by Jane Smiley
When he got home, Andy and Janet were both sound asleep—of course, he had not been afraid of their waking up, the very thing he should have been afraid of. It was after midnight, and cooling a little bit. He closed Janet’s window and got into bed beside Andy. The walking had tired him out, so that, when she got up at dawn and left the room, he didn’t stir. At breakfast, she apologized—she only now realized, cleaning the kitchen, that she’d had too much to drink, she wasn’t even going to say how many, but—she put her arms around him—never again. How stupid of her—it was so dumb to put gin in your lemonade, it disguised the flavor, she’d just poured it in without thinking, and, Frank agreed, that was that.
ON WARM DAYS, Claire liked to go over to Minnie and Lois’s house and lie on the floor of the upstairs hallway, right on the wooden floor, and stay cool that way. She always took a book—right now, she was reading one she got from the library about a girl named Trixie Belden. She was to the part where the two friends, Trixie and the rich girl, Honey, find the redheaded boy sleeping. It rather pleased Claire that she was lying quietly in the only house around them that could even remotely be called a mansion. The windows were closed on the west side, and the shades were drawn, but sunshine skated through the south-facing windows and spread over the red-gold boards of the floor around her. This hall was her favorite place in the world, not only because it was cool, but also because the color of the doors and the doorways and the set of drawers across from her was so deep and comforting. She liked the book, but she turned it on its face, took off her glasses and set them across the spine, then closed her eyes.
She dreamt of the book, of course. Trixie and Honey were in a small room by themselves. They looked a little like Mary Ann Adams and Lydia Keitel at school. The Claire in the dream was looking down at them, and they were trying to get something out of the corner of the small room, a kitten or a chicken or a picket—Claire couldn’t understand the word. As she looked down at them, the room got smaller, and Mary Ann (Trixie) started to cry, and then she said, “I made lunch for you.”
When Claire woke up, her hip was stiff—she had started sleeping on her back, but had turned onto her side, and the floor was hard. She yawned and sat up. The voice said, “With cupcakes.” The voice was Lois’s, and Claire got up on her knees and pushed her hair out of her face. The voice was coming from the dining room, which was to the right at the bottom of the stairs. The staircase, which was not carpeted, was funneling it up to her. She yawned again. Then Joey’s voice said, “You are sweet.” Claire closed her mouth and opened her ears.
Mama had said to Papa the night before that Joe had better get going, because she had seen Dave Crest making up to Lois at the market the day before. Dave had a crew cut, and wore nice clothes, and worked around the market like he owned the place, “Which he does,” said Papa.
“Well, Dan owns the place, but Dave is an only son,” said Mama. “He walks down the aisles like he’s seen too many John Garfield movies. Can’t you say something?” said Mama.
But they all knew that Papa wouldn’t say anything.
“I do love pea soup,” said Joe.
“This is fresh pea soup, and cold. Because it’s a hot day. And I made cornbread and some chicken from last night.”
And then Claire heard the sound of a kiss, a small kiss, but definitely a kiss. At this very moment, there was a flurry and a scratching on the stairs, and here came Nat, wagging his tail. Claire grabbed his nose before he could bark, and started petting him. He flopped into her lap and rolled over. She pushed the book and the glasses across the floor so he wouldn’t roll on them.
Two chairs scraped, and then scraped again. Joe said, “Oh, this is good.”
“These are the last of the peas.”
“They were good this year.”
“The lettuce topped out early, though.”
Silence while they ate. Thinking of those cupcakes, Claire had made up her mind to do something noisy and then trot down the stairs when Lois said, “Let’s get married.”
Joe said, “You and me?”
“Mm-hm.”
“Oh, Lois …” His voice tapered off.
“It’s a good idea.”
“Lois, you’re twenty-one years old and I’m twenty-nine, that’s such a …”
“Eight years is not a big difference.”
They must have gone back to eating, because after a moment Joe said, “The cornbread is really good.”
“Do you like the chicken?”
“Of course.”
“I rolled it in the breadcrumbs twice.”
“It’s crispy.”
Lois’s tone of voice hadn’t changed during this whole conversation. She had proposed, and Joe was going to say no, and Lois just kept on talking. It was not at all like, say, Little Women. Lois said, “I know you’re in love with Minnie. I don’t care.”
“I …” said Joe, but then he chickened out.
“She’s never going to get married. I asked her last night to tell me for sure, and she said that she wants to have her free time to herself, and after Mother and Pop, she’s had enough.”
“She told me that,” said Joe.
“Well, then,” said Lois, still in the same tone, as if the conclusion they should come to would be self-evident.
Joe said, “There’s something wrong with me.”
“What?” said Lois, so brightly that Claire almost barked out a laugh.
“I get fixed in my mind on something and I can’t let it go. You want to know something?”
“Of course.”
