A Farewell to Yarns (8 page)

“Did Albert tell you about Mr. Finch?" Fiona asked, apparently overcome with an urge to be fair.

“He mentioned him, yes. But he just sounds like an unhappy old soul to me. I'm sure I'll get along with him j ust fine." Without another wo r d, she d ia le d a nd s aid , " Mr . W hi t ma n, please, George? Phyllis Wagner here. Yes, lovely trip. George? I've found the most adorable house I want to buy. Would you contact this man—" She gave the information and waited impatiently while he wrote it down.

“Now, it's vacant, and I'd like to get in immediately. Tonight? Why not? What's a closing? Oh, I see. Then ask him if I can just rent it until then. And George, it's quite empty now. Could you please send a decorator over this afternoon with a few things—beds, linens, kitchen things, towels, you know—so I can move in tonight? Yes, I know you will, George.”

Jane listened to this with fascination. Could you just buy a house and move in six hours later without even knowing what a closing was? She'd never heard of such a thing. And she heard it now with mixed feelings. On the one hand, it was wonderful to think she might not have to harbor Bobby under her roof for a single night. Too good to be true. On the other hand, it installed Bobby and Phyllis in her own neighborhood on a more or less permanent basis. Besides her own concerns with this possibility, she hated to do that to Fiona. She was a nice ladywho didn't really deserve to get stuck with Bobby as a next-door neighbor.

But Fiona had started it by mentioning the vacant house, Jane told herself. It was really her own fault, and who could tell—maybe they'd all get along great. She glanced at the Howards. Fiona was looking gracious and English and seemed to be drifting gently from slight worry to puzzlement and back. Albert, however, was gazing out at the frozen garden, stirring his tea and humming to himself. Phyllis, temporarily restored to her usual cheerfulness, had the phone receiver pressed to her ear and was gabbing away at her Mr. Whitman about the house. Jane mentally shrugged.
Whatever happens, it won't have anything to do with me,
she thought.

She was seriously mistaken.

Nine

On the drive back home,
Jane mentally
pre pared herself for the ordeal of helping Phyllis get her new home ready. To her astonishment, Phyllis didn't seem inclined to do anything nor, as it turned out, did she need to. During the afternoon there were two calls from a man who politely introduced himself as Mr. Whitman of Wagner Enterprises asking for Mrs. Wagner. The first time, Jane slipped out of the room to throw in a load of wash. The conversation was over when she came back up, and Phyllis made no reference to it. The second time, Phyllis took down a couple of phone numbers, thanked Mr. Whitman, said yes, she usually did pre fer yellow to blue, then hung up.

Jane had the uneasy sense that someplace people were having nervous breakdowns and tearing their hair out in a desperate effort to please Phyllis, who was blissfully working on knitting a crimson sweater for Bobby.

“I heard once that Queen Victoria could sit down anytime she wanted without looking back to see if there was a chair behind her,” Jane said as she dragged out her own afghan to attack.

“How odd. Didn't she ever fall down on the floor?"

“No. That's the point. There were people around her whose job it was to anticipate her every wish and be ready for it."

“What a strange way that would be to live," Phyllis said. "Whatever made you think of it?”

Jane stared at her for a moment, wondering madly whether she could possibly fail to see the parallel. Apparently she could, and did. "I don't know. It just ran through my mind. Phyllis, do you really think you're doing the right thing to buy that house without even considering it or talking it over with Chet?"

“Oh, but I have considered it, Jane. You see, I don't believe it's over between Chet and me, but I might be wrong. I came here meaning to stay as long as necessary. Her chin was trembling again, but she plowed on. "And if I'm right and he wants me back, having my own home will show him that I'm coming back out of choice, not because I don't have anywhere to go or know how to take care of myself. If we can reconcile, it will be better if I have this house. And if we can't—or it takes a while for him to come to his senses, I'll have a home.”

In a weird way, she was making sense. Except that her self-reliance so far had consisted of calling an employee of Chet's and asking him to make all her arrangements. "But Phyllis, why here?"

“Because Chicago is where I feel at home.”

“D o n 't yo u l i k e l i v i n g o n t h e i s l a n d ? " Phyllis put down her knitting, picked up a corner of the afghan Jane was working on, and looked it over as she spoke. "I never thought about it. I guess I didn't like it or dislike it. It was just where we lived. As long as I was with Chet I would have been content at the North Pole. Where you live really doesn't make the least difference, you know. It's what you are that matters.”

Jane—who had grown up as a State Department brat and had lived such diverse places as Saudi Arabia, Washington, D.C., England, Brazil, and Norway—disagreed utterly but realized it would be pointless to argue that point. She supposed if you discounted climate, wildlife, geography, religion, politics, and local customs, all places
were
pretty much the same. You had to have Phyllis's mentality to fail to notice such differences, however. Jane couldn't let herself get distracted from the subject at hand. "What I meant was, don't you think you'd stand a better chance of patching things up with Che t if you stayed on the island instead of so far away?"

“I don't think so. He'll miss me a bit, and the farther away I am, the more he'll miss me. At least I hope so. And he can always just resell this house I've bought.”

