She did, though. Sometimes she thought she’d done it just because her father had advised against it. That was how it sometimes was, after you’re a child and before you’re an adult. But he’d been right. She loved Ansel, but her father had been right all the same.
Having children both helped and didn’t help. Even before Charlotte was born she’d begun to wonder if she’d chosen the right man but the wrong place. By the time Clare arrived, she was sure of it, and she began to push Ansel toward a move to California like Ida and Hurd. He could get work as a salad man, then a chef, then a hotelier. He was handsome and competent and assured—he could run any sort of business. Or if he had to farm, he could farm, but in California, where you could farm year-round. Five crops a year on some of the land here! Hurd had written. But Ansel, in so many ways malleable, was not in this. “We’re happy here, aren’t we?” he’d say, and how else could she answer? She said of course they were, because the one indisputable truth was that he was happy here. He was happy to get up before dawn and he was happy to come back from the fields late. He could work for hours on the tractor, work straight through dinner, which she would bring out to him in a basket and wait for him to come to her end of the row and be surprised that it was already two in the afternoon. “What do you do when you’re on your tractor?” she asked one day while she watched him eat. He seemed puzzled. “Do? Well, I’m watching the tractor and the row, and I’m listening to the engine, and I’m thinking what else needs to be done this week and next.” She had fried chicken for him. He held still a half-eaten drumstick, looked at her, and smiled. “And there’s still a little time left over for thinking about my bride.” But she knew that what sustained him was his dreaminess, the way he could sit on a tractor or sit in his armchair and remove himself from the real world. He’d always done it, and always would. He had safe places to go. The Scottish girl did, too, she supposed, the way the girl could dry the same dish for a full two minutes, staring out the kitchen window, lost in her daydreams. But all Ellie ever saw staring out the window was flatness and grayness, and all she ever heard was the hollow sighing of the wind.
Once the children were born, she had no time to think about anything except the next feeding or batch of wash. The needs of babies and children were immediate and displaced her own. We’ll come to California when they’re older, she wrote to Ida. Right now I can’t go 10 feet without a fresh diaper.
They got older, and they climbed up Ansel’s cottonwood tree, adding their own pieces of wood to the rickety tree house, and still they went no farther than Wichita. The year that she started feeling peevish all the time, morning to night, was the year Neva was three. Poor Ansel saw it and felt it and wanted to cure it without knowing how. For Christmas, he bought her the radio. Funny that a man who liked plays and singing could be so annoyed by a machine designed to bring plays and singing right into your living room. She knew from the catalogue that it cost $64.64, but from the minute they turned it on, it was clear he viewed it as an intrusion. “Is that all they can do with it?” he asked. “Why don’t they put on real plays?” Some of the music programs were all right with him, but she sensed he preferred to sing himself, with the kids as his chorus. When he came in for dinner, he asked if he couldn’t turn it off, and when it needed tubes, he was slow to order them.
Ansel could live in his own world, but Ellie needed other voices. She needed them all day long. She needed them because the house that Ansel was born in, the one that had sounded so sweet and comforting in Ernie’s car all those years ago, was as lonesome as the moon. There were no women around who’d grown up in the city. There were no women who’d eaten in or seen a Harvey House. There was no Ida. Ellie had tried to keep standards. Those first years, she’d raised her own turkeys from eggs. She’d cooked Rice Piemontaise, a favorite dish in Emporia, once a week, mincing her own garden onions. One year, she’d sent away for powdered mustard so she could prepare Sauce Robert. One Thanksgiving she’d served both Peach Alexandria and Maple Melange. Everyone pretended to like them, except Clare, who loved mincemeat and, though not saying a word, would suffer nothing else.
And now, four days from her fortieth birthday and four days from Thanksgiving, they could not afford turkey, dead or alive. The pantry held little more than empty jars. No more rhubarb, plum syrup, or peaches. No more rice. They still had canned apricots and two big sacks of flour, luckily, so she wouldn’t have to grind up the wheat they used for chicken feed just to make cloverleaf rolls. No more bread-and-butter pickles, no ruby beets. Stewed tomatoes they had in abundance so perhaps she would just have to serve those with chicken and potatoes, which was not the right thing at all for Thanksgiving.
She went back in the house. No one else was there, so she did something she rarely did during the day: she sat down in the chair beside the Tiffany lamp and under the photograph of her father. She took Ida’s letter out of her apron pocket and wished she could write an answer that would make her happy again.
Dear Ellie,
Won’t you come for Thanksgiving this year? Heck, come for Thanksgiving and stay till we’re toothless and old. I’m planning to serve dinner out of doors this year—it was too hot last year to eat inside. Too hot! Isn’t that a change from how things used to be. No silver or china and no Marianne to do the hard work but I like it here so well and I know you would, too. My rock and bottle garden is taking shape and that’s where I’ll put the dinner table—I have 75 blue bottles now, if you can believe. Folks drink no end of Milk of Magnesia!
How is Nevie? Is Charlotte still mopey? I tell you she’d have a grand time of it around here. They’re showing pictures at the Women’s Club on Saturday nights and they have dances in the park. All sorts of nice boys work at the Packing House with Hurd. Clare could work there, you know, unless you wanted him to go to high school after all. It’s not too late! Write and say you’ll have turkey and dressing with us. Plus I will bake a red velvet birthday cake if you come.
Love and stuff,
Ida