Chapter Fourteen
Walk into Hanover Hardware on Sutton Street and you might find a spry, energetic, thirty-two-year-old man with kind eyes and blond Brylcreemed hair who would very much like to sell you a Coldspot or a Kelvinator if you were looking for a refrigerator, or an ABC-O-Matic if you were looking for a washing machine.
The cane he used would suggest polio and might even make you more likely to buy something—not that Cal needed sympathy to boost sales.
He’d won his argument with Roman about bringing in large appliances and had narrowed and shortened the aisles to make room for a show area in the front of the store.
Right in the window and running all the way down the north wall were televisions: General Electrics, Motorolas, Teletones.
“Doesn’t look like a hardware store anymore,” Roman had complained, though they still carried all the same hardware, just in lower volume.
He had no complaints after seeing the monthly profit margin.
On league night, stop into Pin King, the new ten-lane bowling alley on Lanford Street, and you might run into Felix Salt.
Forty-one and thin, graying at the temples and crow’s-footed around the eyes, he was still considered handsome by the wives on the block, but they’d noticed he barely smiled when he said hello.
He looked at the world through the lower part of his eyes now, and he exuded melancholy.
But he bowled like a dream. The other men in the Tuck how would anything have gotten done? “He repeats phrases—little snatches of songs and things—until I think I’m losing my mind.”
Ruth’s solution for how to deal with one child was to bring in more.
Have his friends over. Throw a kiddie party.
The moms come, she said, and by the time they leave, they’re your new friend and your babysitter.
But when Margaret tried this, all the mothers (including Ruth!) dropped their kids off and left, like it was a day care.
Just Margaret and seven children—and every one of them complained about how the cupcake icing was peanut butter, because she’d forgotten to make icing.
She remembered crying, at one point, and trying to reason with them.
Tom had turned six in April of 1952 but wasn’t to begin first grade until September, and all summer she longed for the school year to start so that she could finally have him out of her hair five days a week.
Once it started, some afternoons, she was standing in front of the school fifteen minutes early, waiting for him to come out.
She wasn’t the only mother to do that, she noticed.
If he wasn’t glad to see her—if he was demonstrative about it, walking with his arms folded all the way home, refusing to speak to her for no good reason—she would ask him what she’d done wrong and become cross when he wouldn’t tell her.
She would snap at him, and he would surprise her by snapping back.
At home, if they were having an argument, she would turn her eyes and her attention away from him for as long as she could stand it, and sometimes when she turned around, he’d left the room.
Which meant she had to be the responsible one and go find him, check on him, because she was thirty-four and he was six, and because that’s what parenting was: endless responsibility.
Felix, she knew—like Ruth, like everyone, maybe—thought she got overwhelmed too easily.
He never said as much, but she inferred it in the way he reacted to her complaints, and she resented him for it.
She resented the way he methodically straightened all the shoes on the mat in the foyer when he got home, as if that needed to be done, and the way he collected all of Tom’s toys and lined them up on one side of the living room, and the way he gathered the dishes that were sitting around, as if she weren’t about to do that herself.
Always the same handshake and kiss on the head for Tom, the same smile and kiss on the cheek for her.
Always the same flat look on his face as he took in his surroundings.
After which he would go through the mail, tell her that dinner (whatever it was) was delicious, play with Tom for a bit, help tuck him in, watch some television, and go to bed.
That was parenting, for Felix. It was also husbanding.
And yet, somehow, he thought she had no cause for complaint.
Meanwhile, he was the one who’d gotten a poor performance review at work, and he was the one who’d been demoted last year. He was back down to junior executive now, with half the number of people working under him, and a smaller salary. Yet he hardly seemed bothered by this.
He had no idea what it was like for her.
Just the other day, she’d walked Tom home from school and they’d gotten along fine, holding hands as they crossed salt-sprayed intersections clovered with tire tracks, discussing everything he’d done that day.
Then, as soon as they walked into the house, he’d charged upstairs to his room and let out a wail.
She couldn’t face another goldfish funeral.
He wasn’t even naming them anymore; this latest dead one had been known as Number Six.
Tom had netted it out himself, and here he came down the stairs to show her, dripping all the way, both hands clutching the net’s wire handle.
She went and got a towel from the linen closet.
No burial, she said when he asked; it wasn’t possible, the ground was frozen.
The ground wasn’t frozen, he said; she was lying.
She wasn’t lying, she said, and even if it weren’t frozen, they weren’t putting their coats back on to go outside and dig a hole for another fish.
The toilet would do. As she spoke, Tom’s freckles disappeared into his darkening face.
His eyes narrowed and his mouth drew into a plum pit.
He snapped his hands and the net upward, dotting them both with fish water, and the goldfish, with startling precision, flew into the air and landed in the terrarium’s highest pool.
Carried by the water, it dropped: down to the next pool, and the next, head over tail, all the way to the bottom, where it followed the narrow gutter to the end of the foyer and lay on its side against the drain cover.
“No more fish!” Margaret said. She sent him to his room, and yelled after him as he went up that he had no idea how lucky he was—to have everything he had, to have a house, and to have parents who bought him things—
“I hate you!” he cried at the top of the stairs.
“I hate you back!”
He ran into his room and slammed the door behind him.
The babysitters all said he was easy. His teachers loved him. But there were days when Margaret just didn’t feel equipped to be a mother and couldn’t believe the world was allowing her to do it. They might as well let her drive a tank.
She couldn’t catch her breath. She was mad enough to step on that dead goldfish—
—but in the next moment, she was shocked at herself and misty-eyed. She flushed the fish down the toilet, went upstairs, and pushed his door open to find him curled up on his bed, on his side, looking furious.
“Sweetheart, come on,” she said, getting up onto the bed and lying down beside him, facing and curling around him, their foreheads touching.
“Let’s not be mad, okay?” He shrugged inside her arms, wouldn’t look her in the eye.
When she went to kiss his forehead, he turned away, turned all the way over, but stayed close.
She brought her hand up and stroked the back of his head.
She wondered, sometimes, if they would like each other better if they weren’t mother and son.
If he were a neighbor’s child she babysat, and they both knew that someone was coming to get him in a few hours.
“Let’s not hate each other,” she said. “We didn’t mean that, did we?
About hating? Of course we didn’t.” He was overdue for a haircut.
She drew her fingers lightly through the waves of his hair…
and noticed for the first time the two swirls coming out of his crown, the pattern like a Van Gogh sky.
She kept stroking his head, watching the hair realign itself, inches from her face.
So there it was.
Confirmation of what she’d probably known since the first time she held him. It would’ve been better if it were Felix, she thought. Better for everyone, probably most of all her.
It took some effort to put lightness into her voice, but she managed, saying close to his ear, “We can get a new fish tomorrow, honey. I didn’t mean it when I said no more fish.”
Nothing.