Life Among the Savages (14 page)

“In all the papers?” said the woman; she was removing a spot from the boy's face with the corner of her handkerchief.

“Look,” said Laurie loudly, “he got dirty, poor thing.”

With a certain obscure pride in my son I took him by the back of the collar and hauled him purposefully toward the department where they had pants in his size; I pushed the doll carriage with my other hand while Jannie shepherded Linda, Marilyn, and the rest, with loud, laughing directions. I was also carrying Jannie's beret and her coat —they could not be set on top of the carriage without disturbing sweet dolly—and Laurie's suit jacket, and my own coat. My voice was getting shrill, but I was still doggedly adding “dear” to every sentence.

Once I got Laurie into the department where I wanted him, there was small trouble in getting him to choose a pair of pants. He also chose a gabardine suit much like the one the boy with his picture in the paper had been wearing, priced at $59.95, a complete suit of space cadet armor, priced at $47.00, a very odd fur hat which for some reason he admired, and which would have cost me $7.50, a shaggy suede jacket which was called a Buffalo Bill jacket, and which was priced modestly at $32.50, pants to match $17.00. I one by one eliminated these articles, on the grounds that they were too heavy, too furry, too shaggy, or too expensive. I proffered a bright red bow tie, priced at sixty-nine cents, as a substitute. After some argument, during the course of which I told him he could buy anything he wanted with his father's dime, he was persuaded to take the bow tie or nothing, and the salesman remarked in an aside to me, “
I
don't think these fads will last.” Jannie had amused herself during this time by trying on one fur hat after another, to the extreme bewilderment of Linda, Marilyn, and the rest. She also fell into conversation with a harmless old lady who was trying to find a birthday gift for her nephew and who had great difficulty resisting Jannie's invitation to come shopping with us and Mommy would buy her a pair of shoes.

I added the package with the bow tie and two pairs of corduroy pants to the doll carriage, Jannie's coat and beret, Laurie's suit jacket, and my own coat. Fortunately Jannie's shoes were on the same floor; we could not conceivably get into an elevator, and I was most reluctant to get back onto the escalator. In the shoe department, Jannie sat herself down, ranged her girls about her, and, folding her hands peaceably, announced that she intended to have a pair of shiny black shoes with high-heels and pretty straps and sparkles and no toes.

“Shoes for the kiddies?” said the shoe clerk brightly, setting his little stool down before us.

“Just me and my girls,” Jannie said. “We all want shoes.”

The clerk did not hear this because I was telling him loudly that we wanted something in a solid brown oxford with a good sole. I knew I was going to have to reach a compromise somewhere along this line, and I thought I would start from rock bottom and so, going up, have more bargaining power. When the clerk brought the brown oxford Jannie dismissed it after a brief glance. “That's for my brother,” she said, “bring something for
me
.”

During the excruciating process of Jannie's buying herself a pair of shoes, Laurie amused himself by counting the number of boxes the clerk brought out, Jannie held stead-fastly to the high-heeled black sandal, and I grew very tense and began saying things like “How will you go to
school
without shoes because you are certainly
not
going to have any
shoes
until you start behaving like a little
lady
...”

We reached a tearful compromise on a pair of black patent leather shoes, completely impractical, but better, I reassured myself, than the black sandals with the high heels. Jannie remarked, as we left the shoe department, “I'm glad you're not my mommy. My mommy always buys me the shoes I want, and if
you
were my mommy I would run away.”

“Those are the worst shoes I ever saw in all my life,” Laurie told her.

“They're beautiful,” said Jannie. “All my girls have shoes just like them.”

I had added the package with the shoes to my other portage.

“Let's have
lunch
,” Laurie said.

I looked at the clock with the faint unconscious hope common to all mothers that time will somehow have passed magically away and the next time you look it will be bedtime. It was ten minutes to twelve; a good eight hours to go before the nightly miracle, but a legitimate time for lunch.

