“We’re resurveying the Kittery portion to register the settling.”
Gene has explained to her how he makes three-dimensional elevations and maps for engineers and contractors. She likes the names of the instruments and tools he peruses in catalogs—theodolites and transits, alidades and collimators—but she doesn’t know precisely how they work. Once, when he was courting her, he took her to Merserve Hill and brought out his tripod and tried to teach her how to use the transit, but before she could look into the eyepiece, he positioned her by putting his hands around her waist, and she didn’t hear what he said. She supposes Gene planned it that way. Grace would like to try the outing again and this time pay attention. If the rain ever stops. They could bring the children and make a picnic of it. Highly unlikely that her husband will put his hands around her waist now. Except for a peck when he leaves the house each day and another when he comes home, they seldom touch outside the bed.
“Doesn’t the rain ruin the equipment?” she asks.
“We have special umbrellas. Tarps. What will you do today?”
“I might go over to Mother’s.”
He nods but doesn’t look at her. He would rather she went to his mother’s house for a visit. Relations between his wife and his mother are not all they should be. Does he wish for Grace to bake a two-crust apple pie and take it to her? Should she mention the bakers’ new restrictions? Would he care or would that go into the category of “women’s work,” a subject that allows him to dismiss it?
“I’ve fixed up a canvas hood,” she says.
“Have you now?” He raises his head and seems impressed. He might recognize a certain amount of engineering in the construction of a canvas hood for a carriage. But she would disappoint him if she told him how she did it. She doesn’t use mathematics. Instead she fits and folds and cuts and fits and folds and cuts again, and then she sews. Well, she does measure.
—
She has rigged up a seat so that Claire can sit up in the carriage while Tom lies papoose-like beside her. Tom, the soft fuzz of his dark hair, the pudgy body with its disappearing folds, the warmth of his skin as he burbles; Claire, her white-blond hair in ringlets, short sentences emerging like radio bulletins through static and surprising Grace. Claire, from birth, has always stolen the limelight, first because of her astonishing beauty and now, as is emerging, because of her feistiness. Grace likes nothing more than to lie on her bed with Tom tucked beside her and Claire rolling to her side to put her face close to her mother’s skin. Sometimes they all drift off for a short nap; at other times, they sing.
But as soon as they bump out the door, Claire begins to cry, in seeming sympathy with the rain. Grace knows that Claire’s distress stems from the hood her mother so cleverly designed, the one through which the child can barely see. Or maybe not. Grace wants to cry, too.
—
Her boots have water in them before she reaches the dirt sidewalk. She notes the pink buds of the cherry tree in Rosie’s front lawn. Will they bloom in the rain? She hopes so. It trickles down the edges of her clear plastic head scarf and under her collar. Grace turns onto the first set of stepping-stones she comes to, which leads her to Rosie’s front door. Her friend will be in her tangerine bathrobe, her hair in curlers, but she will invite them in with enthusiasm. Grace cannot face another day trapped inside her own house. She has read all of her “kitchen-table” books, novels not good enough to put inside the glassed-in shelves at the entrance to the dining room. The “kitchen-table” books are full of plot and romance and intrigue.
—
“I brought half a grapefruit,” Grace crows when Rosie opens the door.
Rosie waves them all in, even the baby carriage, which Grace leaves in the vestibule. Looking at her friend’s face, hair, robe, and curlers, all of which more or less match, she imagines Rosie as a column of tangerine flame. Rosie is attractive, even in curlers, but slovenly. Gene once used the word squalor to describe the household. Grace objected then, though she partially agrees.
Rosie scoops Claire up into her arms and at once begins to remove the little girl’s red rain hat and matching slicker. Claire then sinks into Rosie’s chest, and after a moment, Rosie gives the child a fierce hug. But then Claire is on the floor looking for Freddie, the cocker spaniel. Grace, with Tom in her arms, rummages through her handbag and finds the half-grapefruit, carefully wrapped in waxed paper. She gives it to Rosie.
“Where did you get this?” Rosie asks as if she were holding a jeweled egg.
“At Gardiner’s. He got a shipment of six. He let me buy one.”
This isn’t true. He gave it to Grace, and she didn’t object.
“He must have a thing for you,” Rosie teases.
Grace stares Rosie down, and then she begins to smile.
“Can you imagine?” hoots Rosie.
“No!” says Grace, laughing. Rosie squeals at the image.
Ned Gardiner must eat half his produce in the back room, they have decided, because he weighs close to three hundred pounds. His soft stomach hangs over his low belt, and Grace often speculates about how he and his wife, Sophia, once a dark beauty but now nearly two hundred pounds herself, manage in bed. Then Grace feels a pang of conscience for having laughed at a man who gave her a grapefruit.
—
“I’ll split it with you,” Rosie says.
“I’ve had my half,” Grace lies. “You go ahead.”
Rosie’s house seems to be full of things, though Grace notes the lack of a high chair, playpen, or Bathinette. Rosie, too, has a toddler and an infant, a familiar configuration in the neighborhood. Claire has Rosie’s toddler, Ian, in a headlock.
—
“Tim says he’s had to go out time and time again to tow cars out of the mud,” Rosie remarks as she slowly sucks each grapefruit section. She closes her eyes with pleasure. Tim owns half of an automobile repair shop on Route 1.
“Gene says the ground is so wet, the farmers can’t set their seeds.”
Grace blows smoke away from Tom’s face and takes another pull. “It will end,” she says without conviction.
—
“Coffee, yes?” Rosie asks when she has thoroughly squeezed the life out of the fruit. Grace notes that there’s a seed stuck in a fold of Rosie’s robe. Eddie, Rosie’s youngest, has begun to cry. Grace wasn’t aware that the infant was in the room. She watches as her friend snatches blankets from the couch and picks up a pink baby, Rosie’s coloring exactly. Grace might so easily have sat on Eddie, she thinks with a blip of horror. Containerize, her own mother once told Grace, as if imparting the secret of sanity. Her mother meant children as well as dry goods.
—
“Tonight’s shopping night,” Grace says to her friend, who has opened her robe to reveal a blond nipple and a blue-veined breast. “Need anything?”
Every Thursday night, payday for Gene, he picks Grace and the children up as soon as he pulls into the driveway, and they go straight to Shaw’s. Steak for that night, calves’ liver, bacon, codfish cakes, puffed rice, tomato soup, bologna, eggs, butter, chipped beef, canned salmon, canned peas, hot dogs, buns, baked beans, brown bread, and Rice Krispies. Gene removes his pay packet from his pocket and counts out the bills and quarters and nickels and dimes and pennies with care. Everything else—milk, bread, hamburger—can be bought at Gardiner’s when needed. Grace tries to have some amount of protein every night, though by Wednesday the meal is Spanish rice with bits of bacon.
“How are you drying the diapers?” Rosie asks.
“I’ve had to hire a service,” Grace confesses, “but I’ll let it go as soon as the rain stops.”
There’s a moment of silence. Tim’s pay packet is not as full as Gene’s. “Jesus, Grace, how can you stand the stink of the diaper pail?”