The following Sunday, on their tour of the New Houses, Marge up and entered one of them, without so much as a by your leave. Del was taken quite aback because it was not in Marge’s nature to be a forward woman, with anyone else but him she was shy and retiring. Although steps to the front door weren’t installed yet, she’d reached up, clutched the door jambs, pawed at the threshold until her foot caught a purchase, and then boosted herself through the doorway. “That’s trespass,” Del had called after her, watching her disappear. He called out to her again and when she failed to reply he waved Sammy into the vacant house, looked doubtfully up and down the street, and then sprang up after his wife and son.
The house was still nothing more than a shell, outside walls and a roof, rooms partitioned off. Del hardly recognized the voices of Marge and Sammy echoing in the back; the hollow house made them entirely different, the voices of ghosts and strangers. He tracked their unfamiliarity through several doorways and discovered wife and child in the kitchen, Marge holding forth on the layout to the boy as if she had drawn the blueprints with her own hand.
“And this is the counter,” she said, pointing, not looking at Del when he came in. “And these holes here are where the double sinks will go in. And over there, in front of that big window is where the stove’ll go. Electric.” She brushed past Del, Sammy trailing after her, and turned into a hallway. Her husband hesitated and then followed the two of them. “Here’s the indoor toilet,” she said to Sammy, “and it’ll have everything, a sink and a bath. All that.” She trooped them through the three bedrooms, talking in a high-pitched, nervous, eager way that Del hadn’t heard before.
“Look at the size of it!” she exclaimed to Sammy when they entered the master bedroom. Sammy said it didn’t look so big to him but his mother explained that was how an empty room always appeared. It was a funny thing, the more you put into an empty room, the bigger it seemed to get.
She ended her guided tour in the living room, counting off on her fingers. “Kitchen, three bedrooms, bathroom, living room. How many rooms is that? Six, isn’t it? Six rooms. And the kids’ bedrooms are nearly the size of my kitchen,” she said wonderingly. She took her son by the shoulders, steering him directly in front of the enormous rectangle cut in one of the living-room walls. “You know what that’s called, Sammy?” she asked. “That’s called a picture window. It gives you all of outside to look at, the whole big picture. Just look at that view.”
The three of them regarded solemnly and reverently a vast open expanse, the same view that they had been able to enjoy from their front yard before these very houses had been raised to stand between them and what they now admired. But neither Sammy nor Marge remembered this. Standing where they stood the landscape was changed, was charged with an unfamiliar, heart-rending beauty. A limitless stretch of brome grass billowed in the evening breeze, the slanting rays of the evening sun glinting upon it each time it bowed down before the wind. When the wind ebbed, the grass sprang upright again, swaying and shuddering, a deep green tide surging against the dam of pale sky. And here and there, isolated amid the grass, islands of red willow turned a sad, dusky rose in the dying sun, and poplar bluffs were crowned with swarming, shimmering light.
“How would you like to look at that every day of your life?” Sammy’s mother asked him. “Wouldn’t that be something? Sit in your easy-chair and look at that?”
And Sammy nodded yes because he knew his mother wanted him to, which was enough for him, always had been.
His mother had been very particular about getting the number of rooms in the house she had clambered up into correct. Six. Sammy could recall very clearly how she had counted them off, concluding with the thumb on her right hand, which was the living room. It surprised Sammy that he had never thought of their own house in such terms before. Now he pondered the matter long and hard. Kitchen, living room, bedroom made three. Sammy did not have a bedroom of his own. He slept on the sofa in the living room. Three rooms. If he stretched things he could get five by counting the attic and the dirt cellar which you could get into by a trap door in the floor of the kitchen. But if he did, then it was only fair to count the Americans’ basement and that gave them seven rooms. No matter how he worked it, Sammy came up short.
He wondered why he had never thought of their house this way before. Was it because he had been too little to consider such things? Now that he was thinking of it, he realized that there always had been better houses in the town than his, but he hadn’t realized this was so. Maybe because though better, they were still old and shabby. He had heard his mother say that there hadn’t been a new house built in their town since before the Depression when the money evaporated. Now, all at once, there were twenty-five or thirty new houses going up right under his nose.
