by Jane Langton
This morning, as the Kellys’ Ford pickup sped past the Gibbys’ house, Jerry Gibby dumped his new birdbath beside one of the expensive boulders that were part of the flossy landscaping around his new house. Then, puffing with the effort, he went indoors to ask Imogene to come out and take a look. But Imogene was in the Jacuzzi. So, instead, Jerry wandered around the new kitchen, dazed with possessive pride, admiring the microwave oven, the trash compacter, the bar with its own little sink, the bay window with the maple table and the captain’s chairs.
It was all a dream. Jerry couldn’t believe it. If only he had known about this house when he was a kid, growing up in Somerville with a mother who was always sleeping off a binge and a dad who was missing half the time, it would have made things easier. What if he had known that someday he would possess a house in a fancy suburb and a gleaming white Coupe de Ville and a supermarket franchise! Well, of course the bank owned the house and the car, and General Grocery owned most of the supermarket. After all, Jerry still owed General Grocery seven hundred thousand dollars. Oh, God. For a second Jerry panicked. Once again he told himself he had been a fool to build the house and buy the car at the same time he was going so far out on a limb to acquire the store.
Distracted by the grim statistics of his debts, Jerry stared at the trash compacter and tried to persuade himself things were going to be okay. He had a formula for comforting himself whenever he got in a tizzy, Everybody’s got to eat. Jerry had recited the formula to his brothers-in-law and his father-in-law—“Groceries! it’s a cinch. Everybody’s got to eat.” And they had all nodded their heads and agreed with him and loaned him the hundred thousand for the down payment on the supermarket. The car and the house had been spun out of air, somehow or other. Jerry himself wasn’t sure just how.
Worrying made him hungry. Looking in the refrigerator, Jerry found a piece of sausage left over from breakfast, and he ate it greedily, dripping grease on his lapel. Imogene saw the spot when she came flouncing into the kitchen in her pretty ruffled dress. Swiftly she scrubbed it off and kissed him. Then she got to work on the boys, straightening their ties, wetting down their cowlicks. The three fat little boys looked just like Jerry. They all wore identical suits. In the back of the Coupe de Ville they bounced on the seat, demanding to hear the stereo. They wanted to see the windows go up and down when Jerry pushed the buttons. They wanted to try the tape deck.
“Pipe down, guys,” said Jerry, backing cautiously out of the driveway. “Just shut up, okay?”
Imogene patted the white leather of the front seat with her plump hand. “I’m scared about church,” she said. “I won’t know when to kneel and when to stand up.”
“Kneel?” Jerry snickered. “You don’t kneel in a Protestant church. You just sit there. God lets the Protestants sit there on the seat of their pants. Everybody’s equal, you know? How do you do, God! Shake hands, okay, God?”
“Well, at least the minister will be new too,” said Imogene. “We won’t be the only ones walking into the church for the first time.”
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Cambridge, Mass.: the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1955, 1979, 1983, by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
From Emily Dickinson Face to Face by Martha D. Bianchi. Copyright © 1932 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Copyright renewed © 1960 by Alfred LeeteHampson. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.
The daguerreotype on page 246 is in the collection of the Amherst College Library. The frontispiece is in possession of Mr. Herman Abromson of Rockville Centre, Long Island.
copyright © 1984 by Jane Langton
978-1-4532-5233-8
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