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My Macrofamily2 Other things began to happen, just little things, but they worried me. A glass slipped from Mom’s hand and shattered in the sink, an accident she never had. Rex made an appointment with a client on Friday evening which he had always kept free. He asked her a question and she pretended not to have heard him. She never did that. Maggie and I had the impression that they didn’t want to say anything for fear of provoking each other. The atmosphere was tense at Mom’s that summer, and congenial at Dad’s. At supper one evening, he was complaining about a woman who had tried to bargain with him for auto insurance.
Dad usually shrugged that kind of remark off contemptuously, but not this time. I guessed what Millie thought I couldn’t and Dad hoped I wouldn’t. Didn’t the church-choir Romeo sell houses? Didn’t he show them to his clients? What happened when he showed one to a pretty woman who came alone? They would be wandering around inside where they couldn’t be seen. Nobody could hear them either, not even if she shrieked like Millie. Judging by remarks I hadn’t understood before, I guessed that Dad had met Millie when she bought some insurance from him. Parents are always making a secret of relations between them that they think will shock their kids. Why shouldn’t Dad have met Millie that way? She must have heard about Rex from him and he must have heard about it from his buddies. They liked to kid him about his ex, but he probably took satisfaction in the news this time. All of this escaped Tweedledumb -- yeah, I know you don’t spell it that way! -- and Tweedledee who were enjoying their chocolate pudding. Some of it had caught on the corner of Mitch’s mouth, which Millie dabbed with the corner of her napkin. So Rex was two-timing Mom with a woman he had shown houses to. If Maggie and Mom’s parents were right, he would soon be visiting her in one he had sold her. Maybe he already was, but he liked to take his pleasures step by step so ______________________________________________________________________________________________ 26 © he could enjoy each one fully. Now I began to notice that he took pleasure in making people suffer. Since he and Mom didn’t realize that I knew their secret, they tried to keep it from me by vague allusions like Millie’s. Since I did, though, I could guess what they were talking about. And since they were talking about it, Rex knew that Mom knew and dared to talk about it to her. That seemed pretty mean to me. Waiting for supper Thursday evening, he put The Vigilant aside and glanced at his watch.
She came to the kitchen door in her apron. “Yes, Rex?” It sounded terribly formal!
“ You can go on from there.”
“ I can’t make it tonight.”
“ I don’t feel like it.”
“ They won’t sound any better if I sing with them.”
“ Tell them... I’m not feeling well... Whatever you like.”
“ People with knowing looks usually know something.”
Genuinely pathetic: “I do.” She made a slight shrug and disappeared in the kitchen. I was so mad I didn’t even realize that I had been staring at Rex until he made a face and hid behind his newspaper. The kids at school were always kidding me about “Fi Fi words.” There was one I had never understood before Rex demonstrated it that evening: sadistic. ______________________________________________________________________________________________ 27 © When you hear somebody talking on the phone, you can guess what he is hearing by what he is saying. By listening to Mom and Rex, I could guess what they were telling each other when I couldn’t hear them. The tone of their voices was revealing even more than their words. Mom’s was modulating from sad to bitter; Rex’s, from condescending to contemptuous. Both began to realize how much I knew and cared less. Wouldn’t I find out anyway? Didn’t everybody else know? The idea of Mom being Rex’s slave upset me; the spectacle of a pitiful slave tormented by a cruel master revolted me. I craved revenge, but only to realize that, even if I had the means, Mom would stand in the way. She loved him too much to give him up, so she was clinging to the hope of getting him back. He was enjoying her distress so much that he took his time betraying her. I wonder if Mom’s anxiety didn’t amuse him even more than flirtation with Paula, a divorcee and loan officer. Oh so gradually was he spending more time with Paula and less with Mom! I began to detect symptoms of desperation in Mom, which scared me into telling Dad. He said everybody knew, but nobody dared to interfere and he even less than the others.
He looked scared: “You think she would do that?”
