When I Was a Little Girl/Chapter 8
VIII
TWO FOR THE SHOW
First of all there was Every Day, with breakfast, lunch, outdoors, dinner, and evenings.
Then there were Sundays, which were quite another kind of time, as different as layer cake from sponge cake: With breakfast late, and mustn’t-jump-rope, and the living-room somehow different, the Out-of-doors moved farther off, our play-house not waiting for us but acting busy at something else in which we had no part; the swing hanging useless as it did when we were away from home and thought about it in the night; bells ringing as if it were their day; until we were almost homesick to hear the grocer’s cart rattle behind the white horse.
There were school half holidays when the sun shone as it never shone before, and we could not decide how to spend the time, and to look ahead seemed a glorious year before dark.
There were the real holidays—Christmas and the Fourth and Birthdays, which didn’t seem like days of time at all, but were like fairies of time, not living in any clock.
And Company-time, when we were not to go in certain rooms, or sing in the hall, and when all downstairs seemed unable to romp with us.
And Vacation-time, when 9 o’clock and 1 o’clock and 4 o’clock meant nothing, and the face of the clock never warned or threatened and the hands never dragged, and Saturday no longer stood out but sank into insignificance, and the days ran like sands.
All these times there were when life grew different and either let us in farther than ever before or else left us out altogether. But almost the strangest and best of these was house-cleaning time.
Screens out, so that the windows looked like faces and not like masks! The couch under the Cooking-apple tree! We used to lie on the couch and look up in the boughs and wish that they would leave it there forever. What was the rule that made them take it in? Mattresses in the backyard to jump on and lie on and stare up from, so differently, into the blue. Rugs like rooms, opening out into an adjoining pansy bed. Chairs set about on the grass, as if at last people had come to understand, as we had always understood, that the Outdoors is a real place to be in, and not just a place to pass through to get somewhere else. If only, if only some day they had brought the piano out on the lawn! To have done one’s practising out there, just as if a piano were born, not made! But they never did that, and we were thankful enough for the things that they did do. When Saturday came, I found with relief that they had still the parlour and one bedroom left to do. I had been afraid that by then these would be restored to the usual dry and dustless order.
In the open window of the empty sitting-room I was sitting negligently that morning, when I saw Mr. Britt going by. He was as old as anyone I knew in the world—Mr. Britt must have been fifty. I never thought of him as folks at all. There were the other neighbours, all dark-haired and quick and busy at the usual human errands; and then there was Mr. Britt, leaving his fruit trees and his rose bushes to go down to his office in the Court House. He had white hair, a long square white beard, and he carried a stick with a crook in the handle. I watched him pityingly. His life was all done, as tidy as a sewed seam, as sure as a learned lesson. All lived out, a piece at a time, just as I planned mine. How immeasurably long it had taken him; what a slow business it must have seemed to him; how very old he was!
At our gate he stopped. Mr. Britt’s face was pink, and there were pleasant wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, and when he talked, he seemed to think about you.
“Moving?” he inquired.
“House-cleaning,” I explained with importance. “Fine day of it,” he commented and went on. He always sighed a little when he spoke, not in sorrow; but in a certain weariness.
In forty-two years I should be as old as that. Forty-two years—more than five life-times, as I knew them.
I was still looking after him, trying to think it through—a number as vast as the sky of stars was vast—when round the corner, across the street, the Rodman girls appeared. ("Margaret and Betty Rodman?” my mother used to inquire pointedly when I said “the Rodman girls.”) In their wake was their little brother; Harold. I hailed them joyously.
“Come on over! It’s house-cleaning.”
“We were,” admitted Betty, as they ran. “We saw the things out in the yard, and we asked right off. We can stay a whole hour.”
“Can’t we get Mary Gilbraith to tell us when it’s an hour?” Margaret Amelia suggested as they came in at the gate. “Then we won’t have to remember.”
Mary Gilbraith stood beating a curtain, and we called to her. She nodded her head, wound in a brown veil.
“Sure,” she said. “And don’t you children track up them clean floors inside there.”
I glanced over my shoulder into the empty room.
“Shall I get down,” I inquired of my guests, “or will you get up?”
They would get up, and they did so. We three just fitted the sill, with Harold looking wistfully upward.
“Go find a nice stick,” Margaret Amelia advised him maternally.
“What’ll we play?” I was pursuing politely. “Pretend?” I intimated. Because of course there is nothing that is quite so much fun as pretend. “Or real?” I conceded the alternative its second place.
“Pretend what?” Betty wanted to know.
“Well, what difference does that make?” I inquired scornfully. “We can decide that after.”
However, we duly weighed the respective merits of Lost-in-the-Woods, Cave-in-the-Middle-of-the-World, and Invisible, a selection always involving ceremony.
“Harold can’t play any of them,” Margaret Amelia remembered regretfully. “He don’t stay lost nor invisible—he wriggles. And Cave scares him.”
We considered what to do with Harold, and at last mine was the inspiration—no doubt because I was on the home field. In a fence corner I had a play-house, roofed level with the fence top. From my sand-pile (sand boxes came later—mine was a corner of the garden sacred to me) we brought tin pails of earth which we emptied about the little boy, gradually covering his fat legs and nicely packing his plaid skirt. Then we got him a baking-powder can cover for a cutter and a handleless spoon, and we went away. He was infinitely content.
“Makin' a meat pie,” he confided, as we left him.
