laurie changed with Jannie and then Sally thought that she would like to look out of the window, too, so Jannie changed with Sally. Then the old man reading science fiction got up and went and sat down at the other end of the car, so Sally thought she would sit over in his empty seat instead. “Are you on a train?” my husband asked Barry; “Is this a train?” Laurie asked, and I put in, “Look, we’re all on a train.” “Yup,” Barry kept saying. “Yup.”
“Listen,” Laurie said, leaning forward to talk to his father and me. “Now, the diner’s three cars up and I figure we better get into the diner early because there are such a lot of us. Jannie and I will sit at a table by ourselves because they only have tables for four, and you two can take care of the kids. And I better have the tickets, because if they get lost . . .”
We were really on the train, with our children, our suitcases, and Dikidiki; we were going to New York. That was, I believe, my last clear, co-ordinated thought. From that moment until I came back through our own front door again, four days later, nothing happened in any kind of reasonable or logical order; nothing made sense. I know that we reached Grand Central Station, and it was my fault that Barry fell down the crack between the train and the platform; I was looking back over my shoulder counting heads and Barry stepped into the crack, but the porter unwedged him. Then the porter vanished as we assembled on the platform with our suitcases, so that, at last, my husband carried two suitcases, Laurie carried two, Jannie carried one, and Sally carried the little black bag. Barry carried Dikidiki and I was supposed to lead Barry with one hand and Sally with the other; Laurie and Jannie followed us, and my husband brought up the rear, stopping every few feet to put down his two suitcases and pick up Dikidiki.
“Look at all the cars there were on our train,” I told Barry, and Barry said, “Yup.”
Sally giggled. “I bet that train doesn’t get very far,” she said, and showed me the long thread of gray wool following us. “I tied the end to the seat in the train,” she said. “I’d like to see that train get away.”
In Vermont we do not have revolving doors. Laurie finally had to go in and get Sally out; we estimated that with the expanse of the station and the length of the train platform and the number of times she had been around in the revolving door we had lost nearly three miles of gray thread. The hat was by now only a little beanie-type which sat on top of Sally’s head. Because the end of the thread was caught in the revolving door, Barry and Jannie and I stood in fascination while Laurie and my husband tried to get a taxi, watching the hat unraveling off Sally’s head. The last knot disappeared out the taxi window when we were about halfway to the hotel.
I remember the hotel because we had a suite of three bedrooms and a kind of foyer in the middle; nothing was where it is at home. “I guess we’re here,” my husband said. “I wish I could remember whether I left the study window open,” I said. I had carefully put Barry’s pajamas in the top of one of the suitcases, but he and Dikidiki were asleep before I could get it open. Sally and Laurie and Jannie went around and around the three rooms, moving restlessly, surveying beds and dressers and pictures and admiring the array of towels in the bathroom and reading all the little notices out loud.
We were awakened bright and early in the morning by the chambermaid, who had found Barry in the hall, clad in the top half of his pajamas. He had locked himself out of the room, and when the chambermaid came by he was standing there pounding furiously on the door. “Monsters,” he was screaming, purple-faced, “monsters, monsters!”
At breakfast Laurie and Jannie endeavored to map out our plans for the time in New York. “I don’t want to take the kids into any more restaurants than we can help,” Laurie said. “Maybe from now on we could get some bread and peanut butter and milk and stuff and Mom could kind of fix some meals here in the hotel room.”
“Indeed Mom could not,” I assured him earnestly. “One of the things I came to New York for was to go to restaurants and have steak and pork fried rice and hot tacos and shishkebab and veal cutlets parmigiana and wiener schnitzel and shrimp curry and—”
“Don’t you want to do anything except eat?”
“No,” I said, with my eyes shut. “And cheese blintzes and sukiyaki and—”
Laurie said to Jannie, “Well, if Dad and I go to a ball game, you’ll have to take Sally and Barry and Mom and go shopping or something. You know, clothes and stuff. Maybe take Barry on buses.”
“Mother has to go to the dentist,” my husband said.
“Oh, Dad—she can do that at home.”
“Certainly,” I said. “So then it’s settled; Jannie and Sally and I will go shopping and I will get myself a new housecoat, black, and I think a pair of lizard shoes. Or snake-skin.”
“No,” my husband said.
“And Laurie and Dad can go to the ball game.”
“Sally will need a new hat,” Jannie said. She turned to Barry, and said lovingly, “Now I want you to be sure not to fall out the window of the bus.”
“What do you want to do in New York, Perfessor?” Laurie asked Sally.
Sally lifted her head from her coloring book. “Where?” she said.
The children retired to their several rooms to dress, and a spirited argument began between Jannie and Sally. Jannie injudiciously pointed out that Sally would sure be excited when she saw the big stores. And the tall buildings. “New York,” Jannie said, “has the tallest building in the world.”
That was precisely the kind of statement to arouse Sally, in whose world nothing was ever so stable as to warrant a superlative. “I just bet,” she said.
“Laurie?” Jannie called. “Isn’t the tallest building in the world right here in New York?”
“Empire State,” Laurie said.
“I bet,” Sally said. “I better just see this tallest building in the world, I just guess.”
“Daddy?”
“Indeed, yes,” my husband said. “The very tallest. Mother,” he said, “will take you in an elevator right to the top.”
“No, she won’t,” I said, shuddering.
“I don’t need to go to the top.” Sally was amused. “If it really is the tallest there’s no sense going all the way to the top. But even from the bottom I just bet it’s not the tallest.”
“Well,” said Laurie, nettled, “the people in New York certainly think it is, anyway. They tell everybody.”
“I just bet,
” Sally said direfully.
It turned out, Jannie and I subsequently discovered when we were shopping, that Sally was also not prepared to believe in escalators. “No,” she said, standing at the bottom and clutching Barry firmly. “No. Not for me or for Barry neither. Stairs are hard enough by theirselves, not moving.”
“I’ll carry you,” I said desperately. “I’ll carry you up and then come back down and get Barry.”
“It’s easy,” Jannie insisted. “I’ve done it lots of times.”
“Nope.” Sally pressed back against the crowd around us. “I don’t know where it goes,” she said.
“Just to the top—see the people getting off?”
“But,” Sally said, “those are not the same people as the ones getting on down here. The people get on and go somewhere but the people who get off are just the ones that old staircase lets get off. And look coming down over there—all different.”
I am afraid of elevators. “Look, Sally,” I said, “I promise you—”
“You can get on if you want to,” Sally said. “Me and Barry will go back and tell Daddy where you went.”
I think that was the day that Jannie wanted to look at wedding gowns, or perhaps that was the day after. One day Laurie and Jannie went to Radio City with their father, so that must have been the day I took Sally and Barry to the zoo, and Barry and Dikidiki stood and looked silently at the polar bear and the polar bear stood and looked silently at Barry and Dikidiki. Sally was perplexed because the animals were not in cages when so many of the people in the city were. “Why are they all in cages,” she asked insistently, moving along beside me, “in stores and restaurants and movies and everything, they have someone in a cage? But the big stone lions we saw are just standing right out there and the people in cages?”
“Look at the rhinoceros,” I said.
“And in the hotel, in cages? Do they eat people, like children? Is that bear going to eat Dikidiki? Do baby birds have tiny toy eggs to play with?”