“But they’d get to thinking I was pretty silly, around the stationery store,” I said. “Seeing me come in every day nearly for another typewriter ribbon, or else coming in pretending I was going to get a typewriter ribbon, because I have enough trouble now with running out of money all of a sudden and having to give things back.” He opened his mouth again and I said hastily, “All right, though. I’ll put it on my shopping list right away, and then I won’t forget.”
“Canceled checks,” he said. He sat down at his desk and began to open drawers. I sighed.
“I just don’t know what you’re so worried about,” I said.
“Four children?” he asked.
“Four.”
“I wish . . .” he began, and then stopped. “Look,” he said then, “I work in here, don’t I? In this study?”
“I guess so,” I said.
“So I was certainly justified in taking off the rent for one room in the house which is like an office for me. Couldn’t I?”
“I guess not,” I said, bewildered.
“And you better get Barry’s train and stuff out of here before that fellow comes tomorrow. And I’ll kind of leave my typewriter out and some papers lying around.”
“I could go right into town tomorrow and think about a typewriter ribbon,” I offered hopefully.
“I wish I felt better about that car,” he said.
“Well, after all, four days a week I drive you up to your classes at the college, and then I come and get you. That’s a lot of wear and tear on the car.”
“No,” he said. “Commuting to and from your employment is not business driving.”
I stared at him. “You mean,” I said, and gasped, and caught my breath, “you mean I get up in the morning and I drive Barry to nursery school and then I come back and I get you and I drive you to the college and then I go back and I get Barry and bring him home and then I go back and get you and I bring you home and then I take you up again in the afternoon and then I go and get you again and they call that pleasure driving? Now, listen.” I got up and began to walk around and around the study. “Now, listen. There are a lot of things we have to put up with, like prices going up on everything and the children’s overshoes nearly triple what they were last winter and even the laundry raising prices again and the turn-in they gave us on the old car, and the way the mail is getting slower every day, but I can tell you right now that no G-man covered with badges is going to come walking right into my own house and stand there with machine guns and tear gas and whatever else they carry and abuse his authority pushing me around and trying to tell me that this amateur taxi service I run has got to be called pleasure driving. Now you listen to me—”
“I don’t want to listen to you,” my husband said. “And now I think of it, I would like you to go out somewhere while the man is here tomorrow. Maybe you better stay away for the whole day, because it says right on the tax blank in the small print that commuting back and forth to your place of employment is not a legitimate deductible expense for your car. Look,” he said. “If you drive me to the college, that’s not deductible. But if I walk to the college and you drive along behind me with my briefcase in the car, well, that’s deductible.”
“Drive your briefcase? Why can’t it walk?”
“No,” my husband said. “No, no.” After a while he went on in a very quiet voice, “I really can’t see that it will do any good for both of us to be worrying about this. I’ll just look over these old checks, and you go count the children again.”
I bribed the children into bed, and read a story to Sally and Barry, and got the dishes done and the dogs and cats fed. When the kitchen was in order I went and knocked on the study door and my husband said to go away and not bother him. I watched television for a while, and read a mystery story, and about eleven I went and knocked on the study door and my husband said to go away and not bother him. I said I just thought he might like a little something to eat and he said that later he might have a glass of milk but not to wait up for him. I read for a while longer and then knocked on the study door and said good night, and my husband said to go away and not bother him and good night. Sometime around two in the morning Barry had a nightmare and I went in to quiet him, and then downstairs where I knocked on the study door and said did he know it was two in the morning. My husband said please to go away and not bother him; didn’t he have enough on his mind without my coming to pound on the door every two minutes just to tell him what time it was?
When I came down in the morning he was asleep in the study chair. All his old checkbooks were lined up neatly on the desk, along with a stack of old bills. I covered him with a blanket and went into the kitchen and made breakfast for the children and got them dressed and fed and washed and off to school. I put Barry into his snowsuit and drove him to nursery school, and on the way home I picked up the morning papers. When I had the coffee made and the paper all ready by my husband’s plate I went into the study and woke him and he opened his eyes and said, “I forgot the depreciation on the pencil sharpener.”
The man was supposed to come at ten. Between ten, when he was stationed in the study, and five past ten, when the doorbell finally rang, my husband came into the kitchen four times, once to ask if I thought he ought to change into another shirt, the one with the darns on the elbows, once to ask if I had any idea what our garbage disposal came to by the year, once to ask if there was any aspirin in the kitchen, and once to complain that it was positively heartless to leave a victim like this, kicking his heels and waiting in agony.
When the doorbell rang I heard him go down the front hall with a dignified, measured step, as of one going manfully to his fate, and I closed the kitchen door and sat down on the kitchen stool and wondered what to do. I do not ordinarily find much difficulty in disposing of my morning time, which frequently seems too short for any reasonable occupation, but this morning the dishes were done and the table was set for lunch and I had made brownies and a nut cake the day before, and all that was left was the study rug, which needed vacuuming, but I thought my husband might not like having me coming through with the vacuum while he was talking to the man from the income tax. I heard his voice raised once; he was shouting “Depreciation,” and then he was quiet, and I could hear the low reasonable murmur which was the man from the income tax.