“I think I was about five when this stray came to live in the barn, and she had puppies. I guess there was a lot of rabies around back then, and Mama made Papa drown the puppies and shoot the dog, and of course they had to do it, because we had sheep and cows and horses. But I thought about those puppies every day until I got Nat. That was seventeen years. A couple died and I wrapped them in handkerchiefs and buried them. I named the bitch ‘Pal.’ Look at me.”
“You have tears in your eyes?”
“I don’t get over things.”
To Claire, this somehow felt like it was a pretty definite no to her asking him to marry her. Claire very carefully shifted her position and reached for her glasses. Her back was starting to hurt.
“You add things. You added Nat. Add me.”
“Lois! Why do you want that? Why would you want that?”
“Joe, I want this! I want this exact thing. Making lunch for you. Living here. Having some babies, and them living here. Right here. Anybody else, and I would have to do what he wants to do, go where he wants to go.”
Now there was a long silence, then a scraping chair, then footsteps. Lois would be carrying the dishes back to the kitchen.
Joe said, “What would we do if it didn’t work out?”
“You’d move back to your house and it would be just like this. There’s no bad thing that would happen.”
“What if you fell in love with someone?”
“I am in love with someone. You. And I don’t think you’re in love with Minnie, either. I don’t think you know how to be in love yet. I want a chance. It’s like an arranged marriage, except that I am arranging it.”
Joe laughed.
Claire crawled over to one of the bedroom doors, then through it into the bedroom, through the bedroom onto the sleeping porch; then she stood up and half walked, half stomped through the bedroom into the hallway. She picked up her book and ran down the staircase. Joe and Lois looked up, sat back, startled. She said, “I was reading on the sleeping porch and I dozed off. What time is it?”
They fell for it. Lois said, “Want a cupcake? Lemon icing.”
Claire reached for one.
JIM UPJOHN CALLED Frank at the office and asked what he was doing that afternoon. Frank looked at the clock. He had skipped lunch. It was a quarter to one. He said, “I am reading descriptions of rockets.”
“American or Soviet?”
“German.”
; “Old hat,” said Jim.
“You wish,” said Frank. “They had something so much bigger than the V-2 in the works that we still haven’t totally figured it out.”
“Mm,” said Jim, and Frank remembered to shut up. He said, “Nice day.”
“Yes, Corporal Langdon, it is. And that’s why I’m calling.”
“Yes, sir,” said Frank.
“Meet me in half an hour at Anderson Field, building one. We’re going to take my new plane for a spin.”
Frank was out the door in less than a minute.
It was beautiful—bright but calm. The breeze was southerly, straight from Florida, it felt like, light and warm. The apple trees that edged the parking lot of his building were heavy with fruit, and the grass was thick, the way it got before the first frost. He didn’t get into the car, though—Anderson was only a quarter-mile from where he was standing. He left his jacket and his briefcase in the Studebaker, and sprinted. Jim was waiting for him. The plane was already outside of the hangar, and the two of them pulled the blocks away from the wheels. Frank said, “What’s this one?”
“It’s a Fairchild Argus. I’ve been wanting one of these for years, but with four seats. I finally found one. With the see-through canopy. Just wait.”
It was as pleasant as Jim had predicted—buzzing down the Anderson runway and then lifting over Jamaica Bay and turning south toward New Jersey. Frank had been having an especially tedious day, but now his spirits lifted with the plane, and he said, “A pilot’s license seems like a good idea right about now.”
“Wait till we come in for a landing, then decide. I flew the first time when I was twelve. I was too stupid to think that anything could go wrong, so, obviously, the Army Air Force was the place for me. Ever ridden a horse?”
“Only a plowhorse.” They were shouting, but they didn’t seem to be.
“Well, when you ride horses really fast, you learn to never look down. Same with a plane. What draws the eye draws the body.”
But Frank knew that he could be good at this, that it was the natural culmination of every step forward that he had ever taken. They flew on—along the Atlantic coast of New Jersey, low enough to look at Sandy Hook, then the thinly peopled length of the boardwalk at Asbury Park, then down along the coast to the Barnegat Lighthouse (according to Jim), then farther south, over the flat green of the Pine Barrens. Jim turned north, and they flew past Trenton, along the Delaware River. Here and there, the leaves were beginning to turn. Moment by moment, Frank ceased looking at every spot as a potential home-buying opportunity, and began seeing the earth again, the way he had on the farm, when he was living in his tent, when he was marching through Africa and then through Italy, France, and Germany. He said, “You know, this reminds me that I’ve never spent so much time in one place as I do now. It’s either the apartment or the office or the bus between them.”
“You don’t go for rides in your car?”
“Only to look at open houses on Sunday.”
“How’s the baby?”
“She’s got hair. She’s almost walking. She and Andy have matching outfits.”
Jim laughed, then said, “Well, you tell me what’s worse, Corporal. Looking obsessively for a place to live—”
“Which is a lot like looking for the perfect spot for a foxhole.”
“Or knowing that you will always live where you are supposed to.”
“My heart weeps for you.”
“Too big is as bad as too small.”
“You should meet my friend Rubino the real-estate magnate. You would see eye to eye.”
