He picks up these insidious cooperative suggestions from Miss Potter, and he has me in the midst of family projects before I’m aware of what’s going on.
“Well, I guess it wouldn’t hurt to try. Hand me a piece of that green wire.”
I gathered the ends of the streamers together, carefully half-looped them and wired them to the bottom of the stem, so that the stem was part of the curve, too. They were pliable, but not limp or crackly, from the glycerin. My idea was to make a Dried Arrangement and then wire in some camellias at the last minute.
If I had been a purist, I would have left the Arrangement the way it was, with just the one leaf. Tommy and I, however, are not purists.
“Go out into the garage and get me six dried okra pods off the shelf,” I said. “I am a fairy godmother.”
“Which ones is the okra?” Tommy asked.
“The stripy ones.”
Tommy was back in a flash. “What are you going to turn them into?”
“A handsome young Dried Arrangement.”
“Can I stick some in?”
“One.”
I wired them all and put in five, their slight crescents all curving in the same direction. Tommy put the sixth one in, curving, of course, in the wrong direction.
Still, you know, it didn’t look bad.
“Now,” I said, “we need something behind it. For a background. Something pale. Go into the garage,” I commanded, waving my magic floral wire, “and get me four ferns. They’re between the sheets of newspaper.”
It’s obvious what’s wrong with all this. You should never use an even number of things in a flower arrangement. It’s gauche and bourgeois and almost as bad as serving iced sherry.
JUST as I was really getting started, Ronald came in demanding dinner.
“How am I ever going to get my Arrangement made if people keep interrupting?” I said, because I was knee-deep in weeds and it was infuriating to have to stop. “Don’t you and Tommy ever think of anything but food?”
“Sally Jo!”
I opened cans of this and that, like the ladies on television. Ronald and Tommy ate morosely and of course the Tylers dropped by after dinner and Marcelle said, “What is that?” And I said, “Oh, it isn’t finished yet,” and Tommy said, “I helped,” and Marcelle said, “That’s awfully clever of Tommy to help make something. But tell me, dear, have you ever wondered about his subconscious?”
No, I hadn’t, but it was my subconscious, and after that I kept wondering, Why is my subconscious like a Moebius Strip? The best answer I could come up with was that it’s because it has a halftwist in it.
But the next morning I got the fern in exactly right, balancing the five okra pods with three large ferns and the wrong-way one with a small fern. The aspidistra showed up beautifully against the fragile dried road fern.
Then, of course, Tommy and Ronald revolted against my Creative Period, each in his own way.
Tommy fell down and split his lip wide open, requiring stitches, and Ronald came down with the flu, requiring continuous bed care.
I’d rather be locked up with two live octopi.
And then Marcelle called and said the pot holders had to be done by the next week, so every time I had an odd moment I had to sit down and work on that wretched applique.
“I’ll resign!” I screamed one day, hurling a half-appliqued pot holder across the room. “Do you know that I still have the bias binding to sew on? And, Ronald, they’re round.”
“For God’s sake, resign! I’ve never heard of making pot holders for a garden club, anyway.”
“It’s for our bazaar. And I can’t resign before the show. I wouldn’t be able to make the Arrangement.”
“Which would suit me just fine,” Ronald said. “Where’s my pipe?”
“Did you look on your pipe rack?”
“There’s a tube of toothpaste on my pipe rack.”
“Then your pipe’s in the medicine cabinet.”
By the time Tommy was back in school and Ronald was back at work, I had one day to finish my Arrangement in.
BARBARA, of course, had been calling every night “to find out how everybody is,” and hinting for me to let her take over.
Somewhere, probably out of sheer irritation, I found the strength of mind to refuse her.
“But you’ll need my Pink Perfections,” Barbara said. “After all, it’s a camellia show.”
“Couldn’t you meet me before the show? I’m going over at eight o’clock and Ronald’s going to drop Tommy off at school for me. The show doesn’t start until nine. You could stop by on the way to work.”
