There was a grandfather clock standing in the far corner of the parlor. Frannie Goldsmith had been listening to its measured ticks and tocks all of her life. It summed up the room, which she had never liked and, on days like today, actively hated.
Her favorite room in the place was her father's workshop. It was in the shed that connected house and barn. You got there through a small door which was barely five feet high and nearly hidden behind the old kitchen woodstove. The door was good to begin with: small and almost hidden, it was deliciously like the sort of door one encountered in fairy-tales and fantasies. When she grew older and taller, she had to duck through it just as her father did - her mother never went out into the workshop unless she absolutely had to. It was an Alice in Wonderland door, and for a while her pretend game, secret even from her father, was that one day when she opened it, she would not find Peter Goldsmith's workshop at all. Instead she would find an underground passageway leading somehow from Wonderland to Hobbiton, a low but somehow cozy tunnel with rounded earthen sides and an earthen ceiling interlaced with sturdy roots that would give your head a good bump if you knocked it against any of them. A tunnel that smelled not of wet soil and damp and nasty bugs and worms, but one which smelled of cinnamon and baking apple pies, one which ended somewhere up ahead in the pantry of Bag End, where Mr. Bilbo Baggins was celebrating his eleventy-first birthday party...
Well, that cozy tunnel never turned out to be there, but to the Frannie Goldsmith who had grown up in this house, the workshop (sometimes called "the toolshop" by her father and "that dirty place where your dad goes to drink beer" by her mother) had been enough. Strange, tools and odd gadgets. A huge chest with a thousand drawers, each of the thousand crammed full. Nails, screws, bits, sandpaper (of three kinds: rough, rougher, and roughest), planes, levels, and all the other things she'd had no name for then and still had no name for. It was dark in the workshop except for the cobwebby forty-watt bulb that hung down by its cord and the bright circle of light from the Tensor lamp that was always focused where her father was working. There were the smells of dust and oil and pipesmoke, and it seemed to her now that there should be a rule: every father must smoke. Pipe cigar, cigarette, marijuana, hash, lettuce leaves, something. Because the smell of smoke seemed an integral part of her own childhood.
"Hand me that wrench, Frannie. No - the little one. What did you do at school today?... She did?... Well why would Ruthie Sears want to push you down?... Yes, it is nasty: Very nasty scrape. But it goes good with the color of your dress, don't you think? Now if you could only find Ruthie Sears and get her to push you down again and scrape the other leg. Then you'd have a pair. Hand me that big screwdriver, would you?... No, the one with the yellow handle."
"Frannie Goldsmith! You come out of that nasty place right now and change your schoolclothes! RIGHT... NOW! You'll be filthy! "
Even now, at twenty-one, she could duck through that doorway and stand between his worktable and the old Ben Franklin stove that gave out such stuperous heat in the wintertime and catch some of what it had felt like to be such a small Frannie Goldsmith growing up in this house. It was an illusory feeling, almost always intermingled with sadness for her barely remembered brother Fred, whose own growing-up had been so rudely and finally interrupted. She could stand and smell the oil that was rubbed into everything, the must, the faint odor of her father's pipe. She could rarely remember what it had been like to be so small, so strangely small, but out there she sometimes could, and it was a glad way to feel.
But the parlor, now.
The parlor.