Chapter 13 #2
Oh, always, always it was us-and-them. Whether it was the town kids in high school or the rich people in Roland Park, always someone to point out that he wasn’t quite measuring up, he didn’t quite make the grade.
And it was assumed to be his own fault, because he lived in a nation where theoretically, he could make the grade.
There was nothing to hold him back. Except that there was something; he couldn’t quite put his finger on it.
There was always some little tiny trick of dress or of speech that kept him on the outside looking in.
Nonsense. Enough. He owned a giant cedar-lined closet now that was meant for storing nothing but woolens.
The wallpaper in this bedroom came all the way from France.
The windows were so tall that when he stood at one, a person down on the street could see from the top of Junior’s head almost to his knees.
But then he noticed a patch of blistered paint at the corner of one sill. The Brills must have left that window open during a rainstorm. Or else it was the result of condensation; that would not be good.
Also, the wallpaper underneath it was showing its seam too distinctly. In fact, the seam was separating. In fact, where the paper met the sill it was actually curling up from the wall a tiny bit.
Saturday was the day he went around giving estimates; that was when the husbands were home.
So he didn’t stop by the new house. He wrapped up his appointments early, because tomorrow they were moving and there was still some packing to do.
He got home about three o’clock and walked on through to the kitchen, where he found Linnie pulling cleaning supplies from the orange crate under the sink.
She was kneeling on the floor, and the soles of her bare feet, which were facing him, were gray with dirt. “I’m home,” he told her.
“Oh, good. Could you reach down that platter from up top of the icebox? I clean forgot about it! I like to walked off and left it.”
He reached for the platter on the refrigerator and placed it on the counter. “I’ve half a mind to take another load to the house before it gets dark,” he told her. “It would make things that much easier in the morning.”
“Oh, don’t do that. You’ll wear yourself out. Wait for tomorrow when Dodd and them get here.”
“I wouldn’t take the heavy stuff. Just a few boxes and such.”
She didn’t answer. He wished she would get her head out of the orange crate and look at him, but she was all hustle-bustle, so after a minute he left her.
In the living room, the children were piling up empty cartons to build something.
Or Merrick was. Redcliffe was still too little to have any plan in mind, but he was thrilled that Merrick was playing with him and he staggered around happily, dragging boxes wherever she told him to.
The rug had been rolled up for the move and it gave them an expanse of bare floorboards.
“Look at our castle, Daddy,” Merrick said, and Junior said, “Very nice,” and went on back to the bedroom to change out of his good clothes.
He always wore his suit when he was giving estimates.
When he returned to the kitchen, Linnie was packing the cleaning supplies in a Duz carton.
“Mrs. Abbott’s husband said no to half the features she was wanting,” Junior said.
“He went straight down the list: ‘Why’s this cost so much? Why’s this?
’ I wished I had known he would do that way before I went to all that trouble with my figures. ”
“That’s a shame,” Linnie Mae said. “Maybe she’ll talk to him later and get him to change his mind.”
“No, she was just going along with it. ‘Oh,’ she said, all sad and mournful, each time he crossed something off.”
He waited for Linnie to comment, but she didn’t. She was wrapping a bottle of ammonia in a dish towel. He wished she would look at him. He was starting to feel uneasy.
Linnie Mae wasn’t the type to shout or sulk or throw things when she was mad about something; she would just stop looking at him.
Well, she would look if she had some cause to, but she wouldn’t study him.
She would speak pleasantly enough, she would smile, she would act the same as ever, and yet always there seemed to be something else claiming her attention.
At such times, he surprised himself by his urgent need of her gaze.
All at once he would realize how often she did look at him, how her eyes would linger on him as if she just purely enjoyed the sight of him.
He couldn’t think of any reason she would be mad at this moment, though.
He was the one who should be mad—and was mad.
Still, he hated this feeling of uncertainty.
He walked over to stand squarely in front of her, with only the Duz carton between them, and he said, “Would you like to eat at the diner tonight?”
They seldom ate at the diner. It had to be a special occasion. But Linnie didn’t look at him, even so. She said, “I reckon we’ll have to, because I took everything in the icebox over to the house today.”
