Should we put the plates on the kitchen floor and squat around them?
That wouldn't be very comfortable.
I could put the breadboard over the bathroom sink, making a small table
out of it. David and I could sit on the edge of the bathtub, and Grant
could sit on the--
No, that wouldn't do.
I settled it by filling our plates and carrying them into the living
room. Grant's and David's plates I set on each arm of the davenport. I
put my own plate on an arm of the overstuffed chair. The salt, pepper,
bread and butter were in the middle of the living room floor.
"Are you still glad we sold our tables?" I asked Grant, when we had
started eating.
He's always willing to put up with a little inconvenience if there's
profit in it.
"Yep," he said. "If we hadn't quick sold them the first day, it might
have turned out that no one would want them at all, and we'd have to
come way down in the price. Please pass the bread."
"Just the same," I said, getting down on my hands and knees to get him
a piece of bread, "I'm going to add twenty dollars to what we planned
on asking for the living room set. If anyone wants it tomorrow they're
going to have to really pay for it!"
"You split your infilitive, Mama," David said.
There's one thing that must be said for David. Maybe he does usually
sound more like a herd of elephants than like one small, agreeable
little boy, and maybe he does create a very reasonable facsimile of
chaos when he gets hold of a piece of gum--but he recognizes a split
infinitive when he hears it. My friends all think he's an infant
prodigy--in that one respect, anyway. But sometimes I wish I'd never
taught him anything about grammar. I didn't know what a split
infinitive was until I was in high school, and I got along just as well
without knowing. I never made Grandma want to swing me by the heels and
smack my head against a wall, either.
"I'm very sorry I split an infinitive," I told David. "I'll try to be
more careful in the future. But just the same," I went on, turning back
to Grant, "whoever buys that living room set is going to really pay for
it!"
"Fine," Grant said, getting up and going into the kitchen; "the more
money we can raise, the better." He came back carrying a jar of
horseradish; he sat down and put some horseradish on his plate, and
proceeded to mix it thoroughly with his peas.
One of the strangest things about Grant, hardly compatible with the
efficiency and practicality of his nature, is his passion for weird
combinations of food. I have learned to look the other way while he
improves upon what I have prepared; if I were to watch while he mixes
and eats his little gastronomical horrors, I doubt if I'd be able to do
much eating myself.
I slept--or, rather, spent the night--on the davenport, and Grant slept
in David's twin-size bed with David. In the middle of the night I sat
up and felt the welts across my back that the ridges in the davenport
cushions had made. I went through the empty bedroom where our lovely,
comfortable bed used to be, into the children's bedroom.
Grant was lying slantwise across David's bed, with David draped across
him. The baby was sleeping peacefully on her stomach in her crib. I
considered crawling in with her, but I was afraid the crib wouldn't
hold an additional hundred and twelve pounds.
I went back into the living room, put another blanket over the
davenport cushions to cover the ridges more thoroughly, and lay down
again.
After breakfast I felt more kindly toward the davenport, though. In our
hour of need it was serving as table, chairs, and bed. What were a few
welts in the face of all that?
Just then the doorbell rang. It was a short, dark, bristling man who
actually tinkled whenever he moved. I was so fascinated by this
discovery that he was inside the house punching at the davenport before
I realized that he wanted my precious living room set.
"How much?" he shot at me suddenly.
I told him, adding twenty dollars to the price we had originally
planned to ask for the set.
"Fine! Sold!" he barked, tinkling as he peeled off crisp green bills
into my hands.
"What are you staring at?" he cried.
I backed away timidly. "It's just that--that noise you make," I said.
"I was just wondering--"
He put a thumb under the watch chain that was draped against his vest
and thrust it out where I could see it. There was a tiny golden bell
attached to the chain.
He let go of the chain suddenly and strode to the overstuffed chair,
picking it up as though it had been a child's chair.
"Open the door, please."
He loaded the chair and davenport onto his pickup truck and drove away.
I sat down in the middle of the living room floor, my hands full of the
crisp green bills, and burst into tears.
The rest of that month crawled by. I visualized the angel in charge of
time chortling and slowing down the time machine so that he'd have
longer to watch us sitting on boxes and eating from boxes, and to watch
me sleeping on the floor--which I chose in preference to sleeping with
David and being kicked all night.
