Do Not Pass Go, page 8
In the morning Mom took care of breakfast and did the breakfast dishes before she went to work. She got the girls ready for school because she didn’t go to work until noon.
That was one reason Deet didn’t mind this new schedule, even though he had so much to do. Getting the girls ready for school was the part he’d hated. It made him crazy, worrying that they’d be late, that their hair wasn’t right, that they’d forget something they needed.
And then there was homework, which the girls would forget until the last minute, or which they’d whine and whimper over, or their library books, which were always late and hiding in the most unlikely places.
And there were buttons that had to be sewed on, and things replaced that were lost, like P. J.’s gym sneakers and Jam’s mittens. There was no end to it.
He might be able to take care of the house and all, but he wasn’t much in the mother line.
Mom did the shopping, too, which she had to do because Deet couldn’t drive; she did the laundry; and she cooked on Saturday and Sunday. Deet did the rest.
He pinned the list on his bulletin board, a tack on each corner so it wouldn’t curl.
2:30-3:00: Bus to jail
3:10-4:10: Visit Dad
4:10-4:30: Catch the bus
4:30-5:00: Bus home
5:00: Get P. J. and Jam
5:15-6:15: Cook dinner, girls fold laundry if
there’s any
6:15-6:30: Eat dinner
6:30-7:00: Make lunches, girls clean up toys,
see if girls have homework
7:00: Girls take baths while I wash dishes,
vacuum the house
7:30-8:00: Read a story
8:00-10:00: Do my homework
6:00: Get up
6:45: Catch bus
Saturday and Sunday: Mop the floors, dust,
clean the stove, refrigerator, clean the
bathroom, etc.
He wrote “etc.” because he wasn’t quite sure what other things needed to be done once a week, but he was sure there must be some.
It was a tight schedule, because visiting Dad took a lot of time. But it was the most important thing on that list, because Dad was locked up in that tiny cell, and just to walk down to the visiting room was a big deal.
The main thing Deet wanted to do was to clean out all the drawers and closets and cupboards. The thing that was wrong with their life was those cupboards and stuff. They set the tone for the way their life was lived. He’d get them so neat, so perfectly organized, that they’d be able to find everything in an instant.
He started with the kitchen cupboards. It took him until midnight one night. He scrubbed every cupboard out, lined the shelves with foil, organized things sensibly. All the baking things were together, all the cooking things together. He threw out a zillion nearly empty ketchup bottles and toothpick boxes and consolidated three baking soda boxes into one. There was a lifetime supply of papery onion skins in the vegetable bin, and three rotten potatoes oozing foul-smelling, putrid fluid. He wanted to throw out all the chipped dishes, but he had to reconsider because he was afraid they wouldn’t have enough to eat on if he did.
Deet was gaining a new respect for housework now that he’d done it for a while. He’d always hated it that their house was messy and disorganized. But he was beginning to see that there was more to being unmessy and organized than met the eye. He looked up quotations about housework after a particularly frantic night when there seemed to be too many things to do and too little time.
There is scarcely any less bother in the running of a family than in that of an entire state. And domestic business is no less importunate for being less important.
—MONTAIGNE
Deet had to look up “importunate.” It meant troublesomely urgent. That was the right word, all right. Everything had to be done now, and nothing could be left out. If you didn’t do the laundry, no one would have clothes for school. If you didn’t make a list of menus, you wouldn’t get what you needed at the store and you wouldn’t have what you needed to cook dinner and make lunches. And you wouldn’t have the meat thawed. If you didn’t get the house cleaned up at night, you’d be in a mess in the morning.
He could find only one more quotation about housework.
MRS. PRITCHARD: I must dust the blinds and then I must raise them.
MRS. OGMORE-PRITCHARD: And before you let the sun in, mind it wipes its shoes.