Try as he might, Sammy could not imagine what kind of people lived in such fine, modern, beautiful houses. He could not imagine them in some far-off place, waiting to be called to come and take possession of their handsome residences. He could not imagine the towns they waited in, or how these people talked, or how they looked. And because all of these things were impossible for him to imagine, he was made uneasy at the prospect of their coming.
The contractor’s foreman paid a Sunday visit to the building site to satisfy himself that everything had been properly stowed away and left shipshape for Monday morning. As he cruised the crescents he glimpsed a young boy running around the corner of one of the houses. Suspecting mischief, he parked the company pick-up, got out, and went behind the house to investigate. What he found around back was Del Cutter, his wife, and their boy. Being a local man, the foreman knew Del by reputation and, despite Cutter’s embarrassment at being discovered there, he knew Del was an honest man and not likely to be sniffing around looking to pinch tools.
“Hello, Del. Hello, Marge,” he said.
Del nodded uncomfortably and plunged his hands deep into his pockets. The boy edged a little closer to his mother. The foreman didn’t have a clue what the three of them were up to. “You folks looking for something?” he asked.
Del and Marge glanced at each other. “Just window-shopping,” said Marge hurriedly when she saw her husband didn’t intend to offer an answer. Then she gave a brittle yelp of laughter.
“Window-shopping,” repeated the foreman. “That’s a good one. Window-shopping.”
“We better get along, Marge,” said Del.
For a second, it looked to the foreman as if Marge Cutter might refuse to budge. Her mouth opened, as if to issue a protest, and then closed again.
Only when the Cutters started to move off did it come to him what they had been doing. Likely hunting for scrap wood to burn in their stove.
He called out to Cutter. “Hey, Del,” he said, “if you was looking for odds and ends to use in your stove that’s okay by me. Not to worry. Take whatever you can find.”
Cutter paused, turned slowly around. The foreman smiled. The Cutters weren’t the lazy, shiftless kind, just people who worked hard to no effect. Letting them walk off with a few butt ends of two-by-fours, or scraps of cedar shingle for kindling took nothing out of his pockets. “Help yourself,” he said swelling with easy generosity. “It’d be a hand in keeping the area tidy.”
He got no thanks from Del Cutter. “I buy my wood,” he said in a quiet voice. “I ain’t a scrounger.”
The foreman almost retorted, If you ain’t a scrounger, then what the hell are you hanging around here for? But on weighing the heat in Cutter’s eyes and his small, hard, terrier’s body, he didn’t. People said Cutter wasn’t anybody to trifle with, not if he was mad.
“Suit yourself,” is all he dared to say.
The Americans were not the only strangers to come, or promise to come. A trailer court mushroomed on the outskirts of town, rows of mobile homes propped up on cinder blocks, vehicles parked every which way on straggling streets, plenty of mud and pot holes and sagging clotheslines flapping laundry, a maze of rusty-coloured snow fence to prevent babies from wandering
off yards of beaten, trampled grass. An encampment of itinerants, shaft-sinkers, electricians, mechanics, steel workers, their women and children.
The trailer court gave Marge Cutter an idea that wasn’t clearly hopeless. One night at supper she said to her husband, “What do you think we could afford in the way of a mobile home?”
Del looked up from his plate. He’d been mowing hay all day under a hot sun and his face was the colour of fire brick. For the first time in their married life, the red face and faded ginger hair struck Marge as sly, maybe even slippery.
“What would we want a mobile home for?” he asked.
“To live in,” said Marge quietly, giving a little hitch to her chin.
“A tin house,” Del said. His father winked at Sammy, making him wince. The boy knew that his mother was deadly serious, even if his father didn’t. “What would that make us? Spam in the can?”
“They’ve got running water out at the trailer court and septic tanks,” said Marge coaxingly. “Those mobile homes all have indoor toilets.”