“Well, children,” I said, smiling sweetly and falsely around the table in the restaurant, “well, now we're going to remember our company manners, aren't we?”

Jannie looked bright and alert, and said sweetly, “Can we have two desserts?”

“Perhaps, dears,” I said with that same sweet smile, “if we eat allllll our lunch.”

Waitresses always take a very long time when you are waiting at a restaurant table with children. I would prefer not to believe that this is due entirely to the general appearance and deportment of my children at the table. At any rate, we had been sitting—me with my hands neatly folded, Laurie with his elbows on the table, and Jannie sliding down in her chair so that her chin rested comfortably on the edge of the table—waiting, I say, for perhaps ten minutes, while waitresses scurried busily past, serving the tables on either side of us, bringing extra pats of butter, stopping to chat merrily, hovering solicitously over customers who could not make up their minds.

“When is she going to
come
?” Laurie demanded.

“I want my lunch,” Jannie amplified. She reached out and gave a sharp slap against one of Laurie's elbows, so that his head crashed down and his chin cracked on the table. “Keep your elbows off the table,” she said admonishingly.

“Now, children,” I said in my gentle voice, scowling fiercely at Jannie, “now, children, remember we intended to use our very best manners.”

“Well,
she
—” Laurie began righteously.

“He had his elbows on the table,” Jannie said. “Mommy dearest, Laurie was putting his old elbows on the table, Mommy dear.”

“
Listen
,” Laurie said, “
she
went and—”

“Darlings,” I said, my voice more sugary, if possible, than before, “let us remember that
other
people are trying to eat
their
lunches, too, and we—”

“What?” Laurie said to Jannie, who was whispering earnestly in his direction.

“Nothing,” Jannie said, looking attentively at me. “We
are
being good children, Mommy dearest. We
are
letting other people eat their lunch.”

“That's right, dear,” I said to her, “
my
children are such good-”

“Why are you talking funny like that?” Laurie asked me, interested, just as the waitress showed up beside us. “You sound like a cat.”

He and Jannie both began to laugh loudly. “She sounds like a cat,” Jannie told the waitress.

“You wanna order?” the waitress said to me.

“I want spaghetti,” Jannie said immediately.

“
I
want spaghetti,” Laurie said.

“Let me see.” I consulted the menu. “Omelette?” I said to Laurie. And, to Jannie, “Vegetable plate?”

“No,” Jannie said, “spaghetti.”

“No spaghetti today,” the waitress said. She sighed deeply, fussing with her hair. “Ony what's onna menu,” she said.

“Chicken salad?” I said. “Liver?”

“Liver,” Laurie said, and made a noisy gesture of distaste. “Liver-biver-shiver-tiver-wiver-niver—”

“Liver-liver-liver,” said Jannie.

“Children,” I said, recollecting myself in time, so that it came out gentle. “We must
not
take up all this time deciding.”

“I decided,” Laurie said. “Spaghetti.”

Jannie switched sides abruptly. “Vegetable plate,” she said. “Mommy dear.”

“Justa minute,” the waitress said, and departed.

Two unpleasant-looking women wearing flowered hats got up ostentatiously from the next table and moved to a table across the room. “Look here,” I said, my voice just loud enough to carry across our own table, “one more word out of either of you and
you—”
eyeing Laurie “—will find yourself being spanked right here in public where everyone will laugh at you and
you—”
eyeing Jannie “—will find yourself being spanked somewhere in private where
no
one can hear you. And right now Jannie is going to have a vegetable plate for lunch and Laurie is going to have a chicken salad and I am going to have spaghetti—I mean, a club sandwich. Now does anyone have anything to say?”

They stared at me numbly. Laurie scowled, and showed his teeth, and was quiet. Jannie's face moved, the corners of her mouth turned down, her great blue eyes filled with tears, and she took a deep breath. “Just one howl out of you,” I said sweetly, “and all your girls get shut outdoors tonight.” She closed her mouth, and blinked.

Laurie made a move as though to reach for his gun. “That man can still take your picture, you know,” I said. He put both hands back on the table.

