Just before lunchtime the men got the refrigerator installed and working, and for some reason that comfortable old clatter made the house seem more familiar than anything else. I said I would go right down to the grocery for meat and milk and eggs and butter, and on the way I gave in to a kind of irresistible nostalgia and turned the car onto the old side road and out the three miles to take a look at our old house. When I came around the corner I stopped the car and stared; it was like meeting an old friend who has dyed her hair and taken to wearing tight velvet pants and mascara. The house was painted bright yellow, and at first I could not understand why it looked so odd, and yet so ordinary and like every other house we had passed driving home the day before. Then I realized: Mrs. Ferrier had removed the four white pillars.
Before we had been in our new house six weeks, the back apartment was full of things, and the crooked gatepost had become a topic on which we were all morbidly sensitive. When we bought the house, my husband and I both assumed, upon the candid statement of the real estate agent, that the only thing defective on the property was the left-hand gatepost leaning off at a rakish angle. The roof, the furnace, the wiring, the plumbing, the foundations—all of these, we believed innocently, were new, newly repaired, or so solid that not even an earthquake could shake them. “But,” the real estate agent told first me, and then my husband, and then both of us together, “I’d be a pretty poor businessman if I tried to tell you that gatepost is straight.” We were forced to agree: that gatepost was emphatically crooked, and the real estate salesman was not a pretty poor businessman at all. The gateposts were massive stone affairs, although there was no wall to go with them; they stood at the end of a driveway which, while nicely dry during the summer months when we looked at the house, was not the splendid sweeping affair the gateposts seemed to imply. Nevertheless, my husband and I told one another with shy pride that the gateposts gave our meager three acres something of the air of an estate, except that of course the left-hand gatepost was a little crooked. When we talked it over afterward, though—the real estate agent reeling back to his office, the papers in his hands, and no doubt giggling incredulously to himself all the way—we decided that all we had to do was put up maybe a fence, and get the gatepost straightened, of course, and put in some kind of a lawn, and maybe a couple of more bushes on the side of the house where the wall had kind of fallen in—anyway, we thought, standing by the gatepost and regarding our land, it was not going to take much to get the old place looking like a mansion again.
We have no local firm of gatepost-straighteners, but every deadpan wit within the county limits had a stab at us. The man who came to repair the roof thought that we ought to get someone to hitch a team to the gatepost and pull it straight. The man who came to repair the furnace suggested that we dig out under the post on the uninclined side, and let the post settle down even-like. The electrician took a few minutes off from ripping out the dining room ceiling to say that what we had to do was dig out the roots of the tree under the gatepost. The plumber thought no; we better get a man to move the gatepost over two, three feet. I finally developed a kind of answer for use around the grocery and the post office, about how I’d taken a lot of trouble pushing that gatepost as crooked as it was, and any time I wanted it straight I would go on out and push it back again. My husband took to saying around the barbershop that it wasn’t that that gatepost was crooked, it was that the other one was too straight. Laurie solemnly assured the kids in fifth grade that it was only specific gravity kept the gatepost up at all. Among ourselves we tended to avoid the subject, and after a while I got so I could drive the car between the gateposts without ducking sharply to the right. During one severe late-summer storm we all stood anxiously at the front windows, wondering if the gatepost would go down, but it stood staunch; what did go down was a tree across the street, smashing part of the front porch of a man who had asked Sally why she didn’t take the gatepost apart and build it up again straight.