My husband told me afterward that the man’s name was Mr. Kelly and that, all things considered, he was quite an agreeable fellow, but I never saw him. I sat on the kitchen stool for about fifteen minutes and then I gathered up all the library books and went out and got into the car and drove down the street to the library. A couple of new mystery stories had come in, and I read one of them sitting at the library table, and I watched the library desk for a few minutes while Mrs. Johnson went out for a cigarette, and we talked about the P.T.A. and the Starlight 4-H Club food sale. After I left the library I picked up the mail and sat in the car for a few minutes reading a letter from my mother, and then it was almost time to pick up Barry at nursery school, so I stopped in the grocery and asked the grocer if he had a typewriter ribbon. He said no, but they had some pencils, so I bought four pencils.
When Barry and I got home a few minutes later the voices were still going on in the study. Barry headed directly for the study door to show Daddy the airplane he had made in nursery school, and I caught him and gave him a piece of paper and the four pencils to play with. By the time the other children came home I had vegetable soup ready, and grilled cheese sandwiches. As each child came up onto the back porch I opened the kitchen door and said “Shh.” They came in quietly, casting uneasy glances at the study door, and sitting in silence at the table.
Finally Laurie burst out “Golly!” and I said “Shh,” and he whispered, “I can’t stand it. Golly, poor old Dad.”
“I asked my teacher did she think my daddy would get arrested by the policeman if he took that man’s money,” Sally remarked, looking
darkly into her vegetable soup. “She said she certainly hoped not.”
“Shh,” I said.
“Where’s Daddy?” Barry asked.
“Shh,” I said. “Eat your lunch.”
“Shh,” Laurie said.
“Poor old Dad,” Jannie said.
“Shh,” I said. We all heard the door between the study and the front hall open, and then footsteps going along the hall to the front door. We could hear the man from the income tax saying clearly, “Of course, you know by now it doesn’t mean a thing to me. It’s only a word, that’s all. A hundred dollars—five hundred dollars—ten cents; it doesn’t really mean anything to us fellows; it’s just a word.”
“Well, I can see where it might be,” my husband said. “Goodbye.”
“No, no,” said the man from the income tax. “In our business we never come right out and say ‘goodbye’ to a victim. We always figure we’ll be seeing him again some time.” He laughed uproariously, and we could hear the front door close.
After a minute my husband’s footsteps sounded again in the hall and he came through the dining room and into the kitchen. We all sat around the kitchen table looking at him.
“Well, well, well,” he said. “What’s for lunch?” He pulled out his chair and sat down.
There was a silence and then Laurie said, “How is everything?”
“Fine,” my husband said, surprised. “Why?”
“We just thought you might be tired or something,” I said. “You had so little sleep.”
“Never felt better,” my husband said. “That was a nice fellow, by the way. He gave me a few pointers on next year’s income tax. Giant fan,” he said to Laurie.
“That’s too bad,” Laurie said politely.
“Did he come all this way just to ask you to play for the Giants?” I asked.
“For the Giants?” He was astonished.
“I only thought,” I said elaborately, “that there was some difficulty about your income tax. Some questions about your income tax.”
“Oh, that,” my husband said. “Yes. Got my figures wrong, as a matter of fact. I put it down eight times nine was fifty-six.”
“Dad.” Laurie put down his soup spoon. “For gracious goodness sakes. Oh, Dad, for gracious goodness sakes.”
“It’s seventy-four,” Jannie said helpfully.
My husband leaned back and took out one of the cigars he ordinarily saves for after dinner. “It never pays to worry about money,” he said. “After all, money isn’t everything.”
• • •
Suddenly it was only two weeks to wait until Christmas, and the temperature was twenty-two below the night of the school Christmas pageant. Then it was only eight days to go; formally, the children and I hung a Christmas wreath on each gatepost. Then, some hours less than a week, and my husband’s present, ordered from that place in Seattle, might not come in time; then it was five days and then sixty hours and fourteen minutes, and we brought the Christmas tree home and stood it on the back porch. The store in Seattle was criminally slow, perhaps even forgetful; it was only thirty-seven hours before Christmas. Then, the morning of Christmas Eve I stuffed the turkey and decided on apple pie, after all, because last year no one had touched the pumpkin. All afternoon the children and I drove around town to the houses of their friends, leaving little packages of candy, and chocolate apples, and all afternoon their friends had been stopping off at our house (“Can’t stay; just want to leave this, and Merry Christmas!”) and leaving little packages of Christmas cookies and fruit cake. Then at last it was five o’clock in the afternoon, and the special delivery truck pulled up outside with the package from Seattle. Laurie and his father went to bring in the tree and I signed for the package and Jannie stirred the eggnog and Sally salted the popcorn and Barry sat in a corner of the kitchen, wide-eyed and still.
“Deck the halls with boughs of holly,” Jannie sang, and Sally chanted, “Christmas, Christmas.”
