Raising Demons Page 5

Concluding, and rightly, that she was talking to the milkman, who needed urgently to be told that he must leave three quarts of milk instead of five, and a dozen eggs, I went to the head of the stairs and shouted, “Sally? Tell him to leave eggs and three quarts. Then stay exactly where you are until I come down.”

  I slammed the dresser drawer shut, hoping it would wake my husband, slid into my shoes, and raced downstairs to find Sally, who has a kind of literal mind, frozen halfway between the door and the table. “Can I move now?” she asked, as I came to a stop, “move?” There were five quarts of milk on the table, and three dozen eggs. “Sally,” I said helplessly, “where have you been?”

  Sally, who was then almost four years old, has always been very pretty. Any time I am prepared to spend an hour or so working on her, she is very lovely indeed, although her general appearance is of a child barely kept in a state of minimum human cleanliness by the most stubborn determination. Her hair was not cut short until she was six, so that summer it was still long and curly; since this particular morning she had been on her own for several hours she was recognizable largely by the voice and by the horrible doll she was carrying. She had chosen to put on a sunsuit, which would have been perfectly reasonable if she had not put it on backward; her hair was not able entirely to conceal the condition of her face, and from where I stood it looked very much as though she had gotten a lollipop from somewhere, because there was a lollipop stick wound in one curl. “Where have you been?” I asked again.

  “Out,” she said inconclusively. “I been visiting, visiting.” Her odd jangling manner of speech had never annoyed me more, and I said sharply, “Visiting where?”

  She waved. “Around,” she said.

  “Where is Jannie? Laurie?”

  “Laurie is on his bike. Jannie got eaten by a bear, eaten.”

  This was so close to my guilty expectations that I went nervously to the kitchen door and looked out; there were no bears but at least part of Sally’s general appearance was explained by the impressive line of mudpies on the back step. Following a reasonable train of thought, I asked, “Did you have breakfast?”

  “I had it at Amy’s house, Amy’s.”

  Amy’s mother was one of the sweetest people I had met that summer. Her children were always spotless, and they were fed at correct times in an immaculate kitchen. I had never heard Amy’s mother raise her voice to her children and she always seemed to have time to make her own clothes. “You would go to Amy’s,” I said.

  “Well, I told Amy’s mother that I did not have any breakfast, breakfast, because my mommy did not wake up and give it to me, mommy. And Amy’s mother said I was a poor baby, baby, and she gave me cereal and fruit, cereal, and she said there, dear, and she gave me chocolate milk and I did remember to say thank you, remember.”

  I made a mental note to stop over later and tell Amy’s mother laughingly that Sally had certainly fooled us, hadn’t she, because I was right here making breakfast and Sally had just run out and I had spent hours looking for her and . . . “I told Amy’s mother you were gone away to Fornicalia,” Sally said, seating herself at the table before her half-finished bowl of cereal. “Laurie got me this cereal but he put on too much milk and I went to Amy’s.”

  She seemed satisfied that she had given me a reasonable account of her morning, and I said “California” absently as I began to clear dishes out of the sink and stack them. “Hickory Dockery Dick,” Sally said musically. “Why did they come home wagging their tails behind them, tails?”

  By half-past eleven I had coffee making and had located Jannie (breakfast at Laura’s house, scrambled eggs and orange juice and toast because Jannie’s mother was still asleep because Jannie’s mother had not come home until way, way late last night) and had had word of Laurie, who called to say that he was at the stables helping water the horses and would be back in a little while for lunch. “I see you finally got up,” he remarked over the phone. “Yeah,” I said.

  I had fed Barry and put him in his playpen, and was feeling a little bit less like the delinquent mother whose children are found begging in the streets. Sally told me a long story about an elephant she and Amy had encountered, which asked them civilly the way to the zoo, zoo, and gave them each a piece of bubble gum, a delicacy ordinarily forbidden Sally, but I had to let her keep it because it was a present from an elephant. By the time my husband came stomping downstairs I was sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee and smiling maternally at Sally; I gave my husband another smile of patient, tolerant understanding, and asked him sweetly if he would care for coffee? He nodded, and sat down at the table, but he jumped when I lifted the frying pan. “Eggs?” I asked him, and he shook his head no.