I still had to drive Sally to nursery school, and after a while the two older children took to waiting and riding along. Our new house was only two blocks from their school, but, as Jannie explained, it got very very very tiresome walking past the same houses every time. We had been in our new house for over six months, through our family holiday season, which begins early in October with Laurie’s birthday, then continues through Sally’s birthday on Hallowe’en, and Jannie’s birthday a week later and then Barry’s birthday and Thanksgiving, and finally the long home stretch into Christmas. On Laurie’s birthday we were still unpacking books, I remember, and his friends dined in the shadow of the half-filled bookcases in the dining room. By Sally’s birthday the men had come to sand the pine floors, and all the downstairs furniture was piled in the dining room and all the other floors were freshly varnished, so Sally had a birthday party in the kitchen, with crepe-paper barricades across the doors to prevent her guests from straying onto the fresh varnish, and balloons and lollipops hanging from the ceiling. By Jannie’s birthday we could use the dining room again, but the upholsterers had taken all the good dining room chairs to freshen the tapestry backs, so Jannie’s friends had a picnic dinner sitting on the glittering varnished floor. Barry was too little to have a birthday party, which was just as well, because that was when they were repairing the plumbing in the bathroom downstairs, and they had taken out the bathtub and put it in the study where my husband fell into it one night when he could not sleep and went downstairs to get a book. Since Thanksgiving came on Barry’s birthday that year, the men took the day off and went away and left the bathtub in the study from Wednesday afternoon until Monday morning. It was the most practical wastebasket we ever had in the study, but they came on Monday and put it back. Barry got a blue teddy bear for his birthday, and he named it Dikidiki.
The new house had a very good spot to put the Christmas tree, in the bay window of the living room, and from far down past the railroad tracks, coming home through the snow, we could see the lights of our Christmas tree shining from our house. There was a good sledding place for Jannie and Sally down behind the barn, although Laurie went up to the hill with the other boys. That Christmas we got a movie camera and a projector and screen, and I took movies of Barry in a pink snowsuit being tumbled off a sled pulled by Laurie in a brown jacket and a blue hat and Jannie in navy blue with a red scarf and Sally in green, with pompons on her hat. I took pictures of our house and our trees and our barn. In the long winter evenings we sat in the dark living room and my husband, running the projector with Laurie’s help, showed us the pictures of Barry tumbling off the sled and Laurie in brown throwing a snowball at Sally in green with pompons on her hat, and Jannie standing proudly beside a monumental snowman, and the bare branches and snow-touched roof and the barn somehow at an angle because I had trouble holding the camera with gloves on. The children enjoyed looking at the pictures of themselves, and got very restless when they had to watch pictures of the house and barn.
We drove past the old house now and then, and I observed with contempt that Mrs. Ferrier had tried to compensate for the naked look of the porch by putting some kind of a grayish scratchy bush on either side of the steps. When the winter was over they might blossom into great colorful things, but I did not, somehow, envy Mrs. Ferrier with her yellow pillarless house and her scratchy bushes; she did not even have a crooked gatepost.
• • •
Along about the beginning of February, when the days of winter seem endless and no amount of wistful recollecting can bring back any air of summer, I caught one of those colds which last for two days in the children and two weeks with me. I got to feeling that I could not bear the sight of the colored cereal bowls for one more morning, could not empty one more ashtray, could not brush one more head or bake one more potato or let out one more dog or pick up one more jacket. I snarled at the bright faces regarding me at the breakfast table and I was strongly tempted to kick the legs out from under the chair on which my older son was teetering ba
ckward. I could not think of anything to serve for dinner which was not dull, or tasteless, or unusually full of bones. There was never any news in the morning paper. The mail was slim and almost entirely composed of letters beginning “We are sure that through some oversight you must have neglected . . .”
This state of mind is not practical in a household which continues to move relentlessly on from breakfast to mail to school to bath to bed to breakfast, no matter how I feel. My only conscious positive wish was for the doctor to drop in—casually, perhaps, coming to pick up an old syringe he had left lying around—glance at me suddenly and exclaim, dropping his bag and turning pale, “Good lord—look at you! Why, you should be in the hospital,” and, turning angrily to my husband, “Are you crazy? Can’t you see that your wife is desperately ill?” I took my temperature twice a day, and limped carrying in the dinner dishes.
One morning the cleaner returned my gray suit with a button missing and I cut my finger slicing rye bread for toast for my husband and the children had been late for school. There was a letter in the mail from an old friend of mine who was driving through our town on her way to visit another old friend, and if I could take a couple of days off and go along we could all three spend a marvelous weekend comparing pictures of our children and talking about the time Marjorie cut her hair.