“You seem to know everything they got,” said Del. “What else they got?”
“You buy a mobile home,” said Marge, “and it comes complete. Furniture, beds, cupboards, electric stove and fridge, propane furnace for heating. Everything in one package, all built in.”
“We got furniture,” said Del.
“Nothing stopping anybody selling furniture.”
Marge watched him go shifty-eyed, a fox cornered. “I don’t see the percentage in selling perfectly good furniture,” he said. “You never get what it’s worth.”
“I don’t see the percentage in some things either,” announced Marge. “I don’t see the percentage in knocking myself out in an uphill battle to keep this shack clean. An old place like this – the doors and windows don’t fit proper. The wind blows and there’s dust under every sash. In the winter I got to keep a rug under the door just to keep the snow from sifting in on the floor. The linoleum won’t polish because it’s worn clear through to the backing in places. Look,” she said, indicating where the pattern had been scuffed away. “I’ve got to haul wood to cook and water to wash and in the winter I got to empty chamber-pots. I take up Sammy’s bed in the morning and I make it up again at night. He ought to have his own bedroom and his own bed. I’m tired of carrying this wreck of a house on my back. Times are changing. They aren’t what they were. Why can’t I have something that isn’t broken, that the dirt isn’t ground into?” she said with longing in her voice. “Something new.”
Del didn’t have a ready answer to her question. In his mind he was willing to grant that she was entitled to what she wanted, that Marge, so long uncomplaining, deserved consideration. But he did not know how to say so, did not see how it could be brought to pass, so he shrugged hopelessly and muttered something about money.
Marge stared at Del and Del at Marge. Sammy knew what the look on his mother’s face meant. It was the look she got whenever Sammy pushed her too far, past her breaking point. Once his mother said something, or stated an intention wearing that face, she never took it back.
“They’re paying a dollar an hour out at the mine site,” said Marge. “You don’t make near that kind of money now.”
He hadn’t expected that. Del scooted his eyes back down to his plate. Like Sammy, there were things he couldn’t imagine. One of them was crawling about under the earth, working like a maggot in the black guts of an animal. “I don’t know nothing about that kind of work,” he said. “It’s not in my line.”
“They’re training men. Dollar an hour to learn.”
“Dollar an hour to learn to be a worm. I ain’t a worm.”
Unlike Sammy and Del, Marge’s trouble came from what she could imagine, not from what she couldn’t. She was not prepared to surrender these imaginings. Bitterly, she said, “You aren’t a worm and you aren’t Spam in a can. What the hell are you?”
“I’ll tell you what the hell I am,” his father said. “I’m the goddamn boss around here, that’s what I am.” But Sammy could see that the brave words didn’t match his father’s expression. The look on his face belonged to a man hurt and frightened, the mouth shamming hardness while the eyes begged.
Sammy could recall bad times between his parents before, times when they had turned the air cold and thin in a room. But it had never gone on for so long, the irritable, flesh-crawling silences, the flashes of dogged, stupid bickering. In the past, one or the other of them had forgotten or pretended to forget, but what had passed between them now was unforgettable, with too much at hazard for even gentle pretences to be possible. So Sammy and Marge paid visits to the new houses without Del. Ever since the foreman had insulted him by supposing he and his family were scavenging – like some sort of tribe of bone and rag pickers – Del Cutter wouldn’t have been caught dead on the Americans’ property.
It was an entirely different story with his wife. He had made it plain that he wanted her to stay off the place too, but she ignored him and returned again and again to roam the empty houses. The only difficulty was that the nearer the houses came to completion, the harder they were to get into. Now they had doors which could be locked. Here Sammy came in handy. He had inherited his father’s lean, compact body and could wriggle through windows carelessly left open. Cat-like, he squeezed into basements or, standing on his mother’s shoulders, slithered through bedroom and bathroom windows left ajar, dropping to the floor and padding off to unlock the door and let her in.