“ I will see what I can do.” I thought he would talk to Mom, but he decided to talk to Rex. The judge heard two versions of what happened between them. Dad testified that Rex was mistreating Rex’s companion, who happened to be Dad’s divorced wife. This behavior had upset Mom and their ten-year-old son, so Dad decided to see Rex and ask him to stop. He found an unoccupied house for sale with Rex’s name on the sign out front, called him and asked to see it. Rex met him there, they entered and, once the door was closed, Dad told him that, since he was going to leave Mom anyway, he might as well do it right away and stop tormenting her. Rex started yelling at him and pushing him, so he pushed back and Rex slugged ______________________________________________________________________________________________ 28 © him. Dad pointed at his black eye. In his testimony, Rex accused Dad of deceiving him about his interest in the house so he could assault him inside where nobody could see him do it. How could Rex have suspected that the divorced husband of his companion was still jealous three years after the divorce? Dad’s lawyer objected to this assumption and the judge sustained the objection. Rex said Dad had started shouting at him and shoving him, and then he slapped him. Only then did Rex hit him back. He was defending himself! Nobody but Rex and Dad knows whether Dad slapped Rex before Rex slugged Dad. Mom told me that she didn’t want to testify because people were talking and some were even laughing. I replied that, if she testified, they would stop talking and laughing. She wouldn’t admit that she was hesitating because, while she still loved Rex, she appreciated Dad’s attempt to stop him from mistreating her. Yet she finally did take the stand and Rex’s lawyer tried to get her to say that Dad was jealous.
That was the only time everybody laughed, except the judge who was trying to hide a smile. The trial ended without a winner or loser in court, but Rex lost clients and Paula. Since he didn’t have another girlfriend to turn to, he was clinging to Mom. I even guessed that he had wept on her shoulder and told her how sorry he was. If he really felt sorry, though, he hardly showed it. He was coming home every evening, letting her serve him supper, do the housekeeping and his laundry, even sleeping with her as if nothing had happened. He would have gone back to choir practice and singing in church, if she had come with him.
Me: “Well, you have two good moms.”
“ ... Does he have another girlfriend already?”
It happened sooner. I found out one Wednesday after school when Mom didn’t take me to the house in Westpark that she and Rex owned. Instead, she took me ______________________________________________________________________________________________ 29 © to a smaller, older one in Sheffield that she had just bought. Although Sheffield wasn’t as nice as Westpark, I was proud of her. She would have to recover her share of the house in Westpark to help pay for the one in Sheffield, whether Rex reimbursed her for her share or sold it and shared the proceeds with her. He refused and he also refused to divide between them the furniture they had bought together. It wasn’t hard to guess why. Shouldn’t he have been the one to leave her? Wasn’t he more attractive to women than she was to men? Living with her had been a favor he was doing her! Refusing to cooperate with her on her separation from him only seemed fair to him. She had engaged Fossez to move her belongings and they had set a date, but she was bringing as much as she could in her car to reduce the cost. Every day, she tried to make a trip or two at a time when Rex wouldn’t be at home. I couldn’t help her very much because she wouldn’t let me skip school. Since Rex left Florin to her, she had to take care of him. All of that and her job too! I was worried about her. Mom had convinced everybody except Millie that Dad wasn’t jealous of Rex. After Mom had let me off at Millie’s one Saturday evening, I asked her:
“ He’s supposed to be playing poker!”
She gave me a mother-bear hug. “Only ten and he sounds like sixty!” The twins made a face: they didn’t like their mom paying me compliments. Fragra, who was crawling around on a mat, stopped and looked at me. I touched her nose, which made her laugh, which made Millie and me laugh too, but not the twins. Three times, Mom had asked Dad to keep me longer than usual because of her trouble with Rex. Dad had asked Millie if she minded and she had said no cheerfully. ______________________________________________________________________________________________ 30 © Rex hated living alone and having to do all the things Mom had done for him. Finding another girlfriend to do them proved harder than he had expected. Rejections of his overtures made waves that reached Mom, who didn’t feel sorry for him. Convinced that she had betrayed him, he tried to get his revenge. He now demanded his half of the money they had spent on Florin, although he was letting her take care of him. He was even haggling over what he saw as her half of the water, electricity, gas, telephone, cable TV and yardcare bills since she had left him. They had a fight over all that one Saturday afternoon at the house in Westpark, where she had taken Florin and me to get some of her things. Although he could defend himself better than Dad, she humilated him too when she pointed at Florin and said quietly:
