Later I helped put the children to bed. I read a story to them from the Oz book. It made me feel strange to be reading one of the stories that I knew so well… .books so much a part of my life, and these children had not even been born until the ‘fifties. They hadn’t even been alive during World War Two.
I realized that this was the first time I had ever had anything to do with children.
“You sure have nice kids,” I said to Fay, after we had left the children’s rooms.
Fay said, “Everybody says that, so it must be true. Personally I find them a lot of work. You enjoy playing with them, but after they’ve pestered you day in day out for years—wait’ll you’ve got up every morning at seven and fixed breakfast for them.”
Fixing breakfast was one thing my sister hated; she liked to lie in bed late, until nine or ten, and with the girls in school she had no choice but to get up early. Charley of course had to be off to his factory, so he could not take the responsibility of dressing the girls, brushing their hair, preparing their lunches, seeing that they had their books and so forth. After a week or so I found that I did not mind getting up early and setting the table, putting on water for the Cream of Wheat, making the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and fifing the thermos jugs with tomato soup, opening the drapes, frying bacon, cutting open the grapefruit, buttoning the girls’ dresses, and then, after I had served breakfast to them, clearing the table, washing the dishes, taking out the garbage and trash, and finally sweeping the floor around the breakfast table. Meanwhile Charley got shaved, dressed, ate his soft boiled egg, toast and coffee, and set off for Petaluma. At nine or so Fay got up, took a shower, dressed, carried a cup of coffee and a dish of applesauce out onto the patio, ate, read the Chronicle–if somebody had thought to go out and get it for her—and then sat by herself smoking a cigarette.
Not only did I enjoy fixing breakfast, but I also enjoyed babysitting in the evenings, and that was a godsend for Fay. It meant that once again she could begin getting out and visiting people; she could get down to the Bay Area to movies and plays and classes, she could even go three times a week to her analyst in San Francisco instead of only once, and because they did not have to worry about keeping me up late, as they had had to with teen-age baby-sitters, they could stay as late in the city as they wanted, going to parties or bans. And on Friday morning I went with my sister to Petaluma and carried the groceries for her, putting everything away when we got home and even burning the leftover bags and cantons in the incinerator.
In exchange for all this I got truly wonderful meals, and I got to ride the horse and play games with the kids. A metal pole had been erected outdoors for tether ball, and the children and I played tether ball almost every afternoon. I got really skilled at it.
“You know,” Charley said to me once, “you missed your vocation. You should have been a playground director or worked for the YMCA. I never saw anybody take to kids so. The noise doesn’t bother you. That’s what bothers me.” In the evenings he always looked tired.
I said, “I think parents should spend more time with their kids.”
“How can they help it?” Fay said. “Good god, the kids are underfoot all the time. Kids grow up better if adults don’t interfere with them too much. They should be let alone.” She was glad to have me babysit and play with the girls, but she did not approve of my mixing into the continual quarrels that the girls had with each other. She had al ways simply let them fight it out, but I soon saw that the older girl, being more advanced intellectually and much heavier physically, always won. It was not fair, and I felt required to step in.
“The only way kids can learn what’s justice is if adults teach them,” I said to Fay.
“What do you know about justice?” Fay said. “Here you are up here in my house freeloading. How’d you get up here anyhow?” She glared at me with that half-serious, half-joking exasperation that I was familiar with; she had this way of mixing a serious statement in with irony so that it was never possible to tell how seriously she meant what she said. “Who brought you here?” she demanded.
In my own mind I had no guilt. I was giving back plenty for what I took; I did a great deal of Fay’s housework for her, and by babysitting I made it possible for them to save a lot of money. On an average, baby-sitting alone had run them three dollars a night, and over a period of a month this sometimes added up to sixty or seventy dollars. All these figures I recorded in my notebooks; I calculated how much I cost them and how much I saved them. The only real cost that I added to their budget was that of food. But I was not eating sixty dollars worth of food a month, so by baby-sitting alone I earned my keep. I didn’t add appreciably to the heating bills, on the water, although of course I did bathe and wash, and my clothes had to be put into the automatic washer. And I went around turning off lights not in use, and lowering thermostats when people left rooms, so in my estimation—such a thing is admittedly very hard to estimate—I actually saved them money on their utility bills. And by riding the horse I prolonged his life, since, not being ridden, he was getting overly fat, which put an unnatural strain on his heart.
More than anything else, however, and something that could not be calculated in dollars and cents, I improved the atmosphere regarding the children. In me they had someone who cared about them, who enjoyed playing with them and listening to them and giving them affection—I did not consider it a duty or a chore. I took them on long walks, bought them bubble gum at the store, watched “Gunsmoke” with them on tv, cleaned up their rooms…
And that’s another thing: by doing heavy household work such as scrubbing the floors I made it possible for Fay to let Mrs. Mendini, her cleaning woman, go. Consider that Mrs. Mendini’s presence had always annoyed Fay; she felt that Mrs. Mendini was listening to everything anybody said, and Fay had always liked privacy. That was one of her major motives for desiring a large house isolated in the country.
One Saturday afternoon when Fay had gone into San Rafael to shop, and the two girls were over at Edith Keever’s place playing with her children, Charley started talking to me out in the field by the duck pen. He had been running a new pipe to the ducks’ water trough.
“Doesn’t it bother you to do housework?” he asked me.
“No,” I said.
“I don’t think a man should do that kind of stuff,” he said. Later on he said, “I don’t think the girls should see a man doing it either. It gives them the idea a man can be bossed around by a woman.”
To that, I said nothing; I could think of nothing pertinent.
Charley said, “She can’t get me to do her god damn errands.”
“I see,” I said politely.
“A man has to keep his self-respect,” Charley said. “Doing housework robs him of his masculinity.”
I had noticed, almost as soon as I had moved in with them, how touchy Charley was with her. He seemed to resent her asking him to do anything, even to helping her around the garden. One night, when she asked him to open a can or ajar for her—I didn’t see it cleanly, although I came in from my room to watch—he blew up, threw the jar down on the floor, and started calling her names. I noted that in my records, because I could perceive a pattern.
Once a week or so Charley would go off by himself, usually down to the Western Bar, or a bar in Olema that he liked, and get tanked up on beer. That seemed to be his system for getting his resentment of my sister out into the open; otherwise it merely simmered away down inside him, making him quarrelsome and moody. But when he had had a few drinks he could threaten her physically. I never saw him actually hit her, but I could tell by her response, when he came home from the bar, that at such times she was genuinely afraid of him. I don’t think she realized why he drank, that he was releasing stored-up resentment; she thought of it more as a character defect on his part, and possibly a defect common with all men.