“Don’t move!” cried Mr. Hofacket. We all froze. Mr. Hofacket’s powder lit us up like summer lightning and caught us for that one second in time. When we later saw a copy of the photograph, most of the faces were solemn and severe. I looked pensive. The only smiling face was that of Granddaddy, grinning away like the Cheshire Cat.
Chapter 17
HOME ECONOMIES
As more individuals are produced than can possibly survive, there must in every case be a struggle for existence, either one individual with another of the same species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life.
AGAINST MY WILL, I had arrived at that age when a young girl began to acquire those skills she would need to manage her own household after marriage. And of course, all the girls I knew expected to get married. Everybody did, unless you were so rich that you didn’t have to, or so hard on the eyes that no man would have you. A few girls went off to be teachers or nurses for a while before they got married, and I considered them lucky. And now we had the example of Maggie Medlin, Telephone Operator, an independent woman with her own money who answered to no man other than Mr. Bell. Since there was still only the one telephone in town, her duties were not onerous. She sat before her board, receiver around her neck, eating apples and reading the newspaper until the board buzzed with a call to be relayed. She then plugged in a cord and said in the same crisp voice every time, “Hello, Central, what number please?” She had to say this, despite the fact that there was only the one number. All the girls in school admired her. We played Operator with a scrap of cardboard and a length of twine for a switching station. This looked like the good life to me. But the telephone proved to be so popular that soon everyone had to have one. Maggie was not allowed to leave her station and became a veritable Company slave.
THE PLANT THRIVED. We heard no word from Washington. Granddaddy toiled on with me at his elbow whenever I could escape to the laboratory with him.
One Saturday morning, Mother looked up from her sewing as I was running out the front door, one of Granddaddy’s butterfly nets and his old fishing creel slung over my shoulder. “Stop a minute,” she said as my hand turned the doorknob. I didn’t like the way she looked me over. “Where are you off to?” she said.
“Down to the river, ma’am, to collect specimens,” I said, edging crabwise out the door.
“Come back here. Specimens are all very well,” said Mother, “but I’m worried that you are lagging behind. When I was your age, I could smock and darn and had the essentials of good plain cookery.”
“I know how to cook,” I said stoutly.
“What can you cook?” she said.
“I can make a cheese sandwich. I can make a soft-boiled egg.” I thought about it some more, and then said triumphantly, “I can make a hard-boiled egg.”
My mother said, “Lord above, it’s worse than I thought.”
“What is?” I said.
“Your ignorance of cookery.”
“But why do I have to cook? Viola cooks for us,” I said.
“Yes, but what about later? When you grow up and have a family of your own? How will you feed them?”
Viola had been with us always, since before I was born, since before even Harry was born. It had never occurred to me that she wouldn’t always be there. My world wobbled on its axis. “Viola can cook for my family,” I said.
There was silence. Then Mother said, “All right, you can go. But we will talk about this again soon.”
I ran out of there and did my best to forget the conversation, but it nagged at me all the way to the river like a tooth beginning to go bad. All joy had fled the morning. Mother was awakening to the sorry facts: My biscuits were like stones, my samplers askew, my seams like rickrack. I considered my mother’s life: the mending basket that never emptied, the sheets and collars and cuffs to be turned, the twenty loaves of bread to be punched down each and every week. It’s true that she didn’t have to do all the heavy cleaning herself—she had SanJuanna for that. And a washerwoman came on Monday and spent the whole day boiling the clothes in the dripping laundry shed out back. Viola killed and plucked and cooked the chickens. Alberto dispatched and butchered the hogs. But my mother’s life was a never-ending round of maintenance. Not one single thing did she ever achieve but that it had to be done all over again, one day or one week or one season later. Oh, the monotony.
The day didn’t begin to look up until I caught a spotted fritillary butterfly. They were swift and elusive and difficult to net. I knew Granddaddy would be well pleased, plus it helped keep my mind off cooking and mending. When I got home, it took me a whole hour just to set the delicate body in preparation for mounting, and by then I had forgotten what an ignorant girl I was. Just as well, as the campaign to bring me up to domestic scratch was, without my knowledge or cooperation, ginning up in earnest.
The campaign gained momentum when Miss Harbottle decided that all the girls in my class would enter their handiwork in the Fentress Fair. This was distressing news. I found sewing a waste of time, and I had been easing along doing the minimum. My work could charitably be described as sloppy, like Petey’s cocoon. Stitches dropped themselves and later reappeared at random so that the long striped scarf I was knitting bulged in the middle like a python after dining on a rabbit. I fancied that a malevolent Rumpelstiltskin crept into my room at night and undid my best work, turning the gold of my efforts into pathetic dross on a wheel perversely spinning backward.
Although she’d been watching my knitting to some degree, it had been a while since Mother had inspected my fine sewing. One day she asked to check my work. I reluctantly took her my sewing bag, and she poked through it for a minute. “You did this?”
“Yes, Mother.”
“Are you proud of it?”
Was I proud of it? I pondered this. Was it a trick question or not? I couldn’t tell; I didn’t know which way to flop. “Uh . . .”
“I’m asking you, Calpurnia.”
“No, ma’am, I guess I’m not too proud of it.”
“Then why don’t you do work you can be proud of?”
I thought again. I had no snappy answer, so I had to fall back on honesty. “Because it’s boring, ma’am?” A truthful answer, but one I knew to be foolish, even as it exited my mouth.
“Ah,” said Mother. “Boring.”
A bad sign when she repeated your own words back to you like a parrot. Now, parrots. Those were some interesting birds, living to such a great age that they were passed down in the family will. Why, Granddaddy had told me about a parrot who had lived past his century and learned over four hundred conversational phrases, as acute a mimic as any human being . . .
“Calpurnia, I don’t believe you’re . . .”
Although I doubted I’d be allowed a parrot (Granddaddy had also told me they were very expensive), this didn’t necessarily exclude the possibility of something smaller, a cockatiel, say, or maybe a budgie. . . . Mother’s lips were moving. . . . Something about practicing?
“Have to do better . . .”
A budgie would do as the bird of last resort. They could be taught to speak, couldn’t they?