Always, there was something new and noteworthy for his mother to show him. “See, they’re putting in a fireplace now. She’ll have fires in the winter. She’ll put her chair so. It’ll be night and she’ll turn out the electric lights to watch the fire all the better. Her shadow will be big on the back wall across there. She’ll have carpet all through. She’ll be able to walk from the living room to the bedroom in her bare feet and never have them touch anything but carpet, never chill them on linoleum.”
“This baseboard trim is mahogany,” she told him. “You’re looking at the best. She’ll have a mahogany mantel on the fireplace too. These walls she’ll have painted cream to set off the trim. She’ll have it lovely once she’s done.”
They went into the kitchen. “She’ll have all the cupboards mahogany too – with a dark stain. There’ll be a Lazy Susan to keep all the spices, coffee, tea, sugar, and such, convenient at a spin. She’ll have a hood and fan over the stove to suck up grease and smoke. The kitchen curtains will be white with green trim – not plastic curtains but linen.”
“This’ll be the boy’s bedroom,” she said, standing in the centre of the vacant room. “She’ll buy him a captain’s bed – a bed with drawers underneath for his clothes. He’ll have a bulletin board where he can pin up pictures of his favourite hockey players. She’ll buy a desk and lamp for him so’s he can do his home work and not be bothered and interrupted while he studies. She’ll paint his walls blue, a boy’s colour. He’ll have a chest to keep his toys. Can’t you see it?”
Maybe not, but he could see her face.
They were going at it again, in their new way. Not yelling, not storming as once they had, but teasing in a vicious, cold-blooded fashion, biting at one another. He had moved to the kitchen but his stomach didn’t hurt any less, he could still hear them.
His mother said, “Maybe it’s wrong to offer you encouragement. Maybe what they say is true, maybe old dogs can’t be taught new tricks. Maybe we’ll die in this kennel.”
His father wasn’t as good at this as she was. “Well, if I’m an old dog what does that make you? You’ve got two years on me.”
Sammy got to his feet and went out, careful not to let the screen door slap shut behind him. It was getting late and he shouldn’t have been going out, but he couldn’t take any more of it. For a moment he stood absolutely still, waiting for a voice to order him back inside. It didn’t come. They had no ear except for the wicked things passing back and forth between them.
He crossed the roa
d to the new houses. The sun was going down, shedding an odd, orange light. Many of the new houses wore a fresh primer coat of white paint and when the sun touched them they glowed copper. The first time his family had inspected the houses the setting sun had burned amid their ribs like a fiery heart. They had all three been together then. Now the burning was outside, on the paint.
He walked slowly up and down the roads, sizing up the houses. The angrier he got, the more slowly he prowled, slower and slower. He stopped in front of a split level. A roof, shingles, paint, siding, concrete driveway. Sammy went up the walk, tried the front door, then circled around and shook the back door. It was locked too but all the windows looking out on the yard stood open. He found himself a pair of sawhorses, a board to stand on, and pulled himself up and through a bedroom window. When he dropped to the floor he realized his palms were sticky and the front of his shirt smeared with paint from sliding down the wall. The smell of paint was very strong in the house and he understood immediately why all the windows had stood conveniently open for him. He held his shirt out from his chest and examined it. He was in trouble with his mother.
Sammy started to wander aimlessly through the house, opening doors to rooms, to closets, to cupboards. Each time he pulled open a door he jerked it a little more cruelly, slammed it a little harder. Running out of doors to open and close, places to seek answers, he went into the living room. There a canvas tarp was anchored to the hardwood floor with buckets of paint and a roller tray that held several brushes soaking in turpentine. A cluster of curls, wood shavings planed from a door, were swept into a pile at the edge of the tarp.
Sammy sat down on the floor. This house was all but finished and now he could feel it waiting for one of the American ladies to come and claim it. He knew nothing at all about such ladies. They were scarcely real to him, scarcely to be believed in. He struggled to see them clearly. He strained to catch their voices. Nothing came to him except a picture of his mother, drifting through these rooms. What he heard over and over was his mother talking. She’ll this, she’ll that. She’ll this, she’ll that, his mother repeated in his ear.
Things As They Are? Page 11