—DYLAN THOMAS
Deet wrote both quotations in his notebook and then doodled on his desk pad for a few minutes, thinking about housework. He remembered that they were out of Scotch tape, so he made a new list for Mom, Things to Buy on Saturday. He wrote “Scotch tape” under that, and then he jumped up to stick the list on the refrigerator, under Jam’s Elmo magnet.
Then he started to write.
There were only these two quotations about housework in the quotation book.
That seems really funny, because everyone has a house, or a place to live, and someone has to clean that place, and do the laundry and wash the dishes and take care of everything, so it’s a very important subject, isn’t it? But hardly anybody has said any thing famous about it.
Maybe that’s because the people who say things that become famous quotations didn’t do their own housework. Just Montaigne. You can tell he did. Whoever he was.
When you do housework, there are a lot of things you do that no one notices. Nobody says, oh, you vacuumed the floor, or you washed out the tub, unless the rug and the tub were so grungy that anyone would notice an improvement. Our house was always messy, but I never noticed that it was always clean. I just noticed that there was stuff all over, not put away neatly.
Now that I’m doing the housework since my mom went back to work, I can see all the things I didn’t notice before. You can clean out the refrigerator all you like, but all the other people in the family are going to mess it up faster than you can blink. I feel really touchy about people messing things up now, so I know what “mind it wipes its shoes” means. This is the job you do, cleaning a house, and people come along at any minute and mess it up. And don’t even notice. I actually say things like, “Put that glass away,” or “Wipe up that spill.” I feel really silly after I’ve said something like that. My mom was never fussy; she never said things like that when she was cleaning the house.
There are a million people all over the world, billions of people, most of them women probably, who have discovered all this and more about taking care of a house. It’s the not noticing that is the worst, I think. What if you tried to talk about what you did that day. “I scrubbed the floor this morning, and was it a mess. Took me a half hour on my hands and knees.” The most you’d get would be a look. Not much conversation material in that. No wonder housewives felt unappreciated. No wonder there was women’s lib.
Like housework, cooking was a lot more complicated than it looked, but it got a lot more comments. One night Deet made that kind of macaroni and cheese that comes in a box, but the next day he asked Sally how to make it from scratch, so they had it again, only this time it was much better, with lots of real cheese melting all over the macaroni. The girls seemed a little surprised to have the same thing two nights in a row. Deet didn’t think he’d mind eating the same thing for a week, if it was something he liked.
After that Deet got out his mom’s recipe box to look for ideas. He decided to make his grandma’s famous meatballs. Swedish meatballs. In white gravy. Unbelievably good, they just melted in your mouth.
He had a bad moment when he found that he needed sour cream, but he found some in the refrigerator, way in the back. There was a nasty patch of blue mold on the edge of the carton, but he scraped it off and used the rest.
They were easy to make, Swedish meatballs, but they wouldn’t stay balls. They flattened out on him when they cooked. They were almost meat squares. P. J. and Jam didn’t think they tasted good because they were the wrong shape. He’d have to ask Sally how to get them to stay round.
But they tasted fine to him, and there was a whole pile of mashed potatoes. He’d ask Sally how to get the lumps out of the potatoes, too.
Deet looked for quotations about cooking. Lots more quotations on food than on housework.
We each day dig our graves with our teeth.
—SAMUEL SMILES
Absolutely. Just what he’d been thinking. All that fat and sugar. And double hamburgers and giant bags of French fries. All those fat people in Kmart, sucking on big Slurpees as they stumbled along behind shopping carts, all the exercise they were going to get in a week.
I never see any home cooking. All I get is fancy stuff.
—PRINCE PHILIP, DUKE OF EDINBURGH
That was the Queen of England’s husband. Deet thought about that for a minute. He didn’t know enough about fancy food to decide if the duke was missing anything or not. But if mashed potatoes was home cooking, he did feel sorry for the duke. Deet could have lived on mashed potatoes.
Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.
—BRILLAT-SAVARIN
That was a good one. But it wasn’t as easy to write about as it had looked, because Deet found he didn’t really know that much about food. He hadn’t thought about all the different ways that people eat, and it took some time to think it out. There was hardly time to do his civics when he was finished.