“You’ll have to get the ax,” my husband told Laurie. “Unless your mother would prefer a hole cut in the ceiling.”
“You say that every year,” I said, going past him sideways so he would not see the package I was holding behind me. “If you would only measure the tree before you bring it in—”
“You say that every year,” he said. “Why are you walking like that?”
“Because I have your Christmas present behind me and I don’t want you to notice,” I said with dignity, and scurried into the kitchen to put the package behind the washing machine.
It takes three enormous cartons to hold all our Christmas decorations, and all during the green spring and the hot summer months and the long sunny days and the gray rainy days the cartons sit on a shelf in the far corner of the barn. Then, at last, Laurie and Jannie lift them down and carry them together through the snow to the house, going very slowly, cautioning one another, coming indoors with snow on their boots. I never look at the cartons labeled CHRISTMAS: LIGHTS, ORNAMENTS, DECORATIONS without remembering the sadness of putting them away last year, assuring the children that Christmas would come again, it would surely come again, they would hardly notice the length of the year before Christmas came again. Then Christmas comes again and I perceive that I, at least, have certainly not felt the year slip away; it has gone before I knew it.
Sighing, I lifted the carton named LIGHTS onto one of the dining room chairs to open it. “By the way,” my husband asked Laurie very casually, “what was in that package, the one your mother just took into the kitchen?”
“Why, I wouldn’t have any idea,” Laurie said innocently. He called to me, “Did you remember to cut holes in the top so it could breathe?” he asked.
“Come on, you,” his father said. “Get up on that ladder.”
Jannie ladled eggnog into cups, Sally sat on the couch next to Barry with her lap full of popcorn, and spoke to him softly. “In the morning,” she said, “when you wake up, what do you do?”
“I wake Laurie and I wake Jannie and I wake Mommy and I wake—”
“No, no,” I said. “Tomorrow I plan to sleep very late.”
“Eight o’clock by the playroom clock,” Sally said.
“Eight-thirty,” I said.
“Nine,” my husband said.
“But last year it was eight o’clock,” Sally said indignantly, “you know perfectly well. Last year and the year before that and the year before that and the year before that it was eight o’clock.”
“Yeah.” Laurie turned. “And no setting back the playroom clock, either, like you did that time.”
Sally murmured to Barry, “So when you wake up tomorrow morning, what do you do?”
“I wake Laurie and I wake—”
My husband and Laurie had cut the tree down to size, and Jannie took the cut branches into the dining room and wreathed them around the punch bowl. She began to sing “Joy to the World,” and my husband caught the tree as it toppled forward. “Hey,” Laurie said, peering down between the branches, “you trying to knock me off this ladder or something? Entertain the kids seeing me go crash on the floor?”
“We need a new tree stand,” my husband said.
“Don’t be silly,” I said. “We’ve always used that one.”
We keep a spool of fine wire with the tree stand, and Laurie and his father contrived to secure the tree upright by fastening it with wire and thumbtacks to the frames of the bay window. “Look,” Laurie called down, “last year it was maybe three inches farther over left; here’s one of last year’s thumbtacks.”
I can remember, back in the dim time when I was a little girl, my father taking the strings of Christmas tree lights out of the flowered box, standing with his hands full, saying wistfully, “These lights again? No new ones?” and my mother, turning, frowning slightly, “But you said they were good for another year; last Christmas you said they were—”
r /> “These lights?” my husband said. “You didn’t get any new ones?”
A good deal of the tire tape which holds the light strings together was put on by my father, and some by my brother—kneeling on the floor, entangled, asking madly, “Why can’t we get new lights, will someone please tell me?”—and of course my husband has put on tape of his own. He has taken off some of the tape my father put on and replaced it where it was getting ragged, and last year there was a new spot which Laurie taped. I went out one year (as I suppose my mother must have done at least once before me) and bought three new strings of lights, but somehow their bright green cord was so gaudy among the soft old ornaments, and there was nothing for my husband to do during the half hour when the rest of us were drinking eggnog and he would usually have been taping the light cords, so I put the new lights in the box with the old ones and they are still there; every year my husband takes them out of the box, looks at them, and puts them back again. “We ought to get new tree lights,” Laurie said, unwinding the tire tape, “for heaven’s sake, how long do you expect these will last?”
“They’ll do for another year or so,” my husband said absently. “Look, here’s more of Grandpa’s tire tape peeling off.”
“—and Donner and Blitzen and Dasher and Prancer—” Sally told Barry. Jannie tugged at my arm. “Can you come a minute?” she asked. “I got to show you something.” I followed her up the back stairs to her room, which had a sign on the door threatening the most dire vengeance on any who entered for any reason whatsoever. Jannie shut the door tight behind us and I sat down on her bed while with much pausing to listen apprehensively she took from her bottom dresser drawer a candy box. She set this down on the bed next to me and opened it carefully. Taking out one of the small packages inside, she set it on my lap. It was brightly wrapped, and the card on it read, “To Daddy from Jannie.”