All Rex could do was sputter. The day the packers came to pack her breakables, Mom let me skip school so I could help her. Alerted no doubt by a neighbor, Rex took the day off and came home. Watching the two women suspiciously, he intervened whenever they started to pack something he considered wholly or partly his. Mom had already asked them not to pack the porcelaine and glassware they had bought together, but he disputed other things that evidently belonged to her. He snatched a Lalique vase Dad had given her for her birthday from a packer at the risk of dropping and breaking it. All of us were shocked. Mom patted the big woman on the arm, smiled to reassure her and followed Rex. He had taken the vase to the dining room, where he put it down on the table and moved it around until it was in the exact center. I had often seen him do that after Mom had put it there with flowers in it. She spoke to him quietly now and he nodded spitefully. Although he continued to stop the two women from packing things he claimed for himself, he treated them more politely and discussed them with Mom beyond their earshot. Several times, she had to remind him of things that she had brought with her ______________________________________________________________________________________________ 31 © when she moved in with him or bought with her own money. While he let her give these to the packers, he refused to agree to any division of those they had bought together. This greed for small things warned her of worse when it came to big ones. Would he also claim for himself the grand piano, the designer furniture, the prints and paintings, the high-definition television, the surround-sound system, the refrigerator-freezer, the six-burner chef’s stove, the him-and-her Jacuzzi and all the rest? They had bought nothing but the best during the first two years of their life together, the happy ones. For lack of cooperation from him, she had to leave more than she took and the movers only filled half of their truck. Even as they were carrying Mom’s belongings into her new house, Rex called and demanded that she return the pearl necklace his mother had given her. Fond of Mom, his mother had hoped she would marry him. Only Rex had been present when she gave her the necklace and she had died a year later. He now claimed that she had given it to her on condition that she marry him. Mom had heard nothing of such a condition. Besides, wasn’t he the one who hadn’t wanted to get married? Unmoved, he threatened to sue her. She replied that she would have to sue him too if he refused to let her have her share of their property. Both of them hired a lawyer, but she worried about the cost as well as those of her mortgage and her move. Keeping up with her practice, settling in her new house and taking care of Florin and me were tiring her. Circles around her eyes and the anxiety I saw in them moved me to confide in Dad again and, this time, I didn’t mind doing it in front of Millie.
Dad, surprized: “What can you do?”
She had a plan by breakfast the next morning and she put it into effect that evening. ______________________________________________________________________________________________ 32 © When Rex came home from work, the lights were on and a big woman he didn’t know met him at the door. She looked a little vulgar, but otherwise rather nice. Millie explained that she was acting on Gretchen’s behalf. Rex started to protest, but she interrupted him saying that she had vacuumed the house, done the laundry, ironed his shirts and prepared dinner for him. The menu: filet mignon, wild rice, asparagus, baguette slices, a Bordeau and chocolate mousse for desert. Weren’t they his favorites?
“ All right: go and relax in your chair, listen to your music and read your newspaper. I will bring you an extra-dry Martini and some sesame crackers.”
“How much is this going to cost me?”
“ This time?”
“ She is?”
That hurt a little bit.
Again, he did as she told him. After she had finished in the kitchen, she found him waiting impatiently. Instead of sitting down, she looked around.
Irritated: “My next girlfriend?”
“ ... Why did you do all this for me?”
Angry: “What?”
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“ I wonder if I shouldn’t just pay you and be done with it.”
“ How do you know I’m looking for one?”
“ You have a job, a house, a family.”
They heard a horn.
“ All right. The day after tommorrow.” After every evening she worked for Rex, Millie told us how it had gone. She had us laughing, even Mom who was listening over a speaker phone. From Dad’s buddies, we heard that the chip had slipped from Rex’s shoulder. His behavior had not only turned women away, but also friends and clients. At lunch on Thursday, fellow members of the Tinhorn Impresario Kindergarden stopped talking when he approached. Mom’s lawyer told her that Rex’s lawyer had told him that Rex would be willing to cooperate in dividing their property if she agreed to return his mother’s necklace. She replied that she had no intention of betraying her wishes, but this overture encouraged her. Millie was finding Rex less wary and more willing to confide in her. After he heard that Mom had refused to give him the necklace again, Millie had a promising conversation with him:
“ My mother gave it to Gretchen. A present from my father.”
“ She intended to encourage her to marry me.”
“ ... Not in so many words.”
______________________________________________________________________________________________
“ What would I do with it?”
“ If I get married again, I will give it to my wife.”
“ ... ”
“ I could sell it.”
“ ... ”
“ Maggie. She’s only twelve.”
“ As fast we grow old.”
Eagerly: “Did she say that?”
Mom offered to give Maggie the necklace when she got married or reached the age of thirty, whichever happened first. Even before then, she would lend it to her whenever she wanted to wear it, although youth didn’t need any jewelry. I was thinking that it would only emphasize poor Maggie’ homeliness. Mom had shown it to me once: it went around her neck three times and hung down in front.