“I’ll be there at eight o’clock,” Barbara said. “How many Pink Perfections do you want me to bring? Three? Five?”
“Four,” I said, and hung up before she could even gasp.
I worked most of the night. I filled in the curve of the Moebius Strip with some soft, sort of thistle down things. I covered the starfoam with curly moss and left the rest of the chopping board bare. I worked in the mindless way that produces the best effect.
The alarm went off at six. I hopped out of bed and darted about the chilly house to get my family clothed and fed and out. I was more excited than I ought to have been over a flower show. I’d stuck my neck out too far, refusing to let Barbara help. And using a totally unorthodox Arrangement. And furthermore—you don’t ordinarily think of Flower Arranging as a vice, but it was something nasty in me that made me volunteer to do it, and to exclude Barbara, who after all needs to make Flower Arrangements because she doesn’t have any children. And if one is going to have a vice at all, and neglect home and family and friends, one ought to be able to say, “There, at least I got a prize.”
I broke the eggs into a bowl and got the bacon started. Then I popped into the living room and turned the light on for a quick look at my Moebius Strip. There was something not quite right about it. For one thing, it no longer looked like a Moebius Strip. On the other hand, it didn’t look not like a Moebius Strip.
The bacon started complaining and I went to separate the pieces and at this point Tommy woke up and informed me that he was wet, as is his tendency on cold mornings. Then Ron said he couldn’t find his cuff links and the cat started yowling to come in and I didn’t have time to think about anything at all.
Until I started in to get my flower Arrangement to bring to the John D. Ransom auditorium, where the show was going to be. Then Tommy said, “I fixed it for you.” And so he had. It looked Moebius, only more so.
Barbara was waiting for me just inside the door, her arms wrapped around herself, doing a little two-step to warm up. The auditorium was like a vault and the heating system was just getting started, with random, thunderous shrieks.
“Why, Sally Jo!” Barbara cried, stopping in mid-two-step. “It’s interesting.”
I CARRIED the Arrangement over to the niche marked EASTBANK GARDEN GROUP. ARRANGEMENT BY SALLY JO WARNER. I set it down carefully, though Barbara says an Arrangement should always be so tight you can turn it upside down and shake it.
Interesting! I had a moment of wild triumph and then I was a little ashamed of myself. Barbara was generous enough to like it.
“However,” Barbara said, pressing her lips together and making me feel normal again, “where are we going to put the Pink Perfections?”
Barbara opened the shallow box with four camellias in it. They were, of course, perfect and spotless and exactly alike. I can understand how Barbara manages to discipline her house and her dog and her husband, but I have never figured out how anyone can discipline flowers.
“The camellias? Oh, yes, the camellias . . .”
There was a baffled bellow from Ronald. He was trying to get Tommy’s snowsuit off. I ran over before the zipper or Tommy could get jammed. The instant I had the snowsuit off, there was a wail from Tommy. “She ruined my Flower Arrangement!”
My heart sank. “No, no, dear,” I said, hurrying after him to where Barbara was, but he was right. There were bits of weed
and fluff piled up on the floor and a gleam of joy in Barbara’s eyes, and there was nothing left of the fascinating shape Tommy and I had made. “See?” I went on. “It’s beautiful. Ifs a perfect Hogarth Curve.” It was. It didn’t droop at all. And Barbara had made the Arrangement.
“There was something funny in there,” Barbara said. “I thought it must be Tommy’s, so I saved it.”
“It’s my inside-out balloon,” Tommy said, his chin quivering, “and she turned it back right-side in!”
It was Tommy’s multi-colored balloon, and it really didn’t look much like a balloon any more, though it was still blown up. “How did your balloon get in there?”
“I put it in,” Tommy said, “to make the Arrangement more rounder. It’s the roundest thing I ever made.” Tears were gathering in his eyes.
“Now, dear, I don’t know why I didn’t see it.”