“Ha, ha,” Jannie said bitterly to me, “
you
've only got one head.”

“Put your foot in here,” Laurie told me, extending his water glass.

The waitress reappeared. “Kids made up their minds?” she said.

“Vegetable plate,” said Jannie meekly.

“Chicken salad,” Laurie said politely. “And two cups of coffee, please.”

“Two glasses of milk,” I told her. “And I will have a club sandwich.”

“And Linda will have spaghetti,” Jannie said, “and Marilyn will have spaghetti, and Susan will have spaghetti. . .”

“Jannie,” I said sharply.

“And Margaret,” Jannie whispered, “Margaret has to have the vegetable plate.”

If I gave up any idea of my dark suit, all we still had to do was manage the escalator going down and get ourselves into a bus and out again at home. I sighed. “I wonder how Daddy and Sally are getting along,” I said.

It was at that moment that the waitress approached our table with the plate of soup and the seven little Ellenoys backed her into those spurs.

 

 

 

WE ARE ALL of us, in our family, very fond of puzzles. I do double-crostics and read mystery stories, my husband does baseball box scores and figures out batting averages, and says he knows the odds against drawing a fourth ace, Laurie is addicted to the kind of puzzle which begins “There are fifty-four items in this picture beginning with the letter C,” Jannie does children's jigsaws, and Sally can put together an intricate little arrangement of rings and bars which has had the rest of us stopped for two months. We are none of us, however, capable of solving the puzzles we work up for ourselves in the oddly diffuse patterns of our several lives, and along with such family brain-teasers as “Why is there a pair of rollerskates in Mommy's desk?” and “What is
really
in the back of Laurie's closet?” and “Why doesn't Daddy wear the nice shirts Jannie picked out for Father's Day?” we are all of us still wondering nervously about what might be called the Great Grippe Mystery. As a matter of fact, I should be extremely grateful if anyone could solve it for us, because we are certainly very short of blankets, and it is annoying not to have
any
kind of an answer. Here, in rough outline, is our puzzle:

Our house is, as I have said, large, and the second floor has four bedrooms and a bathroom, all opening out onto a long narrow hall which we have made even narrower by lining it with bookcases so that every inch of hall which is not doorway is books. As is the case with most houses, both the front door and the back door are downstairs on the first floor. The front bedroom, which is my husband's and mine, is the largest and lightest, and has a double bed. The room next down the hall belongs to the girls, and contains a crib and a single, short bed. Laurie's room, across the hall, has a double-decker bed and he sleeps on the top half. The guest room, at the end of the hall, has a double bed. The double bed in our room is made up with white sheets and cases, the baby's crib has pink linen, and Jannie's bed has yellow. Laurie's bed has green linen, and the guest room has blue. The bottom half of Laurie's bed is never made up, unless company is going to use it immediately, because the dog traditionally spends a large part of his time there and regards it as his bed. There is no bed table on the distaff side of the double bed in our room. One side of the bed in the guest room is pushed against the wall. No one can fit into the baby's crib except the baby; the ladder to the top half of Laurie's double-decker is very shaky and stands in a corner of the room; the children reach the top half of the bed by climbing up over the footboard. All three of the children are accustomed to having a glass of apple juice, to which they are addicted, by their bedsides at night. Laurie uses a green glass, Jannie uses a red glass, Sally uses one of those little flowered cheese glasses, and my husband uses an aluminum tumbler because he has broken so many ordinary glasses trying to find them in the dark.

I do not take cough drops or cough medicine in any form.

The baby customarily sleeps with half a dozen cloth books, an armless doll, and a small cardboard suitcase which holds the remnants of half a dozen decks of cards. Jannie is very partial to a pink baby blanket, which has shrunk from many washings. The girls' room is very warm, the guest room moderately so; our room is chilly, and Laurie's room is quite cold. We are all of us, including the dog, notoriously easy and heavy sleepers; my husband never eats coffee cake.