I read this letter to my husband, holding my bandaged finger well in sight. “It would have been nice to have gone,” I said wistfully, and sighed. “Oh, well,” I said. “Here’s another bill from the telephone company.”
“I don’t want to know about it,” my husband said, regarding the beverage I had served him for coffee. “You go along on that trip, do you good.” He hesitated, and then said stoutly, “I’ll take care of the children.”
“Fine,” I said, before he had quite finished speaking, “then if you think I should, I will go. Do me good to get away for a while,” I told him. “You won’t have any trouble, not if I’m only gone two days.”
“I am perfectly capable of running this house,” he said. “Perfectly capable. You just leave a list of things the baby eats, and so on. And who to call if someone gets sick.”
“I usually call the doctor,” I said, and went hastily to write to both my friends and sew the button on my gray suit and wash out a couple of blouses and generally compose myself to leave in two days’ time. My husband can turn on the stove and answer the telephone, but it seemed to me that it might help if I arranged to have the children largely out of his way; the baby, of course, had to stay at home, but I called my friend Kay and asked if our Sally could spend Saturday afternoon playing at her house, and perhaps stay for dinner. I explained that I was leaving Saturday noon for a short visit with a friend and returning Sunday night, and she said golly, what a lucky break for me, and since my husband would be a bachelor Saturday night how about he came to their house for dinner? I said that he had to stay home with the baby, and she said well, anyway, Sally could stay overnight with them. I said wonderful, I would do the same for her sometime.
Then I called my friend Helen and asked if Jannie could visit her Jennifer on Saturday afternoon, because I was going out of town for two days and she said gee, she wished she could get away for a day or so, and sure, they’d love to have Jannie for the afternoon and supper, and overnight, too, if I liked, and why didn’t my husband come over for supper, too, since he would be all alone? I said he had to stay at home with the baby, and she said then they’d expect Jannie sometime on Saturday.
Then I called my friend Peg and said could Laurie come over to her house Saturday afternoon because I would be away, and she said some people got all the breaks, someday she was going to go away for a weekend, and her William would be delighted to have our Laurie around on Saturday and if he felt like it he could stay overnight, and why didn’t my husband drop over and take pot luck with them for dinner? So I said my husband had to stay at home with the baby, but we’d take a rain check on it, and I’d send Laurie along after lunch on Saturday.
The next morning, the day before I was to leave, Sally brought home from nursery school an almost undecipherable piece of paper which translated (I called the child’s mother and checked it, finally) as: “My birthday party is on Sunday at three o’clock and Sally can come. This is from Pat.” I called Kay and she said yes, her Ellen was invited, too, so why didn’t Sally plan to stay at their house Sunday night instead, and she would pick them up after the party and see that they got to nursery school Monday morning. That way, she added, she would be able to take Ellen into town to get shoes on Saturday afternoon, as she had originally thought of doing. However, she said, if it would be more convenient for me to have things the way we first planned it . . . I said no, no, it would probably be just as simple for my husband to have Sally out of the way on Sunday, and I would try to arrange to send Sally to play with the twins on Saturday. So I called my friend Dorothy and asked if my Sally could spend Saturday afternoon with her twins and she said gladly, how lucky I was to be able to get away, would my husband like to come for dinner and I said he had to stay with the baby and she said she would give Sally supper and bring her home afterward.
When the children came home from school Friday afternoon Laurie was very much excited over an invitation he had received to go to the movies with his friend Oliver on Saturday night, and when I said that he had been invited to stay overnight with William he groaned and said but he had to go to the movies, he had told Oliver he would, he would go to William’s some other time. So I called Peg and she said that was all right with her, send Laurie along on Sunday afternoon and she would take the boys skating and bring Laurie home after dinner, since Sunday was a school night. As I hung up the phone rang again and it was Helen, to say that some old friends of theirs had just phoned that they were coming for the weekend so there wouldn’t be room for Jannie overnight; could she give the child supper and send her home? And if she came over Sunday afternoon she could go skating with them and she and Jennifer could make fudge or something. I said of course, how nice of them to take Jannie when they had company and all, and Jannie was extremely pleased.