If you were a vegetarian and ate only plants and things you don’t have to kill an animal to get, like milk and eggs, this guy would say you were a kind person, a person who cared as much about animals as about himself.
Or maybe it just means that you think animal fat is the thing that causes heart attacks and so you eat this way to protect yourself. So you would be self-protective, not kind.
If you ate nothing but Hostess Twinkies, like Donny Allen in our class, that would mean you’re kind of a baby, really, wouldn’t it? All sugar, and not even having to chew hard.
Or if you eat the same things over and over, like my grandma and grandpa, it probably means you’re stuck in a rut. My dad says when he was little they even had a schedule: chicken on Sunday, baked beans and hot dogs on Friday, and so on. That’s weird.
There’s our friend Sally, who’s just the opposite. She’s always trying something new, usually from some foreign country, like Greece or India. So Sally would be the opposite of stuck in a rut. Adventurous, I guess you’d say.
And Sally says lots of times her experiment is a failure, and she and her husband have to go out and get a hamburger! So I guess you’d say they’re not tight about money, either, because it costs a lot to pay for two meals when it was supposed to be only one. If you were stingy, you’d make only things you knew you could eat.
My mom fixed things she thought of at the last minute, and there was always something she didn’t have, so I’d always have to run down to Sally’s to borrow it. So I guess you’d say the way we ate showed that nobody was thinking ahead.
If you eat only fancy stuff, like a duke, it probably means you’re rich. And if you eat only stuff from the supermarket deli, like those guys you see lined up there every night, you are probably very busy and don’t have a wife to cook. Or maybe you’re not busy, but just lazy. Or maybe you’re married, but your wife can’t cook.
I’ll have to think about this quotation some more, because I really haven’t paid much attention to how other people eat.
His schedule wasn’t working out so well, because he’d underestimated the amount of time it would take to get the girls to bed. He’d have to be more flexible, he saw. So that night he washed the dishes after he finished his homework. Before he made their lunches for school, he washed the girls’ lunch boxes with bleach. They always smelled like something weird. He could never get that smell out of them.
Jam had a Barbie lunch box and P. J. had an Elmo lunch box, and you didn’t ever want to get them mixed up. It was not easy making lunches for them, because they complained about everything. Jam wanted honey with her peanut butter, and P. J. wanted jelly, but not grape jelly, just strawberry jelly. And Jam wanted her sandwiches cut in half, and P. J. liked quarters.
The person who cooks takes a lot of flak, Deet was learning.
FOURTEEN
When Dad called at night, the girls would chatter on about school, complain about Deet’s cooking, and tattle on each other. Dad managed to make the girls feel he was interested in them, not removed from their lives. In the old days, Deet thought, before there were phones, going to jail must have been like a death in the family.
Dad didn’t talk about what was going on with him, he just asked the girls question after question, kept them chattering, and when they were finished they felt close to him. Where had he learned a thing like that? Not from Grandpa or Grandma. They never asked questions, at least not the kind that showed an interest, showed you were paying attention. Dad just knew how to make people feel good. It was like the way he knew that sidewise way of giving compliments. The next time Deet had trouble thinking about what to talk about to anyone, he’d just ask questions.
“When can we come to see you, Dad?” P. J. asked every time.
“Not ever,” he’d say. “Never. You can’t talk in here very well, because there are so many people around. It’s better to talk on the telephone.” But Deet knew he didn’t want the girls to see him in there. You think your dad is the king of the world, you think he can do anything. And then you see him led around by these guards, locked in, locked out, and then you know he isn’t the king. Maybe what you don’t see you can forget about easier. Maybe if the girls never saw him there, it wouldn’t be real to them.
One night Dad told the girls, “Hold the phone up to the speakers and play me something on the CD player. Some Willie Nelson. Anything.”