Free, we were drawn irresistibly back to the out-of-doors furniture. We jumped in the middle of the mattresses lying in the grass, we hung the comforters and quilts in long overlapping rows on the clothes line and ran from one end to the other within that tent-like enclosure. Margaret Amelia arranged herself languidly on the Brussels couch that ordinarily stood in the upstairs hall piled with leather-bound reports, but now, scales falling from our eyes, we saw to be the bank of a stream whereon Maid Marian reclined; but while Betty and I were trying to decide which should be Robin Hood and which Alan-a-dale (alas, for our chivalry . . . we were both holding out to be Robin) Maid Marian settled it by dancing down the stair carpet which made a hallway half across the lawn. We followed her. The terminus brought us back to the parlour window. We stepped on the coping and stared inside. This was our parlour! Yet it looked no more like the formal room which we seldom entered than a fairy looks like a mortal. Many and many a time an empty room is so much more a suggestive, haunted, beckoning place than ever it becomes after its furniture gets it into bondage. Rooms are often free, beautiful creatures before they are saddled and bridled with alien lives and with upholstery, and hitched for lumbering, permanent uses. I felt this vaguely even then.
“It’s like the cloth in the store,” I observed, balancing on my stomach on the sill. “It’s heaps prettier before it’s made up into clothes.”
“How funny,” said Margaret Amelia. “I like the trimming on, and the pretty buttons.”
“Let’s play,” I said hurriedly; for I had seen in her eyes that look which always comes into eyes whose owners have just called an idea “funny.”
“Very well. But,” said Betty, frankly, “I'm awful sick of playing Pretend. You always want to play that. We played that last time anyhow. Let’s play Store. Let’s play,” she said, with sudden zest, “Furniture Store, outdoors.”
The whole lawn became the ground floor for our shop. Forthwith we arranged the aisles of chairs, stopping to sit in this one and that “to taste the difference.” To sit in the patent upholstered rocker, close to the flowering currant bush fragrant with spicy, yellow buds was like being somewhere else.
“This looks like the pictures of greenhouses,” said Margaret Amelia, dragging a willow chair to the Bridal Wreath at the fork in the brick walk. She idled there for a moment.
“Emily Broom says that when they moved she rode right through town on their velvet lounge on the dray,” she volunteered.
We pictured it mutely. Something like that had been a dream of mine. Now and then, I had walked backward on the street to watch a furniture wagon delivering a new chair that rocked idle and unoccupied in the box. I always marvelled at the unimaginativeness of the driver which kept him on the wagon seat.
“We’ve never moved,” I confessed regretfully.
“We did,” said Betty, “but they piled everything up so good there wasn’t anything left to sit on. I rode with the driver—but his seat wasn’t very high,” she added, less in the interest of truth than with a lingering resentment.
“Stitchy Branchett told me,” contributed Margaret Amelia, “once he set on the top step of the step ladder on one of their dray loads.”
“I don’t believe it,” I announced flatly. “It’d tip and pitch him off.”
“He said he did,” Margaret Amelia held. “Betty heard him. Didn’t he, Betty? Who I don’t believe is Joe Richmond. He says he went to sleep on a mattress on the dray when they moved. He couldn’t of.”
“Course he couldn’t of,” we all affirmed.
“Delia says they've moved six times that she can remember of and she’s rode on every load,” I repeated.
We all looked enviously across at Delia’s house. Then, moved by a common impulse, we scrambled back to make the most of our own advantages, such as they were.
At last the ground floor of the furniture store was all arranged, and the two show windows set with the choicest pieces to face the street. And when we were ready to open the place to the general public, we sat on the edge of the well curb and surveyed our results.
“Now let's start,” said Margaret Amelia.
At that instant—the precision with which these things happen is almost conscious—Mary Gilbraith briefly put her head out the kitchen window.
“It's just edgin' on ’leven,” she announced. “You children keep your feet off them mattresses.”
We stared at one another. This was incredible. Margaret Amelia and Betty had just come. We had hardly tasted what the morning might have held. Our place of business was only at this moment ready for us. We had just meant to begin.
There was no appeal. We went down the garden path for Harold. He sat where we had left him, somewhat drowsy in the warm sun, patting an enormous mound of moist earth. Busy with our own wrongs, we picked him up and stood him on his feet without warning him. An indignant roar broke from him.
“Just goin' frost my meat pie!” he wailed. “Wiv chocolate on!”
Some stirring of pity for our common plight may have animated us—I do not remember. But he was hurried off. I went with them to the fence, gave them last tag as became an hostess, stood on the gate as it swung shut, experienced the fine jar and bang of its closing, and then hung wistfully across it, looking for the unknown.
The elm and maple shadows moved pleasantly on the cream-coloured brick walk whose depths of tone were more uneven than the shadows. An oriole was calling, hanging back downward from a little bough. Somebody’s dog came by, looked up at me, wagged his tail, and hurried on about his business. Looking after him, I saw Mr. Britt coming slowly home with his mail. At our gate he stopped.
“Playing something?” he inquired.
Welcoming any sympathy, I told him how we had just got ready to play when it was time to stop. He nodded with some unexpected understanding, closing his eyes briefly.
“That’s it,” he said. “We all just get ready when it’s time to stop. Fine day of it,” he added, and sighed and went on.
I stared after him. Could it be possible that his life had not seemed long to him? That he felt as if he had hardly begun? I dismissed this as utterly improbable. Fifty years!