“I put it in after you made it. Then I blew it up and tied it and poked in the end. It was the roundest thing in the whole world!”
“But it’s still tied! See? So nobody could have turned it right-side out. It looks the same on both sides.”
“No, it don’t. The other side got magnetic paint on it That’s why the balloon got ripples in it”
Ron had been standing around looking impatient and he said, “Tommy, there’s no such thing as magnetic paint”
“There is, too,” Tommy said. “I made it.”
“How did you make it?”
“You mix up silver paint like you use for Christmas Arrangements and you add that silver glitter that you sprinkle and then you add all the old magnets you have around and you stir it good.”
“How many old magnets?” I asked.
“Lots and lots and lots.”
“Then what?”
“Then you turn the balloon inside out and blow it up and pinch the end with a clothes pin and paint it and then when it’s dry you let the air out.”
“And just why do you do all this?” Ron asked.
THAT was a silly question and Tommy didn’t bother to answer it.
“What about the magnets?” I asked.
“You bury them in the back yard.”
“Oh. And do metal things stick on the magnetic paint?”
“Well—hair does, if you brush it first.”
“Metal things.”
“I think they do. A teeny bit. But now it’s all on the wrong side and it’s ruined.”
“I have to get to work,” Ron said.
“Here, catch.” I tossed the balloon to Tommy.
It stayed up in the middle of the air.
“See?” Tommy said. “It’s no good no more.”
We all stood staring, in a state of shock.
“It’s a funny shape,” Ron said finally. “Those puckers sort of go in and if you follow that striated band . . . if you follow . . .”
I was trying to follow it with my eyes, too.
“. . . you get vertigo,” Ron finished, looking off in another direction.
“Yes, you do,” I said. “Well, we can’t just leave it here. Tommy, would you like to take it to show Miss Potter?”
“Miss Potter, hell!” Ron exclaimed. “There’s something extraordinary about this. I’m going to take it down to work with me and let the boys at the lab have a look at it. I’ve never seen anything that just stayed in mid-air like that. You notice it doesn’t seem to float, as it would if it contained a gas, and . . .”
But I was busy apologizing to Barbara for Tommy’s manners and assuring her the Hogarth Curve was beautiful.
I pinned the left-over camellia in my hair, because I felt I deserved something, and Ron said he’d drop Tommy and me off at kindergarten.
“Isn’t it marvelous,” I asked Ron as I wiped off the windshield, because Tommy kept huffing on it, “to have a son who’s an important scientist before the age of six?”
“Now don’t be getting delusions of grandeur about him,” Ron said. “Whatever you and he made was purely accidental.”
“That goes to show what you know about the scientific method. I was making a Moebius Arrangement and Tommy was making the roundest thing in the whole world, and when you’re working on something and something else happens, something scientifically important, it’s called—I can’t remember what it’s called, but it’s a perfectly good word beginning with R. Or maybe L.”
“Serendipity. But you and Tommy . . . Never mind.”
LATER on in the morning, Ron called to tell me to go see a man named Craddock over at the lab, and I’d have to go by myself because Ron was busy, and I said, “All right,” but it wasn’t all right. The thought of going to that strange place to talk to important men was terrifying.
I opened my closet and looked unhappily through my inappropriate house dresses and equally inappropriate party dresses. I finally decided on my black skirt, dark gray sweater and white cotton blouse, which I hoped would give the impression of a businesslike outfit.
On the way down on the streetcar, I found a woman staring at me and I realized I had been practicing my facial expression. It was the one where I hang a cigarette out of the side of my mouth, narrow my eyes to a slit, and say, “I’m Warner. You Craddock?”
What actually happened was that an office boy said, “What are you so nervous about, lady?” and brought me through a maze of forbidding-looking chambers and deposited me on a bench facing a back that was, presumably, Craddock’s.
I sat there trying to decide whether to address him or just wait, when he turned, looked at me, and jumped two feet.
