Charms for the Easy Life (12 page)

My mother said, “Don’t be silly. You can’t stay at home.”

My grandmother didn’t say anything to me. She just sat there, studying my face.

I meant what I said. I had lain awake many nights and thought about this, how all the best schools were far from home. It wasn’t that I imagined myself alone on a campus where nobody was familiar to me except characters in books I had already read. That vision didn’t concern me. But when I saw myself peeking through the window of my mother’s house, my grandmother and her without me, getting ready to go out on a house call or walking back in tired and bloodstained, I could barely breathe. The only way I could make the anxiety abate was to remind myself that I didn’t have to go anywhere. I could get all the education I needed or wanted, for the time being, at home.

In our house, the point of reading and learning was neither to impress outsiders nor to get a job or a husband, nothing like that. It had nothing to do with anybody but the three of us. When a good book was in the house, the place fairly vibrated. We trained ourselves to be exceptionally fast readers so a book could be traded around before the nagging and tugging became intolerable. I remember particularly, when The Grapes of Wrath was new, how my mother and grandmother felt I wasn’t reading it quickly enough, how they asked me every half-hour or so how far along I was. When I suggested we take an afternoon-and-evening vacation and read it together, they sat down on the sofa and patted the spot between them, as if I were a puppy they were coaxing to jump up. We took turns holding the book, turning pages, and the only times we got up in twelve hours were to turn on a light and go to the bathroom.

We shared a curiosity about the world that couldn’t be satisfied in any other way. Maybe my grandmother approached this sort of satisfaction with her passion for medicine, but still she would sit for hours and contemplate the disappearance of that opening narrator in Madame Bovary with the same intensity with which she would line up a patient’s symptoms and then labor over a diagnosis. Hardy was her favorite novelist, and she knew his work as well as she knew the signs of cirrhosis and diabetes. She and my mother could fight like mad about any issue of the day except what a toad Madame Bovary was. They went over and over her life, talking about her as if she were real. One morning they fought over some trifling matter, and then pouted all day until my grandmother looked up from a novel and said, “Sophia! This character reminds me of Madame Bovary. Did you think she had that nasty death coming to her? Was she that bad a strumpet? Tell me. I’m interested.” My mother sat down by her and explained how she thought Madame Bovary deserved that and more, and then they spread on into Jude the Obscure and Far from the
Madding
Crowd. It was as if they had completely forgotten that three hours before, they had called each other the vilest sorts of names, names as low-down as those they had just chosen for Madame Bovary.

With regard to the colleges, my mother wouldn’t let me stop with “I have absolutely no idea.” I tried to pacify her by going on to say that I’d think about all this later, but when I got up to go to my room, she was right behind me. I asked if she planned to hang about me like Grant hung about Richmond, and after laughing a second, she closed the door to my room and said very sternly, “You need to be serious. This is your future.”

It would’ve been impossible to tell her that I much preferred to talk with my grandmother about my future. As smart as my mother was, I was afraid to trust her. I couldn’t forget how she had married the type of man who would make a joke of his wedding day and all the days after. Even if my father had been alive, he wouldn’t have been moved by the principal’s letter. He wouldn’t have been proud or gratified, even secretly, that he had the sort of daughter who could compete at a fine college. He would’ve been oblivious to it. He wouldn’t have gotten it. And so, while my mother sat on the edge of my bed, waiting for me to tell her my wishes and desires, to purge for her, the woman I really wanted to talk to was in the kitchen pressing pills, wondering whether my mother would go to sleep early so she and I could get a head start on our inevitable discussion.

By the time my mother did go to bed, I was so weary from having fended her off all day that I almost told my grandmother we’d have to get up early in the morning to do this. But I couldn’t. When she tapped on my door and stepped into the room, I could tell that she had everything figured out. She knew exactly what I was to do with myself, and I suspected that it did not include long, bitter winters in Vermont or Massachusetts.

She pulled out my desk chair, sat down hard the way she always did, and said, “Well, what do you think of all this?”

I said, “You know I don’t want to leave home.”