  “Dockery Hickory Dick,” Sally said. “Later will you take us swimming, Daddy, swimming?”

  “Of course he will, dear,” I said largely, and my husband turned his head and looked at me for a minute.

  “Daddy would like—” I was going on maliciously when the back door opened gently and Jannie said, “Can I change to a dress?”

  “Good morning, dear,” I said.

  “Good morning. Can I? My white sundress? You didn’t wake up this morning, did you?”

  “Jan, later Daddy will take us swimming, Daddy.”

  “Can I change to my bathing suit?” Jannie switched smoothly. “Can I change to my blue bathing suit?” She was wearing a pair of shorts and a blouse which she dearly loved but which was so small for her that she could only button the top button, and it left a two-inch gap over the top of her shorts. “So I’ll be all ready when we go swimming?”

  “Can I wear a dress, dress? Can I?”

  “No,” I said. “Later. No.”

  “Can I anyway go barefoot?”

  “Can I, barefoot?”

  “You’re already barefoot,” I said, puzzled.

  “But you weren’t awake so we could ask, so I thought,” Jannie said judiciously, “that I had better ask now.”

  “You may go barefoot,” I said.

  “Thank you,” Jannie said. “May I change to my bathing suit?”

  “I had breakfast at Amy’s,” Sally said. “Ha-ha.”

  “Ha-ha,” Jannie said. “I had breakfast at Laura’s.”

  “Horrible,” my husband said. “Way to bring up children,” he explained to his coffee cup.

  “And Daddy will get you each an ice-cream cone,” I said to Jannie and Sally.

  Sally nodded approvingly. “But furstaneta finish my cereal,” she said. “Furstaneta” translates precisely as “First I need to,” and it precedes most of Sally’s important actions; in this case, tipping her bowl of cereal onto the floor.

  “Bring up children,” my husband said.

  There was a scratching at the back screen and Toby put his head in and looked around at us. Almost immediately there was the crash of Laurie’s bike hitting the ground outside. “Daddy will take you swimming, too,” Sally told Laurie, as he came through the door.

  “Not me, kiddie,” Laurie said blandly, relieving Jannie of the piece of bread she was covering with mayonnaise as he went past, and leaving her gazing astonished from the jar of mayonnaise to her empty hand. “Me, I’m on Popeye this aft.”

  “Don’t come any closer till I finish my coffee,” his father said.

  “Buddy’s gone lame,” Laurie told his father.

  “If his shoes are too tight tell him I’ll take them,” my husband said.

  “Horses don’t get lame from tight shoes, bud,” Laurie said. “How about some food?” he asked me.

  Slinging one leg over the seat of his chair, he pulled the jar of mayonnaise toward him. “Jerry says,” he told Jannie, “that kid sisters are only good to have if they’re sixteen years old and have no big brothers.”

  “Laurie,” I said, “that is hardly the way—”

  “To address your ever-loving family,” Laurie
said. “Jerry says,” he went on, “you got to have families, because otherwise where would you borrow money?”

  “Good lord,” my husband said, just as Jannie put in suddenly, “Mommy, where am I?”

  “Sitting at the kitchen table,” I said. “Why?”

  “I just all of a sudden couldn’t remember how I got here,” Jannie said, looking around at all our startled faces. “I don’t remember anything.”

  My husband and I stared at each other. “Jannie,” he said, “tell us what happened.”

  “I fell, I believe,” Jannie said. “I believe I fell.”

  “Where did you hit yourself?” I asked.

  “Down on the woodpile,” Sally said. “Jannie fell off the woodpile, Jannie.”

  “Did you?” I asked. “When?”

  “I don’t remember,” Jannie said, pleased.

  “Your own name?” Laurie asked with interest. “Because it’s Jannie.”

  “How old are you?” Sally asked.

  Jannie giggled. “Now I don’t even remember that,” she said.