That’s how I learned the difference. Maybe they belong in a museum. Mom offered her compromise on condition that Rex negotiate the division of their property in good faith. On advice from her lawyer, she drew up two lists that suggested what each might be willing to let the other have. Rex’s lawyer advised him to consider them, make any changes he wished and start negotiating with Mom. He warned him that, if Mom sued him and won, the property would be auctioned off and would probably bring far less than its true value. The two lawyers persuaded their clients to hire an appraiser to ascertain the value of ______________________________________________________________________________________________ 35 © each item so they could divide the whole fairly. Now Rex told Millie he had decided that he wouldn’t have a girlfriend who didn’t like the furniture in his house. After all the trouble he and Gretchen had taken to furnish it, he wanted to keep it that way. Mom drew up two more lists to distinguish between the things she would accept reimbursement for and those she would insist on dividing between them. She met Rex at the house in Westpark the next Saturday afternoon and, after a few hours of haggling, they had divided the property on this second list between them. Though belligerant at first, Rex was increasingly cheerful as they progressed. When Mom got up to leave, he offered to reimburse her for her half of the equity in the house, provided she pay half of the bills dues since she had left him. She refused. The next Tuesday, she got a check for half the appraiser’s evaluation of the property on the first of her second two lists. On Thursday, another one came for her share of the equity in the house with a note telling her to forget the bills. She called him at once and thanked him. When would he like to have Florin? They ageed on Tuesday and Wednesday when Maggie would be there to help. Mom had paid her mortgage off when she picked me up after school on Friday. What a difference! Her eyes had lost their anxiety and her voice had recovered its music. As we passed a Dairy Queen we had often seen and never noticed, she said:
She was turning into the parking lot already before I overcame my surprise enough to agree. She had always resisted whim treats. Trying to lick our cones before they dripped on our fingers started us laughing and it’s a wonder we ever stopped. The next morning, she asked me to check her hem in back to make sure her slip wasn’t showing. She was going shopping and meeting the girls for lunch in Heidi’s on the top floor of Sedgwick and Crompton. An architect had created floor space for tables on many different levels, which resembled terraces around a hill. Pretty hard on the waiters and waitresses! Contoured like mountainous terrain, the glass roof offered a magnificent view of Mapleton wherever you sat. An hour or two with the girls on their lofty perch in Heidi’s and you would think Mom was ______________________________________________________________________________________________ 36 © still in college. When she picked me up at the library, I looked at the back seat and, sure enough, I saw a dark red shopping bag with a gold S and C. It was the trophy Mom had won by ransacking the best women’s clothing stores in town and driving the saleswomen to the restroom. She just had to show it to me, the only man in her life just then, and of course I liked it. It was a sand-colored cashmere cardigan, which she kept buttoning and unbuttoning as she admired herself, turning this way and that in the mirror on her bathroom door. It was covering and uncovering the bulges in her blue and green blouse, which looked like an impressionist painting. She actually looked sort of... well, pretty again. Sooner or later, she would find another man and I wouldn’t like him. The next thing that went wrong, though, happened at Dad’s. There were three bedrooms, a big one for him and Millie, two small ones for the twins and me. Dad and Millie had put Fragra’s crib in their closet, after moving their clothes to a rack on the other side next to the bathroom. The twins and I barely had enough room for ours in our small closets and, in cold weather, overclothes crammed the one next to the entrance. The only space available to all of us were small living and dining rooms. Dad and I hated the kiddy shows on TV watched by the twins and the soaps watched by Millie. She had been trying to talk Dad into sharing the cost of a bigger house with her, but he had been procrastinating over mortgage rates and the turmoil of moving. After Millie’s screeches one night, I was waiting for the toilet to flush so I could go back to sleep. Instead, I heard a thump followed by Dad shouting, then Millie telling him not to wake the kids up. I got up and opened my door just as the twins were passing and I followed them to Dad and Millie’s door. They opened it and entered.
“ Mickey!” pleaded Millie. “They were worried about us, that’s all. You shouldn’t scold them for that.” _____________________________________________________________________________________________ 37 © She was lifting the rack while he struggled to free himself from the clothes.
“ They aren’t brats. Besides, yours is there too. Now come on, Mickey, stop acting like a... like a... ” The twins left the room and I shut the door behind them, but we were still listening. We could hear them hanging the clothes back up. Millie: “We need more room, Mickey. What are we going to do when Fragra outgrows her crib? We have to separate the twins and the sooner the better.” Mitch and Midge looked at each other, their mouths open.
