The Stars Are Fire(2)
Grace, at the moment, doesn’t mind what others think, because living with short hair, if not fashionable, is easier than dealing with pin curls or a set. She tucks it behind her ears. She looks good in a hat. Whenever she goes out she wears clip earrings.
Slightly above average in height, she is tall in heels. She lost the pregnancy weight fast after Tom: Two children under the age of two kept her running most days. She pictures her husband now, bare chested, wetting and soaping a washcloth, getting his face first, then his neck, and finally his underarms. Often he will scrub his wrists. She can hear him tap his razor against the sink. Is he whistling?
Grace wears no makeup except lipstick, a well-blotted mauve. It makes her lips look fuller, Gene says. When she talks to him, he stares at her mouth as if he might be hard of hearing.
She scratches a match against the box it came in and lights a cigarette, inhaling deeply. First of the morning.
—
“What section today?” she asks, savoring the wifely pleasure of watching Gene tear into his grapefruit.
“We’re resurveying the Kittery portion to register the settling.”
Gene has explained to her how he makes three-dimensional elevations and maps for engineers and contractors. She likes the names of the instruments and tools he peruses in catalogs—theodolites and transits, alidades and collimators—but she doesn’t know precisely how they work. Once, when he was courting her, he took her to Merserve Hill and brought out his tripod and tried to teach her how to use the transit, but before she could look into the eyepiece, he positioned her by putting his hands around her waist, and she didn’t hear what he said. She supposes Gene planned it that way. Grace would like to try the outing again and this time pay attention. If the rain ever stops. They could bring the children and make a picnic of it. Highly unlikely that her husband will put his hands around her waist now. Except for a peck when he leaves the house each day and another when he comes home, they seldom touch outside the bed.
“Doesn’t the rain ruin the equipment?” she asks.
“We have special umbrellas. Tarps. What will you do today?”
“I might go over to Mother’s.”
He nods but doesn’t look at her. He would rather she went to his mother’s house for a visit. Relations between his wife and his mother are not all they should be. Does he wish for Grace to bake a two-crust apple pie and take it to her? Should she mention the bakers’ new restrictions? Would he care or would that go into the category of “women’s work,” a subject that allows him to dismiss it?
“I’ve fixed up a canvas hood,” she says.
“Have you now?” He raises his head and seems impressed. He might recognize a certain amount of engineering in the construction of a canvas hood for a carriage. But she would disappoint him if she told him how she did it. She doesn’t use mathematics. Instead she fits and folds and cuts and fits and folds and cuts again, and then she sews. Well, she does measure.
—
She has rigged up a seat so that Claire can sit up in the carriage while Tom lies papoose-like beside her. Tom, the soft fuzz of his dark hair, the pudgy body with its disappearing folds, the warmth of his skin as he burbles; Claire, her white-blond hair in ringlets, short sentences emerging like radio bulletins through static and surprising Grace. Claire, from birth, has always stolen the limelight, first because of her astonishing beauty and now, as is emerging, because of her feistiness. Grace likes nothing more than to lie on her bed with Tom tucked beside her and Claire rolling to her side to put her face close to her mother’s skin. Sometimes they all drift off for a short nap; at other times, they sing.
But as soon as they bump out the door, Claire begins to cry, in seeming sympathy with the rain. Grace knows that Claire’s distress stems from the hood her mother so cleverly designed, the one through which the child can barely see. Or maybe not. Grace wants to cry, too.
—
Her boots have water in them before she reaches the dirt sidewalk. She notes the pink buds of the cherry tree in Rosie’s front lawn. Will they bloom in the rain? She hopes so. It trickles down the edges of her clear plastic head scarf and under her collar. Grace turns onto the first set of stepping-stones she comes to, which leads her to Rosie’s front door. Her friend will be in her tangerine bathrobe, her hair in curlers, but she will invite them in with enthusiasm. Grace cannot face another day trapped inside her own house. She has read all of her “kitchen-table” books, novels not good enough to put inside the glassed-in shelves at the entrance to the dining room. The “kitchen-table” books are full of plot and romance and intrigue.
—
“I brought half a grapefruit,” Grace crows when Rosie opens the door.
Rosie waves them all in, even the baby carriage, which Grace leaves in the vestibule. Looking at her friend’s face, hair, robe, and curlers, all of which more or less match, she imagines Rosie as a column of tangerine flame. Rosie is attractive, even in curlers, but slovenly. Gene once used the word squalor to describe the household. Grace objected then, though she partially agrees.
Rosie scoops Claire up into her arms and at once begins to remove the little girl’s red rain hat and matching slicker. Claire then sinks into Rosie’s chest, and after a moment, Rosie gives the child a fierce hug. But then Claire is on the floor looking for Freddie, the cocker spaniel. Grace, with Tom in her arms, rummages through her handbag and finds the half-grapefruit, carefully wrapped in waxed paper. She gives it to Rosie.