  “What were you playing on the woodpile?” I asked.

  Jannie took a deep breath. “Well,” she said, “I was playing on the woodpile with Laura and Laura’s brother Johnnie and we were playing pirate ship and Laura was the captain and Johnnie was the first mate and I was the shrew—”

  “Crew.”

  “Shrew. And I was the shrew, and I said I was going to dive overboard looking for fish and Laura said that was no way to catch fish you had to use a spear and Johnnie said—”

  “And then you fell?”

  “Not yet. And Johnnie said I was supposed to dive overboard to be dead, see, because I was a captured maiden and so I said I would only pretend to dive overboard because even if you were captured maidens you couldn’t go jumping off the woodpile. Could you?” she appealed to Laurie.

  “Depends,” Laurie said judiciously. “I know that ole horse Buddy—”

  “Anyway,” Jannie said, “Laura said I had to jump and Johnnie said he would if I would and so then I fell.”

  “But you can’t remember anything about it?”

  “Well,” Jannie said doubtfully, “I do remember a little bit about playing on the woodpile. But now I think I have forgotten my name.”

  “It’s Jannie,” Laurie said.

  I glanced, frowning, at my husband, and he shook his head and shrugged. “It was all on television, all,” Sally said suddenly. “We saw it at Amy’s house, Uncle Bob’s program, Amy’s, and the little cow that laughs all the time, cow, he fell and hit his head and then he couldn’t remember all about Uncle Bob and the trip to the moon, moon.”

  “It was not,” Jannie said, “it wasn’t, it wasn’t.”

  “And we all said we couldn’t remember,” Sally said. “Can we go swimming now, swimming?”

  “Now,” Jannie said reproachfully, “now I can’t even remember your name.”

  “It’s Sally,” Laurie said.

  “Shall I put a cold cloth on your head?” I asked solicitously.

  “Perhaps I better go lie down for a minute,” Jannie said, her voice noticeably weaker. “I’ll just leave my bread and mayonnaise.”

  “Suppose,” I said, “you go lie down for a minute and take your bread and mayonnaise with you, since you seem to have made four slices of bread and mayonnaise and I do not see that you have eaten more than half of one.”

  “But I don’t feel—”

  “If you are too ill to have your nice bread and mayonnaise, then you are too ill to go swimming.”

  Jannie sighed, and thought, and sighed again. “This is not very fair,” she pointed out. “Swimming might be very good for my poor head.”

  “Say, kid,” Laurie said to me, “how about some sandwiches to take down to the stable?”

  “Make them yourself,” I said, reaching for the coffeepot.

  “No woman knows how to cook, anyway,” Laurie said. “Jerry says,” he told his father, “that the worst thing about having a wife is she does the cooking.” His father nodded bleakly.

  “If any big-mouthed brother of a horse cares to take over the cooking in this house—” I began indignantly.

  “But if I eat all my bread and mayonnaise, then I will be—”

  Laurie guffawed. “If I’m a brother of a horse then what’s Jannie?” he demanded, and then, without waiting for the indignant answer Jannie was opening her mouth to deliver, he remarked, “Here comes Amy, simple.”

  “Amy?” said Sally, just as I was saying, “Simple is not a polite name for—” and my husband was saying, “Any young man as fresh as—” and Jannie was saying, “Horses don’t have sisters, they have—” “Amy?” Sally said. “May I please have two cookies, two, one for Amy and one for me, cookies?”

  “You may, you may,” I said hastily. “Provided you eat them outdoors.” If Sally’s refrain conversation is difficult to bear, Amy’s repetitive conversation is worse; where Sally repeats the vital word, Amy repeats the whole sentence; Sally is the only one in our family who can talk to Amy at all. “May I please play with Sally?” Amy was saying through the back door screen, “is Sally here so she can play with me?”

  Sally slid off her chair and made for the cookie jar. “Amy,” she shouted, “Daddy is going to take us swimming, swimming, and ask your mommy if you can come, your mommy.”