“ I stopped giving them their bath together. They were too interested in each other. The double-decker isn’t enough either. Sometimes I find them together in the lower or the upper.”
“ They see it everywhere they look. That will do until tommorrow. I will tidy them up and brush the dust off.” The light under the door went off. Midge took Mitch’s hand and tip-toed him back to their room. ‘Upper or lower?’ I wondered. I started to leave too, but I heard Dad:
“ Where are you going to add on to this one? Look, Mickey: I hate moving and mortgages as much as you do, but an addition won’t do it. We need more room everywhere and not just in one place.”
I slipped back to my room, but a floorboard creaked and everybody must have heard it. I had just been through one move with Mom and, now, I faced another one with Dad! Since Mom had moved further away from the school attended by the twins and me, she had to give me a ride when I was staying with her or, if she couldn’t, I had to take an MTA bus. While I was taking a schoolbus from Dad’s, he and Mom had agreed to send me to a more convenient school in the fall. Well, Dad’s move raised the problem he and Mom thought they had solved all over again. Think of ______________________________________________________________________________________________ 38 © all the criteria he and Millie had to consider in looking for another house! They not only had to find one near Mom’s and a school for the twins and me, but also one within a reasonable commuting distance to both of their workplaces. The necessity of taking kids back and forth between their parents complicated their search even more. What a headache! But location was only part of it. How many bedrooms could Dad and Milie afford? They could find a house with three bedrooms near all of their usual destinations, but they would have to put Midge in the same room as Fragra, and Mitch in the same one as me. I didn’t trust Mitch after the theft of my ballpoint and paper, Dad and Millie didn’t trust Midge with Fragra. A house with four or five bedrooms would necessitate a mortgage that they couldn’t pay back if one of them lost his job. It would also be a waste since three of their four kids would live there only part of every week. Yet Dad was dying for a recreation room so they could get the kids out of the living room and Millie, for a utility room on the ground floor with the furnace, the water heater, the washing machine, the dryer, a big sink and space for hanging clothes up to dry. They soon realized that they needed a good real estate agent.
Millie: “Rex.”
“ He isn’t mine either, but I may be his after what I did for him. Besides, he needs to reassure his clients and his girlfriends.”
She laughed: “Mickey! You are jealous!”
“ What a dumb thing to say!”
“ Hey! That sounds pretty smart!”
“ You already said that.” ______________________________________________________________________________________________ 39 © One of the guys had a friend in real estate who admired Rex. Nobody knew the market better than he did, but he had to show people he had gotten over his domestic troubles. Mom’s move had affected me more by the stress on her than the disruption of my schedule. Would Dad’s disrupt it so badly that I wouldn’t know where to go after shool or how to get there? Sometimes Mom or Dad told me to take the school or the MTA bus for which I needed a dollar; sometimes, to wait for him, her or Millie to pick me up. Dad and Millie never knew when Rex would urge them to see a house before somebody else bought it. He had less trouble finding possibilities than getting them to agree on one of them. Yet he persuaded them to resign themselves to a three-bedroom house with one for the girls and one for the boys. That was the solution most of the houses on the maket allowed and most of his clients could afford. This decision upset both the twins and me so much that we almost made friends. The disagreement between Dad and Millie came from his wish for a rec room and hers, for a utility room. With his reputation at stake, Rex kept trying to find a three-bedroom house with both a rec room and a utility room that wasn’t far from any of our destinations. When he found one he thought they might accept, he got them to meet him there as soon as possible, which rippled everybody’s schedule. One of those days, I was guessing, nobody would come and get me after school, so I wouldn‘t know if I should take the school or MTA bus. Dad had to change plans so often and so often at the last minute that I would sooner or later be stranded. Although he had promised to buy me a cellphone, he wanted to take me with him and let me choose one I liked. Well, nobody showed up one Wednesday afternoon and Dad hadn’t given me a dollar for the MTA bus. One of Mom’s friends offered me a ride, but I declined because it was too early to be sure nobody was coming for me. Soon all of the kids had left and the teachers were leaving too, so I felt a little funny standing there like an orphan or something. Why not walk? I knew the way and it was only three or four miles. Maybe I should take the ______________________________________________________________________________________________ 40 © initiative instead of waiting for a grownup to tell me what to do. As it turned out, I enjoyed that walk, being on my own and seeing things I didn’t have time to look at in a car or a bus. I even recognized a few people I had noticed while passing by and one of them spoke to me:
Since he sold mobile homes he had to be disinterested, didn’t he? It must have taken me about an hour to get to Mom’s house, but I wasn’t tired. She wasn’t there and it was locked, so I sat on the front steps and started playing my recorder. A little girl left the house on the corner two doors away, got on her tricycle and pedaled up the sidewalk. Although I was concentrating on my music, I noticed how skillfully she negotiated the slabs on the sidewalk sloping this way and that. After passing our walk in both directions, she came back, stopped, got off, pushed her tricycle up the bank beside our steps, got back on and pedaled right up to me. I stopped playing, looked at her and finally understood what cute meant.