“I didn’t know anyone was there,” he explained, and since he was the one who had acted a little silly, I felt much better about him immediately.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was just sitting here trying to decide . . .” That wouldn’t do. “My name’s Warner,” I said, omitting the facial expression.
“Dr. Warner?”
“Sally Jo Warner.”
“And you discovered this new—force field?”
“If you mean the right-side-inside-out balloon,” I answered, “Yes. With my son. Thomas.” I decided that if he was going to be a scientist, we should stop calling him Tommy.
CRADDOCK was one of those thin, pale, freckled-all-over people with eyes the color of the rims of his horn-rimmed glasses and he wore the same general expression of stubborn intentness that Tommy has. And I could sense in his expression the same scorn for me that Tommy so frequently has.
“I’d like to discuss this with your son,” he said.
Of course. I couldn’t be expected to say anything sensible.
“Thomas has school in the mornings,” I said.
“Ah? Urn. Which school?”
“Miss Nicholls.”
“Miss—”
“It’s a small private school. Kindergarten through third grade.”
“A third-grade child did this!”
“No. Kindergarten. And I was not without influence in this discovery. I went to Grey Rock Junior College.”
“Urn. Sciences?”
“Yes.”
“I mean what sciences?”
“We learned all the sciences in one course. Chemistry, biology, physics and—well, I’d have to look in the book to remember the others.”
“Never mind,” Craddock said, a shudder going through his slight, clattery frame. “Just tell me how you did this.” He nodded at the balloon, which was encased in a glass box with a tube sort of thing leading into it.
“Well, first you take an aspidistra leaf . . .” I began, and went on from there. Craddock wrote it all down, though he kept saying, “I just don’t see how the balloon fits into all this,” and finally I said, “Now we get to the balloon. And the magnetic paint.”
“Where did you get the magnetic paint?”
“My colleague made it.”
Craddock was awfully picayunish about details. “How much silver paint? How much is ‘the rest of a pack of glitter’ ?” Then he was disturbed because lots and lots and lots of magnet
s is eight.
When I got to the part where Barbara made a Hogarth Curve out of my Moebius Strip, I asked him for a cigarette because I was still upset over it.
“I know how you feel,” Craddock said, being agreeable for the first time. “I don’t think it’s right to make a Hogarth Curve out of a Moebius Strip, either. I wouldn’t even think it was possible.”
“Well, that’s all,” I said, and Craddock grabbed my cigarette before I dropped it into what looked like an empty dish. “I have to rush off and pick up my colleague at kindergarten.”
ON the way to Miss Nicholls, my mind was afire with ambition. Tommy would appear on TV. Everyone would forget about the time Tommy smeared Miss Potter’s chair with mucilage right before she sat down. He’d be offered scholarships to MIT. He’d dictate articles for scientific journals and I’d write them up.
And if anyone ever made remarks about my thinking ability again, I’d just say, “My method produces results.”
About two o’clock that afternoon, Craddock called and bawled, “The force field is leaking! Another hour and it’ll all be gone!”
“Stop sounding as though it’s my fault,” I said.
“Sorry. I’m just anxious.”
“Why don’t you catch the drippings in a pot or something?”
“We tried to. But you should see the cloud chamber.”
I said, “I’m sure the cloud chamber is very interesting,” because it was none of his business if I didn’t know what a cloud chamber was.
“The lines just wiggle and disappear into another dimension. I don’t know how else to describe it”
“What’s making it leak?”
“There’s something unusual in the nuclei of the atoms. They’re decaying.”
“Tommy blew up the balloon,” I said, and wondered if he had cavities, though of course it was a different kind of decay. Still the thought made me a little nervous.
“We’re getting photographs of everything,” Craddock went on, “but what’s worrying us is that we haven’t been able to duplicate the—uh—experiment.”
“I’ll bet you didn’t soak the aspidistra in glycerin. You couldn’t have. There hasn’t been time.”
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