  “My mommy,” said Amy solemnly, opening the screen door and joining Sally at the cookie jar, “doesn’t let me go swimming right now, because I have a cold. I have a cold, so my mommy doesn’t want me to go swimming, because I have a cold. I have a cold,” she told me, “so my mommy won’t let me go swimming.”

  “Because she has a cold,” Laurie said helpfully. “See, she has a cold and so—”

  “Laurie,” I said feverishly. “Sally and Amy, please take those cookies outdoors.”

  “Anyway,” Jannie said with finality, “then that makes Sally a horse, too, because if Laurie is the brother of a horse, then Sally—”

  “If you ask your mommy can we each have two cookies,” Amy began, preceding Sally out the screen door, “then maybe if your mommy says we can have two cookies—”

  Delicately Laurie shut the door behind them, and remarked consideringly to his father, “You know, you take that Riff. Now there’s a nag can jump and run and about everything, and then there’s Raff, and he’s Riff’s own twin brother and you think that horse can jump?” The phone rang.

  “It’s probably a horse for Laurie,” Jannie said, inspired.

  “I’ll get it,” my husband said, abandoning Laurie in mid-sentence.

  “I’ll just change into my bathing suit right now,” Jannie said, taking advantage of my preoccupation with the ringing of the phone to leave two slices of bread and mayonnaise behind the toaster. “See you later, kid,” Laurie said, patting me on the head.

  “Well, well, well,” my husband was saying over the phone. “Isn’t this a surprise.” He turned and grinned evilly at me. “But you’ve got to come on over,” he said, “we’d never forgive you if you didn’t stop in. And plan to stay on for dinner,” he said, looking away from my dropped jaw. “Pot luck, of course.”

  • • •

  Two days before we were to leave, we got a letter from the real estate agent at home, saying that all four apartments in our new house were empty, the downstairs back having loaded their clothes and their television set in a pickup truck in the middle of the night and made off without further reference to the back rent. The agent said that a checkup on the downstairs back apartment indicated that they had been systematically removing furniture and household goods for some time; perhaps ever since they were first informed of the sale of the house. Nothing was left in the downstairs back apartment, not even the lightbulbs or the curtain rods, and the agent was of the opinion that they would have taken the glass out of the wind
ows if it had not been broken already. My husband thought that we should keep the downstairs back apartment intact, repair the windows, and rent it out again. I thought that if we rented the apartment again, we should make out a lease since, although we had not had a lease with Mr. Fielding for nine years, I was still rankling over the arrogant terms in our old lease for our apartment in New York, and I thought that we could give the people who compose leases a lesson in generosity and broad-mindedness. It turned out, however, that the only truly unjust clause which rankled with me was the one prohibiting tenants from keeping mockingbirds, and it seemed pointless to plan to rent our downstairs back apartment with a lease urging the tenants to keep mockingbirds, so we thought we would not rent the apartment.

  We wrote to Mr. Cobb and asked him to give us back our furniture on August twentieth. We thought that it would take us about three hours to drive home, so we told Mr. Cobb to expect us around noon. Because there was no place we could reasonably hope would take in six of us, with dog and cats, overnight, we planned to spend our first night at home in our new house. “We will be camping out,” I told the children. “We will all pitch in and help together,” my husband said, “and not expect Mother to cook a real dinner or anything that first night.”

  It had been impractical, in terms of simple cubic feet, to let Mr. Cobb store our books, after all, and we had at last agreed with a friend of a friend that if he let us leave our books in his empty warehouse we would arrange to have them moved whenever he needed the space for something else. Early in August he had written asking if we could move the books, and we said he could put them in our new house, the downstairs front of which was then empty, and we would of course pay for the trucking and unloading. I do not think that either my husband or I remembered this clearly; we knew, of course, that there were two hundred cartons of books, but we still thought of the books as lined neatly on bookshelves, even though we had packed them ourselves. Because of the mounting expenses connected with our moving, we decided that we would not plan to have the house painted or the wallpaper removed for a while yet, my husband pointing out that the way things were piling up we would be lucky if the children could get a shoe each to wear to school.