“ Hi!”
“ Mine’s Fi Fi.”
“ What’s so funny?”
“ A monkey’s name?”
“ Do you have a lot of books?”
“ My mom’s a dermatologist.”
“ A dermatologist! She’s a doctor, she takes care of people’s skin.”
“ The house is locked and I don’t have a key. I have to wait until Mom comes home.” I explained what had happened.
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I walked beside her and, as we turned the corner, I saw a big brown stucco house with eaves hanging over every side and a screen porch across the front. The steps up from the sidewalk were steeper, so I helped Judy climb them. Her warm little hand felt good holding on to mine. The twins had never held my hand. The periwinkle on either side of the walk needed weeding. Judy pointed at the swing at one end of the porch.
She reached up on tiptoes to ring and the door opened at once. Mrs. Shoetack’s face was all wrinkles, but she had a friendly smile. Bending over her cane:
Judy already knew how to introduce people, which delighted Mrs. Shoetack. She took us to her living room, muted the TV, pulled the dustcover off of her sofa and sat on an elaborate easy chair near the window. Judy explained that my dad was having a lot of trouble finding a house and I explained why. Mrs. Shoetack said hers might be too big and too old-fashioned for him, but she would have to sell it and move into a retirement home. She had been hesitating because she didn’t trust real estate agents and she wanted a nice family to have it and take good care of it. She knew how to sell things since she and her husband had run Shoetack Clothing. Whoever bought her house wouldn’t have to pay a commission. She showed us around, which wasn’t easy for her, especially when she climbed the stairs.
Beside the stairs on both the first and the second floor, there was a hall from front to back. As you came upstairs, you faced a door to a bathroom and found two others on either side. They opened on four bedrooms, one at each corner of the house: a master bedroom over the living room with a private bath, a single behind it and two doubles on the other side. The furniture in the master would have done nicely in the Mapleton Museum, except that you saw it from the inside out. The four-poster bed with a crocheted white canopy over it fascinated Judy. ______________________________________________________________________________________________ 42 © “I feel like Alice in Wonderland,” she said amazing both Mrs. Shoetack and me, the lady because she had learned to read by reading that book and me, because it was the first one Mom had read to me.
“ Math.” In the bathroom, mineral stains disfigured the porcelain wash basin, toilet bowl and tub, which stood on little hooves. I hated to think that Dad and Millie would replace them with plastic ones and the brass plumbing fixtures with chrome-coated pot metal. Maybe museums should display beautiful old bathrooms too. Dustcovers hid the furniture in the other bedrooms. I began to hope for the small one despite the view of a backyard overgrown with weeds. You could see the window of my room at Mom’s. Back downstairs, we followed Mrs. Shoetack through the dining room, where the relief of the dustcovers revealed a table with eight chairs around it and a large sideboard. She pushed through a swinging door to a big yellow kitchen, which, like the other two rooms she used, was spick and span, but outmoded. The high ceiling everywhere downstairs seemed even higher. A black stove stood on clawed feet holding glass balls down on the linoleum. The pipes, the valves, the nozzles around the burners and, behind the window, on the floor of the oven showed you how it worked. I imagined Millie turning the controls and checking the blue petals to get the right amount of heat. I couldn’t imagine Mom doing that. I had never seen a Frigidaire before, but I recognized this one by GrandMom’s description. Since it looked as if it were ready to lift off, I saw what she meant by streamlined. I decided to try and talk Millie into keeping it. An array of glass-windowed cabinets would end her complaints about lack of storage space, but they would incite others about keeping them clean. I pictured the six of us sitting around the big wooden table for breakfast. Mrs. Shoetack took us across the hall to the room on the other back corner of the house, which sliding doors separated from the living room. Dustcovers shrouded ______________________________________________________________________________________________ 43 © a sofa, armchairs, various tables and a roll-top desk. In bookcases up to the ceiling, half of the volumes were bound in red or green leather with gold lettering. I saw an old edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica and a complete works of Dickens. A patio door in back opened onto a screen porch. Mrs. Shoetack took us to a door behind the main staircase, which opened on some steep stairs down to the basement. She invited us to go down and see for ourselves.