“Corporal, here’s what I learned in the war. There’s nothing more haunted than a house. Doesn’t matter where, how grand, how small, made of brick, straw, stone, or gingerbread, whether perfectly cared for or blown to bits. Beings gather there. Every house is a planet, exerting gravitational pull. Every house is in a dark wood, every house has a wicked witch in it, doesn’t matter if she looks like a fairy godmother …”
Jim’s words seemed to nestle beside the roar of the two engines, perfectly clear and impossibly so.
“A plane doesn’t have that kind of existence. It’s like a thought. It’s either flying or it’s vanished. It doesn’t linger to haunt you, to make you wonder what you did wrong, to make you ponder your sins.”
“I can sense that,” said Frank.
“A house gradually lowers itself into the earth.”
“And a plane?”
“Gradually dematerializes.”
They stopped talking, and the Argus swept onward, looping around Scranton, and then crossing the patchwork green and yellow of the Catskills, dotted here and there with lakes that shone in the sunshine like electric lights. Then the city was before them. Jim flew south along the Hudson, low enough so that the banks on either side seemed far away, and then he turned out over the dark ocean and headed for Anderson. In spite of their conversation, Frank’s spirits were as expansive as the empyrean that was revealed through the see-through canopy of the plane.
He was home by six, his usual time. Andy and Janet had slept most of the afternoon—they looked disheveled but beautiful, especially since Andy was back to her old weight and wearing her old clothes. She looked good and still managed to serve up macaroni and cheese that she had put together that morning, and some green beans and a salad. Janet sat in her high chair with a spoon in her hand, pressing the bowl against bits of macaroni that Andy set on her table. Every so often, she said, “Ha! Ha!” A breeze, the same breeze that had invigorated him at the office, blew through the open window. Andy said, “I’m so glad fall is here.”
“I went up in the plane with Jim Upjohn today. For a couple of hours. I think I’d like to get my pilot’s license.”
Because she was Andy and not any of the other women he knew, she didn’t say, “Why?” She said, “Good.” She leaned toward Janet and touched her cheek with one finger. Janet smiled. “Flying baby.”
Looking at her, Frank felt his paralysis seep away.
1952
DEBBIE MANNING KNEW as soon as she woke up that it was Easter morning and that the Easter Bunny would have been there in the night, and left some candy and presents—Mommy had been talking about this for a long time, and she had even taken Debbie out and bought her a new green dress for going to church. The dress had its own slip, which bunched at the waist and pricked her, but the skirt stuck out so that she couldn’t see her white Mary Janes, and so she didn’t mind it very much. Timmy had a new suit with a blue tie, and Dean had a white shirt and blue shorts that buttoned to the shirt. The problem, of course, was that there was no way for the Easter Bunny to make his rounds. Santa had reindeer and Halloween witches, who, according to Mommy, were actually very nice, just pretending to be mean, and had broomsticks, but no provision had been made for the Easter Bunny, and Debbie could not figure it out. Timmy said that he had a flying convertible made of glass, very much like Cinderella’s carriage—but when he said it, he was laughing, which with Timmy always meant that you couldn’t believe him. She lay in bed, even though the sun was bright in the window, because she knew that she was supposed to wait for Mommy and Daddy to get up, but just then she heard running feet outside her door, which was half open, and she slipped out of bed and went to peek. She was wearing her Alice in Wonderland pajamas, which always made her feel very happy.
The running feet were Dean’s, and she saw his head disappearing down the stairs. She went to the top step and whispered, “Stop, Dean!” but he just looked up at her and kept going down, half backward, his hands on the upper step as his feet felt for the lower step. Debbie hadn’t realized that Dean could climb out of his crib. Otherwise, the house was silent. Dean had also managed to get out of the lower half of his pajamas, and his diaper was hanging, heavy and wet, below his bottom. Debbie put her hand on the banister and followed him.
The Easter baskets and whatever else there might be were on the dining-room table, three tall pink-and-green arches for handles. Dean didn’t even
look at them—he was running around going “Hooo-hoo-hoo”—and Debbie realized that he was just up, Easter had nothing to do with it. She went over to him and took his hand, then said, “Want your bottie? Let’s look in the figerator.”
Dean said, “Bottie!” He let her keep holding his hand. His diaper smelled bad. Debbie couldn’t actually reach the handle of the refrigerator, but she managed to stick her fingers into the rubber edge of the door and pull the thing open. There was one bottle on the bottom shelf. She took it out and took the cap off the top, and handed it to Dean, who sat down with a thump on his wet diaper and put it into his mouth. He was big enough now so that he held it with one hand and stared at her while he sucked and played with the edge of his pajama top. Timmy came through the door of the dining room, carrying an Easter basket. He was wearing cowboy pajamas and cowboy boots instead of slippers, and he looked as though he was about to get into trouble.
Debbie said, “What time is it?”
Timmy looked at the clock, then said, “Two hairs past a freckle, eastern elbow time.” He bit the second ear off his chocolate bunny. Then he said, “Let’s do something.”