She asked me why, even though she knew why. She was checking behind me to see how far I had come in my life, what I had learned along the way.

Before she had come into the room, I had rehearsed the things I would say. I would tell her about lying in bed, seeing myself peeking in the house, seeing my mother and her going about their business without me. I would tell her about how my panic had left me when I decided that I wouldn’t leave home. But I wasn’t able to say any of this. All I could do was sit up in my bed and toy with the satin edge of my blanket and wonder what she would do if I let loose and cried as hard as I needed to.

She reached into her pocket and took out a postcard. She told me it was a note Charles Nutter had once sent her from medical school, and then she said, “You remind me of him. Listen.”

My grandmother slipped the postcard back into her pocket and said, “If you’ll go to college, you’ll say that, too. You’ll be exposed to a great many girls like yourself.”

I told her I had thought about this, but I still didn’t want to leave home.

She said, “Well then, nobody’s going to force you to go anywhere, not now. You should eventually. Next year or the next. You know that. I’m afraid that if you go somewhere you don’t want to go, you’ll be miserable and you won’t learn a drop. Your mother’s stubborn nature will surely blossom in you and take over.” And then she smiled and said, “And you’d be wasting my money.”

By now I was crying in great heaving sobs. I asked her what I would say to my mother. She told me not to worry about her. She would take care of that.

The next day I saw and heard the first consequence of my grandmother’s taking care of things. She and my mother walked in the house from a routine call they had gone out on while I was in school. My mother slid her purse across the kitchen counter and said, “Well! I understand you and your grandmother are in cahoots now for certain!”

I explained that we had decided that I would stay home for a while, not forever. I would go to school in a year or so. And then I lied and said that I had exhausted myself in high school and I needed and deserved a break.

My mother drew herself up in the manner in which Southern women draw themselves up, and said, “That’s just fine! While you’re here sitting at the feet of Dr. Birch, all the other girls your age are going to snatch up all the decent young men and leave you the dregs.”

I told her I didn’t care. This made her as mad as I’d ever seen her. She screamed, “You’d better care!”

My grandmother told her to hush and go to bed with some laudanum, and then she jerked on the faucet to wash her hands, muttering something about my mother’s being the expert on dregs, philanderers, and things of that nature. They began trading insults, and they stopped only when I asked them please not to kill each other while I was at the dance. My mother looked at the clock and asked me why I was leaving for a dance at four in the afternoon. I reminded her that I was in charge of the decorations.

She shouted, “See what I mean?”

Yes, I knew. I didn’t have a date or a new party dress. I would spend the evening patrolling the parking lot, asking hoodlums from the vocational school to move along, and they would move along, too, because I would ask them in such a firm yet friendly way. They wouldn’t hoot at me or wink or say anything remotely lascivious because I would appear to be so much older, sort of like somebody’s mother. Why didn’t I have a date? The one boy who would’ve asked me transferred to Lawrenceville Academy. That left fifty or so boys who would never have asked me to a dance, but who regularly asked me to correct their term papers, show them how to use the library card catalogue, intercede in disputes with their girlfriends, and forge absentee excuses from their parents in my mature and thoroughly convincing handwriting. None of these boys ever looked up at me, as I explained for the tenth time that Twain was cross-referenced with Clemens, and said, “It’s you. You’re the one.” No, if they looked into my eyes and said anything, it was, “Boy, Margaret, how’d you learn all this stuff ?”

The caption underneath my senior-year yearbook photograph read “Most Admired,” “Smartest Girl,” and “Most Likely to Succeed.” Underneath that ran the long list of my honors and extracurricular activities. I am smiling, but just slightly, and my eyes look tired. I had stayed up all the previous night working on an essay on Edith Wharton, which my teacher secretly entered in a literary contest. It won first place: ten dollars and an invitation to have tea with a local writer named Inglis Fletcher. I declined the latter, making up some sort of excuse, but really I didn’t go because of my grandmother’s attitude toward her writing, which she considered amateurish and romantic, unremarkable in any way. She said, “Now, if you could meet James Thurber, that’d be worth doing. Don’t you know he could hold forth?”