Judy and I found a big room with a low ceiling lighted by high windows in back. Beneath them, we saw a laundry sink and a washing machine that looked like a barrel lying across a box. At the dark end of the room stood the furnace, converted from coal to oil, and the water heater. Back upstairs, we told Mrs. Shoetack that everything was neat and clean. Taking us back to the kitchen, she suggested that my dad could convert the study into a rec room, but my stepmom might not like going down those stairs to do her laundry. She poured three glasses of orange juice, put some cookies on a blue-and-white China plate and placed all of that on a tray, which she asked me to carry. We returned to the living room where she and I compared Dad and Millie’s wishes with the possibiities of her house, while Judy served the cookies, of which she was fond. As we left, Judy and I saw Mom and Mrs. Bingle, Judy’s mother, coming. It wasn’t hard to guess what had happened. When Mom found my books and my recorder on the front steps with me nowhere in sight, she called Dad. I imagined her with her cellphone to her ear, walking around in circles and making jerky gestures with her free hand. How many times had I seen her do that when she was upset? She had probably scolded Dad, cutting him off every time he tried to say something. Hadn’t she told him to give me a dollar that morning and tell me to take the MTV bus to her house? When Rex called about a house, he had forgotten and rushed off with Millie to see it. Once I was back at Mom’s, I called him and told him I had found the house he and Millie were looking for. He didn’t say anything for a minute, so I added: ______________________________________________________________________________________________ 44 ©
“ Only?... Who is ‘she’?” Millie grabbed another phone and, once I had explained everything, they were firing questions at me. They saw problems that I hadn’t, such as the porch shading the living room, warm air rising to high ceilings, rusty steam-heated radiators, an inefficient furnace, thin insulation, single-pane windows, no air conditioning, etc. Renovation would cost more than they would save by avoiding a commission. Dad worried about the cost of converting the study into a rec room and Millie, about that of re-equiping the laundry. She didn’t like having to go down narrow stairs to a basement. As soon as I told them I could see the window of my room at Mom’s from the small bedroom in back, I regretted it. Neither of them wanted to be that close. Was the furniture included in the price? How much of it could they use? They had never had a dinner party for more than four guests. On the other hand, if their present house sold for the current market price, they could make a substantial down payment on Mrs. Shoetack’s and manage a mortgage for the rest of the cost. Despite Rex’s efforts, he hadn’t found a house that satisfied them as much as this one apparently would. They bought the house, bought a lot of the furniture and bought new appliances for the kitchen and the laundry, but I talked Millie into keeping the stove and the Frigidaire, which she used for overflow. I even talked her and Dad into keeping the bed in the master bedroom by telling them how romantic it was. This Fi Fi word inspired some irony that I understood better than they realized. On the other hand, my efforts to save the antique bathroom fell on deaf ears. Carpenters, painters, plumbers, electricians, insulators, roofers, an exterminator, heating and cooling technicians, just about every kind of workman you could imagine invaded the place. They replaced the furnace by a smaller and more efficient gas model, the steam pipes by hot water pipes and the upright radiators by low ones that ran along the exterior walls. The new air-conditioning system required ducts to distribute cool air throughout the house as well as an ______________________________________________________________________________________________ 45 © outside compressor and an inside condenser. Routing the ducts required much ingenuity in a house that hadn’t been designed to accommodate them. A new washing machine and dryer tended to reconcile Millie with the basement laundry. Likewise an outside door and a few steps up to the back yard, where she could hang clothes up to dry. She had the kitchen repainted a paler yellow and refloored with vinyl in a pattern of black and white drops with twisted tails. She and Dad decided to keep the bookcase and most of the books in the study so we could use them for schoolwork. They converted the rest of the room into a recreation area with grass-green flooring, white plastic chairs and wooden tables. They covered the wall opposite the bookcase with a vinyl mural depicting a wildflower garden frequented by bees, butterflies, squirrels, rabbits, etc., while birds were flying over it. There wasn’t enough room for the ping-pong table, so Dad set it up in the basement. All of these decisions suited me and the twins fine, but sharing the mid-sized bedroom in back with Mitch disappointed me and sharing the one in front with Fragra infuriated Midge. She threw a tantrum, which ended only when she realized nobody