“You did?” he said. “How come?”
“Oh, Doris was keeping the children so I could get some packing done, and I just thought, ‘Why don’t I visit the new house on my own?’ You know I’ve never done that. So I packed up two bags of food and I caught the streetcar over.”
“We could have put the food on the truck tomorrow,” Junior said. His mind was racing. Had she seen the revarnished swing? She must have. He said, “I don’t know why you thought you had to lug all that by yourself.”
“I just figured I was going anyhow, so I might as well carry something,” she said. “And this way we can have breakfast there tomorrow, out of the way of the men.”
She was focusing on the canister of Bon Ami that she was setting upright in one corner of the carton.
“Well,” he said, “how’d the place look to you?”
“It looked okay,” she said. She fitted a long-handled scrub brush into another corner. “The door sticks, though.”
“Door?”
“The front door.”
So she had definitely gone in through the front. Well, of course she had, walking from the streetcar stop.
He said, “That door doesn’t stick!”
“You push down the thumb latch and it won’t give. For a moment I figured I just hadn’t unlocked it right, but when I pulled the door toward me a little first and then pushed down, it gave.”
“That’s the weather stripping,” Junior said. “It’s got good thick weather stripping, is why it does like that. That door does not stick.”
“Well, it seemed to me like it did.”
“Well, it doesn’t.”
He waited. He almost asked her. He almost came straight out and said, “Did you notice the swing? Were you surprised to see it back the way it was? Don’t you have to agree now that it looks better that way?”
But that would be laying himself open, letting her know he cared for her opinion. Or letting her think he cared.
She might tell him the swing looked silly; it was a trying-too-hard copy of a rich person’s swing; he was pretending to be someone he was not.
So all he said was, “You’ll be glad to have that weather stripping when winter comes, believe me.”
Linnie fitted a box of soap flakes next to the Bon Ami. After a moment, he left the room.
Walking to the diner in the twilight, they passed people sitting out on their porches, and everyone—friend or stranger—said “Evening,” or “Nice night.” Linnie said, “I hope the neighbors will say hey to us in the new place.”
“Why, of course they will,” Junior said.
He had Redcliffe riding on his shoulders. Merrick scooted ahead of them on her old wooden Kiddie Kar, propelling it with her feet. She was way too big for it now, but they couldn’t buy her a tricycle on account of the rubber shortage.
“That Mrs. Brill,” Linnie said. “Remember how she’d talk about ‘my’ grocer and ‘my’ druggist?
Like they belonged to her! At Christmastime, when she’d drop off our basket: ‘I got the mistletoe from my florist,’ she’d say, and I’d think, ‘Wouldn’t the florist be surprised to hear he’s yours!
’ I surely hope our new neighbors aren’t going to talk like that. ”
“She didn’t mean it like it sounded,” Junior said. Then he took two long strides ahead of her and turned so that he was walking backwards, looking into her face. “She probably just meant that our florist might not carry mistletoe, but hers did.”
Linnie laughed. “Our florist!” she echoed. “Can you imagine?”
But her eyes were on old Mr. Early, who was hosing down his steps, and she waved to him and called, “How you doing, Mr. Early?”
Junior gave up and faced forward again.
The longest she’d ever stopped looking at him was when she wanted to have a baby and he didn’t.
She’d wanted one for several years and he had kept putting her off—not enough money, not the right time—and she had accepted it, for a while.
Then finally he had said, “Linnie Mae, the plain truth is I don’t ever want children.
” She had been stunned. She had cried; she had argued; she had claimed he only felt that way on account of what had happened with his mother.
(His mother had died in childbirth, taking the baby with her.
But that had nothing to do with it. Really!
He had long ago put that behind him.) And then by and by, Linnie had just seemed to stop savoring the sight of him.
He had to admit that he had felt the lack.
He’d always known, even without her saying so, that she found him handsome.
Not that he cared about such things! But still, he had been conscious of it, and now something was missing.
He had been the one to give in, that time. He had lasted about a week. Then he’d said, “Listen. If we were to have children …” and the sudden, alerted sweep of her eyes across his face had made him feel the way a parched plant must feel when it’s finally given water.