Friday night I ironed a blouse and washed my hair and did my nails, and Saturday morning I took Jannie to her dancing school and made a casserole of scalloped potatoes and sausage. While I was busy in the kitchen Laurie ran out the front door, calling over his shoulder to say that he was going down to Rob’s, and he telephoned later to say that he was staying for lunch. My husband was working in the study, and Barry was in his playpen; Sally hung around me in the kitchen, getting in my way.
I cooked the casserole and then put it in the refrigerator; since I was being picked up at eleven-thirty the best arrangement for the children’s lunch seemed to be cheese and jelly and peanut butter and a loaf of bread set out on the kitchen table. I went to get Jannie at dancing school and when I came back my husband came out of the study and asked me if I had noted down where the children were expected to be so he could keep track of them, and anything else I thought he ought to know. I had fifteen minutes or so before I needed to dress, so I went to my desk and took up a pencil.
SATURDAY, I wrote, and then thought. A simple chronological outline seemed best suited to my husband’s particular requirements, so I drew a line under SATURDAY and continued: Give Barry chopped vegetable soup and a bottle of plain milk, warmed, for lunch; Sally will have lunch at home (peanut butter, etc., on kitchen table); Laurie lunch at Rob’s, Jannie at home. Milk in refrigerator. Sally to play with twins one o’clock, for dinner, home by bedtime. Jannie at Jennifer’s, including dinner, home by bedtime, Laurie riding lesson three o’clock, home for dinner, movie evening with Oliver. Barry in playpen 3–5, supper casserole to go in oven 5:30, oven 375 degrees. Barry rice and liver soup and peaches for supper, bottle bedtime. Feed cats, dog. Laurie knows where dog food is. Laurie right to bed after movie, Sally, Jannie jellybeans at bedtime. SUNDAY: Sally home till 3:30, then Pat’s party (do not forget birthday present, wr
apped, on desk). Sally wear shoes to party, pink party dress (white socks in top left dresser drawer, if none there, blue will do). Comb hair. Bath if possible. Check neck. Laurie at William’s, after lunch, ICE SKATES, William’s for supper, home bedtime; school night, check homework, early bed. Jannie at Jennifer’s, Sunday afternoon, supper, fudge, ICE SKATES, SWEATER. Home bedtime, school night, check homework, jellybeans. Barry Sunday breakfast cereal, bottle, lunch applesauce, cats milk Sunday morning, milk in refrigerator, did you leave casserole in oven Saturday night? Barry Sunday noon chopped vegetable soup, bottle, nap outdoors if weather clement, Barry Sunday supper chopped vegetable and bacon soup, bottle, pudding, feed cats and dog. Do not wait up for me. Cube steaks in refrigerator if you care to cook them, otherwise leftover casserole; jar in refrigerator labeled Mayonnaise is extra coffee to heat up. Bread in breadbox. Leave note for milkman Saturday night DOZEN EGGS, LB. BUTTER, COTTAGE CHEESE. Cover all children 10:30 Saturday night. SALLY PAJAMAS TO ELLEN’S, TOOTHBRUSH. Salad. Do not let Jannie forget extra sweater going to Jennifer’s, scarf. Check Sally Sunday morning for sniffle. Add note milkman 1⁄2 PT. SOUR CREAM. Thirty-five cents in change on top of refrigerator in case Laurie needs money for movies. Six jellybeans is plenty.
• • •
We had a moderately pleasant weekend, although it snowed all the time and I lost another button off my gray suit and everyone seemed to have aged noticeably. My friend dropped me off in front of the house about nine on Sunday evening, and I was glad to get back, seeing the house lighted up and even the upstairs rooms bright, although the children should have been in bed. The dog met me at the door, wagging his tail, and there was an ominous thud as some cat leaped hurriedly off the kitchen table.