was paying any attention. Although she didn’t like being separated from Mitch either, he liked rooming with me, which he took for a promotion. Since she couldn’t boss him around any more, she took it out on poor little Fragra and he came to her rescue, which exasperated his twin sister. That was when Midge became a bitter little sourpuss, who gave Millie more and more trouble. I regretted the small bedroom so much that Dad, who had made an office of it, put my desk there and let me keep my electronic stuff, my CDs and DVDs, my books, my music and my recorder, everything I wanted to keep away from the twins and Fragra. He also let me use his desktop and showed me how, helping me to establish my own e-mail account. He and Millie told the twins they weren’t to enter the office unless I or one of them let them. Both made faces, but Midge’s was worse than Mitch’s. ______________________________________________________________________________________________ 46 © I was the only one who wanted to keep the front porch, but I only wanted to keep it so Judy could use the swing. Before the porch was demolished, Dad had the swing hung in the screen porch in back, where he encouraged Judy to use it. She made a hit with him and his family except Midge and with Mom. When I came home from school, I stopped at her house first and carried her books as well as mine while she rode her tricycle to Dad’s or Mom’s, depending on which one I was staying with. When Mom heard I was swinging with Judy at Dad’s, she bought a swing sofa for her patio with a canopy over it. Unfortunaely, it didn’t swing as well as the old-fashioned one and the canopy didn’t protect us from rain if a wind was blowing. We had to talk Mom out of more expensive solutions, such as hanging a swing somewhere in the house or building a shelter outside to house it. We felt sorry for her, so, when I was staying with her, we swung on her swing even when it was drizzling, which wasn’t good for our books and my music. Judy sympathized with me because of my two homes and I agreed that one was better. While we swung, she read her books and I did my homework or played my recorder. When she didn’t know a word, I was her dictionary, and, when I practiced, she approved of what I played well and criticzed what I didn’t. I was so surprized that I asked Mrs. Adams, who agreed with Judy almost every time. I told Judy to ask her mom and dad if she could take lessons too so we could play duets. Enthusiastic, Dr. and Mrs. Bingle engaged Mrs. Adam to give her two lessons a week, one for her alone and, with Mom’s consent, another together with me. From then on, Judy and I had a wonderful time swinging and playing together. She was learning how to play her piccolo recorder so quickly that all of us were amazed. At Dad’s, everybody except Midge came and listened when we played. Mom and Dad had agreed to send me to Camp Feu de Bois, a summer camp for kids with musical or artistic talent. Although I was looking forward to it, Judy started crying when I told her. She had never done that before, so I felt pretty bad, put my arm around her, held her tight and promised to ask Mom and Dad to bring her every time one of them came to see me. At Feu de Bois, I had a ______________________________________________________________________________________________ 47 © lesson every weekday and concentrated on music, so I learned much faster than during the school year. I also played with other kids in ensembles and the camp orchestra. On weekends, we held concerts attended by parents and other people who came from as far away as Mammoth. Either Mom or Dad came every weekend and they brought Judy with them. Millie and Mitch usually came with Dad and even Midge once, while Mom brought the Bingles once and Mrs. Adams another time. When Midge came, she surprized me by giving me a hug, asking me questions and admiring my ability. I was wondering if her attitude had changed, until she took me by the hand and tried to take me away from Judy. It was the first time she had ever behaved like that. Two weekends later, Mitch told me that she had tried to pick a quarrel with Judy all the way home and Judy had ignored her. Now Midge had a grudge against her. Judy was taking a lesson from Mrs. Adams every weekday and, when she came during the weekend, she showed me what she had learned and we played together. The other campers were kidding me about my “girlfriend”, but I kidded them back, accusing them of jealousy. Judy amused everybody by her remarks about our concerts, praising some, criticizing others and declaring me the best of them all. Some of the older kids were obsiously better than I was, but nobody contradicted her. In fact, her criticism amazed some of our instructors, who admitted that she was right. As soon as she arrived the weekend after Midge had come, she ran up, jumped on me throwing her arms around me and I hugged her off the ground. How I loved her little body! And I loathed Midge! I wished Judy and I could stop growing up and stay as we were. But, when I told her that, she disagreed:
“ But Judy!... You don’t even know how.”
Horrified: “No!”
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