So they played some of his favorite songs for him. “Louder,” he said. “Lots louder.” They had to turn it up so loud Deet and the girls could hardly stand it. It was noisy in the jail at night, iron gates clanging, people yelling, so Dad couldn’t hear it unless it was cranked all the way up.
“Thanks,” said Dad. “I can’t believe how much I miss my music. Can you find ‘The Gambler’? Ronny wants to hear that one. It’s on that album with the stars on the front.”
P. J. found it right away. She was getting a kick out of playing deejay.
They all liked that one too. “You got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’era,” they sang along as loud as they could, feeling joyful.
When the song was finished, Dad said, “Ronny thanks you. He says that’s his new theme song, the one he’s going to live by.”
Know when to walk away and know when to run, thought Deet. That’s what Ronny has to do, all right.
One day that week Mom had taken a few hours off to go to the dentist, so she said she’d see Dad that day, before her appointment. Deet would take the school bus home instead of the downtown bus and give Sally a day off from the girls.
When he got out of school, Deet was surprised to see that Nelly wasn’t waiting for him at their bus station. Usually Nelly was there first, because he had a study hall last period, but he wasn’t first that day, and Deet was by himself. He felt his stomach clench a little when he saw Dennis Slater come up.
Dennis was a sort of smart-ass, an arrogant kind of guy, basketball star and all that. He lived on the ridge in one of the last houses on their bus run. Every time Nelly saw Dennis coming, or anyone like him, he’d start talking ninety miles a minute, sort of leaning toward Deet, so no one else could get a word in. So they could ignore everyone, being so absorbed in their conversation. Now here was Dennis, and no Nelly to run interference.
Dennis nodded at Deet, bent down to pick up an ice chunk, and threw it, free-throw style, into a garbage can.
“Slam dunk,” Dennis said when the ice thunked on the bottom of the can. Deet gave him a small smile.
Dennis came closer and put both of his hands in his pockets. He was one of those cool guys who didn’t wear a hat or mittens, even when it was ninety below. He folded his mouth in a tight line and then he said, “My brother is in there.” Deet looked at him blankly. In where?
Dennis pushed his hair out of his eyes. “He says your dad is a good guy. They play cards together sometimes.”
Jeez, Dennis Slater knew. That about tied it. Dennis wasn’t exactly the kind of guy to keep things to himself. Then Deet wondered why Dad never mentioned anyone with a brother in school. Maybe he didn’t know.
Well, he had to say something. Ask a question.
“Do you ever go to see him?”
“No,” said Dennis. “My mom won’t let me.” He picked up a bigger piece of ice and made another basket. “I know you go to see your dad. My brother told me he saw you there when he was walking past the visiting room.”
“Yeah,” said Deet. “I go every school day. Not today, because my mom was off. She goes on the weekends because she’s usually working the other days.”
“I told my mom you go, so why couldn’t I. But she can’t see it.” Deet felt uncomfortable thinking about this mom and her boy, people he didn’t even know talking about things he thought were private.
“Just my other brother goes. He doesn’t live at home, so he can do what he wants to. I wish I could visit Jerry.”
Deet looked at Dennis for a long minute, trying to remember how wary he’d been of guys like Dennis, lippy guys, sure of themselves. Dennis just looked sad now.
“Is he going to be there long?” asked Deet. Not what he’d wanted to say. He wanted to say something to make Dennis feel better.
“Don’t know,” said Dennis.
Deet nodded. At that moment Mindy pulled their bus into its space by the crossing sign, and at the same time a swarm of kids came from the school, Nelly as well. Nelly looked a dark look at Dennis and moved to Deet’s side, ready to interfere. Deet smiled a don’t worry smile at Nelly.
Dennis said, “How’s it going, Nelly?” and then, “See ya,” to Deet.
Before Dennis turned away, Deet said to him, “It’s not so bad, you know, that place.” Dennis looked at Deet for a moment in an I’ll-take-vour-word-for-it sort of way and went to take his place in the bus line.
