“Hah,” he said. “I don’t have to see it to know it’s all gone for firewood. It’s been four winters now.”
She sat down, put her elbows on the table and stared at her bowl. “Oatmeal,” she said, putting in that one word everything she felt about the beach and wanting to go there.
“It’s not that I don’t want to do better for you,” Ben said. He touched her arm with the tips of his fingers for just a moment. “I wish I could. And I wish I could have hung on to that corned beef hash last time, but it was heavy and I had to run and there was a fight on the train and I lost the sugar too. I wonder which bastard has it now.”
“I know how hard you try, Ben. I do. It’s just sometimes everything comes on you at once, especially when it’s a Saturday like this. Having to get water way down the block and that only when there’s electricity to run the pump, and this oatmeal; sometimes it’s just once too often, and then, most of all, you commuting in all that danger to get food.”
“I make out. I’m not the smallest one on that train.”
“God, I think that everyday. Thank God, I say to myself, or where would we be now. Dead of starvation that’s where.”
She watched him leaning low over his bowl, pushing his lips out and making a sucking sound. Even now she was still surprised to see how long and naked his skull arched, and she had an impulse, seeing it there so bare and ugly and thinking of the commuting, to cover it gently with her two hands, to cup it and make her hands do for his hair; but she only smoothed at her kerchief again to make sure it covered her own baldness.
“Is it living, though? Is it living, staying home all the time, hiding like, in this house? Maybe it’s the rest of them, the dead ones, that are lucky. It’s pretty sad when a person can’t even go to the beach on a Saturday.”
She was thinking the one thing she didn’t want to do most of all was to hurt him. No, she told herself inside, sternly. Stop it right now. Be silent for once and eat, and, like Ben says, don’t think; but she was caught up in it somehow and she said, “You know, Littleboy never did go to the beach yet, not even once, and it’s only nine miles down,” and she knew it would hurt him.
“Where is Littleboy?” he said and yelled again out the window. “He just roams.”
“It isn’t as if there were cars to worry about any more, and have you seen how fast he is and how he climbs so good for three and a half? Besides, what can you do when he gets up so early.”
He was finished eating now and he got up and dipped a cup of water from the large pan on the stove and drank it. “I’ll take a look,” he said. “He won’t come when you call.”
She began to eat finally, watching him out the kitchen window and listening to him calling. Seeing him hunched forward and squinting because he had worn glasses before and his last pair had been broken a year ago. Not in a fight, because he was careful not to wear them commuting even then, when it wasn’t quite so bad. It was Littleboy who had done it, climbed up and got them himself from the very top drawer, and he was a whole year younger. Next thing she knew they were on the floor, broken.
Ben disappeared out of range of the window and Little-boy came darting in as though he had been huddling by the door behind the arbor vitae all the time.
He was the opposite of his big, pink and hairless parents, with thick and fine black hair growing low over his forehead and extending down the back of his neck so far that she always wondered if it ended where hair used to end before, or whether it grew too far down. He was thin and small for his age, but strong-looking and wiry with long arms and legs. He had a pale, olive skin, wide, blunt features and a wary stare, and he looked at her now, waiting to see what she would do.
She only sighed, lifted him and put him in his youth chair and kissed his firm, warm cheek, thinking, what beautiful hair, and wishing she knew how to cut it better so he would look neat.
“We don’t have any more sugar,” she said, “but I saved you some raisins,” and she took down a box and sprinkled some on his cereal.
Then she went to the door and called, “He’s here, Ben. He’s here.” And in a softer voice she said, “The pixy.” She heard Ben answer with a whistle and she turned back to the kitchen to find Littleboy’s oatmeal on the floor in a lopsided oval lump, and him, still looking at her with wise and wary brown eyes.
She knelt down first, and spooned most of it back into the bowl. Then she picked him up rather roughly, but there was gentleness to the roughness, too. She pulled at the elastic topped jeans and gave him two hard, satisfying slaps on bare buttocks. “It isn’t as if we had food to waste,” she said, noticing the down that grew along his backbone and wondering if that was the way the three year olds had been before.
He made an Aaa, Aaa, sound, but didn’t cry, and after that she picked him up and held him so that he nuzzled into her neck in the way she liked. “Aaa,” he said again, more softly, and bit her just above the collar bone.
She dropped him down, letting him kind of slide with her arms still around him. It hurt and she could see there was a shallow, half-inch piece bitten right out.
“He bit me again,” she shouted, hearing Ben at the door. “He bit me. A real piece out even, and look, he has it in his mouth still.”
“God, what a…”
“Don’t hurt him. I already slapped him good for the floor and three is a hard age.” She pulled at Ben’s arm. “It says so in the books. Three is hard, it says.” But she remembered it really said that three was a beginning to be cooperative age.
He let go and Littleboy ran out of the kitchen back toward the bedrooms.
She took a deep breath. “I’ve just got to get out of this house. I mean really away.”
She sat down and let him wash the place and cross two bandaids over it. “Do you think we could go? Do you think we could go just one more time with a blanket and a picnic lunch? I’ve just got to do something.”
“All right. All right. You wear the wrench in your belt and I’ll wear the hammer, and we’ll risk taking the car.”
She spent twenty minutes looking for bathing suits and not finding them, and then she stopped because she knew it didn’t really matter, there probably wouldn’t be anyone there.
The picnic was simple enough. She gathered it together in five minutes, a precious can of tuna fish and hard, homemade biscuits baked the evening before when the electricity had come on for a while, and shriveled, worm-eaten apples, picked from neighboring trees and hoarded all winter in another house that had a cellar.
She heard Ben banging about in the garage, measuring out gas from his cache of cans, ten miles’ worth to put in the car and ten miles’ worth in a can to carry along and hide someplace for the trip back.
Now that he had decided they would go, her mind began to be full of what-ifs. Still, she thought, she would not change her mind. Surely once in four years was not too often to risk going to the beach. She had thought about it all last year too, and now she was going and she would enjoy it.
She gave Littleboy an apple to keep him busy and she packed the lunch in the basket, all the time pressing her lips tight together, and she said to herself that she was not going to think of any more what-ifs, and she was going to have a good time.
Ben had switched after the war from the big-finned Dodge to a small and rattly European car. They fitted into it cozily, the lunch in back with the army blanket and a pail and shovel for playing in the sand, and Littleboy in front on her lap, his hair brushing her cheek as he turned, looking out.
They started out on the empty road. “Remember how it was before on a weekend?” she said, and laughed. “Bumper to bumper, they called it. We didn’t like it then.”