I worked terribly hard in school. During study hall I worked in the principal’s office. I also helped out in the nurse’s office, but not at a regularly scheduled time. She would call me over the intercom when she needed me, and when I got to her office, she would point to a student and say, “Him. I don’t know what to do about him.” Although I felt confident diagnosing sinusitis, bronchitis, and other sorts of seasonal ills, the degree to which the nurse trusted me to assess a student’s condition made me so uneasy that I sometimes telephoned my grandmother and described symptoms. In fact, I did this so much during polio and influenza outbreaks that my grandmother asked to sit in on my honors English class as a sort of payment. We were studying the history of the American novel, a subject she knew well. I was afraid the teacher would err, and when she did, my grandmother raised her hand and said, “Pardon me, but The Last of the
Mohicans
came fifteen years before The
Deerslayer,
not that you’d want to read either one of them.” The teacher attributed her mistake to transposed dates in her notes, and spent the rest of the period on The Scarlet Letter, which was her specialty. She would make pronouncements on plot and theme and then look straight at my grandmother, daring her to disagree. She didn’t, but only because her mind had drifted. Later, when I asked her why she had appeared so preoccupied, she told me she had been roaming the streets of Boston. “I was thinking what a hellish time that must’ve been to live in,” she said. “No plumbing, running sewage, cholera, botulism, dysentery. All these sorts of things. I would’ve been worked to a frazzle.”

I was considered such a part of the school staff that I was given a pass key. When the principal gave it to me, he didn’t lecture me about what a big responsibility it was, how I was being entrusted with record players, sports equipment, and books with the answers in the back. He just gave it to me and said it would come in handy when I needed to set the gym up for dances or work late on county attendance records. He told me to toss the key back in his desk drawer when I graduated.

That’s how I unlocked the school late that afternoon and went through the storage closets and pulled out tape and staplers and crepe paper to use in decorating the gym. When I had done all I could do alone, I sat on a bleacher and waited for the rest of my committee. I waited and waited, and just about when I was giving up on having any sort of help, I heard a voice in the lobby saying, “Sophia! This is a perfectly fine thing to do on a date. Don’t you think, Richard?” I looked at the door, and in came my grandmother and mother and Mr. Baines. My grandmother walked across the gym floor talking loudly. “They couldn’t think of what to do. They’ve seen all the movies, and they’re sick of eating out. I suggested we all come to your party.” She was dressed in her mourning garb, which in its own odd way was the fanciest thing she had, especially when she decorated her bosom with the elaborate cat’s-eye brooch Mr. Baines had surprised her with on her birthday. He had it designed according to her descriptions of one her aunt had worn. My mother was wearing a slim-fitting burgundy velvet dress, very simple and very
chic-a
word which, for all our learning, my grandmother, my mother, and I never pronounced correctly.

By the time the rest of my committee arrived, we had the gym almost finished, and Mr. Baines, my mother, and my grandmother continued to help on into the evening. Mr. Baines volunteered to patrol the parking lot in between dances with my mother. My grandmother retaped sagging crepe paper to the walls in between discussions with the English teacher she had chastised. And then later, both she and my mother helped me calm a crying girl I knew only by her reputation for cheating who had started her monthly and spotted up her dress and would not come out of the bathroom. My grandmother used the steak knife she always hid in her purse to break into the jammed sanitary supply machine and get the girl what she needed, and my mother traded dresses with her and spent the rest of the evening in a homemade affair she otherwise would not have been buried in. My mother wore her black linen coat over the girl’s dress to hide not only the stain but the crooked topstitching on the sagging bodice as well. When the girl came out of the bathroom and found her date, he acted as if he hadn’t come with her, as if he didn’t know her at all. She found the three of us and started bawling again like a madwoman. My grandmother backed this boy up in a narrow space between two sets of bleachers and shouted directly into his face. I went to check on her and was flabbergasted to look down at their feet and see that she held one of her shoes from the last century right down on top of one of his wingtips. I do not know what all she said to him, but the boy sought out his date and spent the rest of the evening seemingly happy to be with her.