The general inconvenience, and living in such a state of upset and
excitement, didn't seem to bother Grant very much. What annoyed him
most about the whole proceeding, I think, was the fact that since a
part of our savings was in small government bonds that had to be
cashed, he'd had to sign his name and address seventy-five times. He
learned from experience what the term "writer's cramp" means.
We had sold our home, of course, getting all cash for it and retaining
possession of it until the day we were to take over the motel. Actually
it was the real estate broker whose advice we had asked about its
value, who bought it. The rise in prices that followed the war had made
it worth a lot more than we paid for it, and we knew that the realtor
too would make a profit on it. But we needed the cash in a hurry, so we
were glad to sell it to him.
Grandma had lent us two thousand dollars. Grandma is a short, sturdy
widow without a lazy bone in her body or a wrinkle in her face. Her
eighty-year-old "boyfriend," Hellwig, had offered us five hundred
dollars more, but we thought we'd be able to get along without the
bachelor's mite.
That made our fifteen thousand. What we got for the furniture, and
Grant's weekly paychecks from General Motors, would have to see us
through the moving and whatever extra expenses might come up.
Our furniture kept selling steadily, and I put a lot of our
accumulated, surplus household goods on display, too. We wouldn't have
room for it in the new place; I was resolved to get rid of as much of
it as I possibly could.
The woman who bought our lamps and rugs, a Mrs. Alexander, kept coming
back to see what else I'd brought out from closets and drawers in the
way of household goods. Every time she came, she bought several
armloads of things. Toward the end of the month, when nearly everything
was gone, she even bought our half-empty cans and jars of spices and
cereals, and on her next trip she bought Grant's rusty tools and
half-used cans of paint. She bought at least twenty dollars worth of
junk that we would otherwise have thrown away. I couldn't help
wondering what her house must look like. She had probably been
acquiring things as avidly as this ever since she got married. I even
sold her the five silver deer bookends!
We were all getting very tired of eating and sitting on boxes.
"I never want to see another box, once we get away from here," I said.
"Just think, some day all of this will be only a memory. Some day I'll
sleep on a bed again, and we'll have chairs to sit on, and a real table
to eat from. Someday, this will all be over."
And then, suddenly, it was. Suddenly it was the day before we were to
leave, and there was a flurry of last minute packing to do, and a last
night of sleeping on the hard floor, and then it was the Saturday we
were to take possession of the motel.
Grant hadn't given up his job. Our monthly payments on the first and
second trust deeds were to be three hundred dollars each (one of them
would be four hundred after the first of the year) and he didn't dare
to quit his job until we had a little money saved. We'd get settled
this first weekend, and after that I'd have to manage the place alone,
while he came back to Los Angeles to work. He would live with Grandma,
in her apartment.
I had been so busy selling things and packing, all month, that I hadn't
had time to become frightened at the prospect, but now, putting the
last of our things in the two-wheeled trailer Grant had borrowed from a
friend, I found myself dwelling upon it more and more, and feeling more
and more certain that I'd never be able to do it. Even the average
woman might not succeed at a new job of such proportions, and anyway,
the resemblance between me and the average woman is purely superficial.
I am the type who would call in a plumber to put a new washer in a
faucet. I remember that on one occasion when, with unusual brilliance
and energy, I tightened a screw with a knife, it was weeks before I
finished telling people about my exploit.
When everything was packed on the trailer and squeezed into the back
seat of the car, I took the camera out of the glove compartment. I
handed it to Grandma and told her to take a picture of us, with the
loaded trailer as background.
Grant is inclined to be a little impatient when he has a big job ahead.
"Come on, come on, we haven't got time to be fooling with pictures," he
said.
"Oh, yes we have," I said firmly. "This is a historic occasion, and we
must have a picture of it."
Grumbling, he came to stand beside me. I held Donna in my arms, and
David stood beside Grant. Grandma focused the camera and took our
picture.
I put the camera back into the glove compartment, and kissed a weeping
Grandma goodbye.
"They wun't nothing seem right, with you folks gone!" she exclaimed.
I told her to say goodbye to Hellwig for us, and I climbed into the
front seat with the children. I took a last look at our prim white
house, gleaming in the morning sunlight, and at all the other prim
houses on the palm-lined street.
Then Grant started the car, and we were off!