Jane suddenly realized she was applying her own standards to the wrong person. Buying a house was a once-in-a-lifetime event to her. To people with the money and staff the Wagners had, it was no more significant than checking into a motel. A temporary thing.

“I've got to pick the kids up in a few minutes," she told Phyllis, resolved not to worry about the disparity between their financial statuses anymore. "You're welcome to ride along, but you'd have to be crazy to volunteer. This close to Christmas they're so hyped up it's like riding in a car with a herd of frenzied gazelles."

“Thanks, no," Phyllis said with a laugh. Then she became instantly serious. "Jane, I so wish I'd had what you have."

“What on earth is that?"

“Oh, driving children to school. That sort of thing. I missed all of Bobby's growing up. I wish I could have picked him and his little friends up from school.”

It was more than Jane could stand.

“Phyllis, that's the sappiest thing I've ever heard! You have no idea what you're saying. The school parking lot is the deadliest place in t he world. T here's alwa ys one pea brained woman who parks blocking the drive and goes off and leaves her car. And then there's usually at least two boys who walk past the line of cars running their hands—and sometimes a sharp object—along the sides of the car. No matter how carefully you investigate the children, you end up with one in every car pool who's never ready in time—"

“Investigate the children?"

“Oh, sure. Getting into a car pool is like applying for high-level government security clearance, except it's done more subtly. From preschool on, each child and his driving parent are accumulating a performance record. Before you allow a new person in the car pool you have to know all about their past. Does the mother take her fair share of driving without whining?

Can the kid be controlled in the car?

Do they live on a street that has good snow removal in the winter? With older kids, you have to take into consideration such things as whether a girl is given to wearing too much perfume—that can be deadly in a closed car—or whether the kid plays a very large band instrument. That's what counts against me, and I know it. Even when you check all that out, once a week somebody goes home with someone else without bothering to pass word along to that day's driver, and you have to comb the school building for them. They leave their books, their mittens, and their half-chewed bubble gum in the backseat. Occasionally they throw up their breakfast on the way to school. One of my girls last year managed to get her hair tangled up in the door handle, and I had to cut her loose. Her mother was furious and sent me a bill from the hairdresser for fixing up the damage.”

Phyllis was laughing and wiping tears from her eyes. "Aren't there
any
good things about driving the children ?"

“Oh, yes. There's one. When a woman has her hands on the wheel of a moving car, she's perceived as part of the mechanism. She ceases to be a mother, or even a human being with ears. The kids will say anything. Things they'd sooner die than tell you, they'll talk about endlessly in a moving car. It's the only way I have any idea what my children are up to. Phyllis, I've got to get going. Help yourself to anything you want if you're hungry. I'm fixing spaghetti for dinner. You aren't allergic or anything, are you?"

“Not to anything and I love spaghetti. Say,Jane—George Whitman said Chet's son John has been trying to get hold of me. Something about the business, I think. Not that I know anything about it. But would you mind if I invited him to come over here to talk to me? Not for dinner, of course—"

“I wouldn't mind a bit," Jane said menda ciously.
Just so long as he doesn't bring along
a volleyball,
she was tempted to add. "There are some cookies in that jar you can giv e him. I'll only be forty minutes or so.”

Shelley was just coming in her driveway as Jane got ready to go. Jane went over to Shelley's car window. "Is there anything I can do to make up to you for this morning? Kiss your feet? Give you my firstborn?"

“You give me one more kid and I
will
get even. After I lined the little darlings up to be weighed, I had to be the reading lady for the third graders. The usual volunteer was sick. Sick, my eye! The canny bitch was just smarter than me. They were climbing me like a jungle gym. Why don't they all have nervous break downs before Christmas? More to the point, why don't we? Think it over, Jane. It's not a bad idea. We could stage some sort of seizure in the front yard. Foam at the mouth and chew sticks. They'd take us off to a nice sanitarium where somebody else has to wrap the gifts and stuff the clammy turkey and get hives taking the vile tree down when it's over.”

Jane considered. "Doesn't sound bad. Do we get to wear our jammies all day?"

“Sure. If we play our cards right, we might even talk somebody out of wheelchairs, and we wouldn't even have to walk anyplace."

“Would our families be able to visit us?"

“I certainly hope not!"

“It wouldn't work for me. My mother-in-law, Thelma, would take over my kids."

“So let her. It would serve her right."

“Yeah, but she'd convince them of her theory—that I was really a pathetic slut their father married out of pity."

“Well?”

Jane laughed. "Gotta go. Anything I can do for you while I'm out?"

“Nothing. Oh, yes. I'm trying to fix that gingerbread house that got the corner smashed. I'm out of powdered sugar."

“I've got some. Just help yourself."

“And go in your house? With your company? Have you lost your mind?"

“Bobby's gone. Only Phyllis is there." At the sight of Shelley's raise d eyebrows, she added, "I'll buy you sugar. Say, Shelley, do you know John and Joannie Wagner?"

“You already asked me that this morning. I've been thinking about it. I know
a
Joanne Wagner. She and I are putting on the P.T.A. tea next week. You know her, too. She's the one who made all those grapevine wreaths for the bazaar. Hard-working, lovely voice, and very pleasant but dumpy, defeated looking.”

Jane understood this to apply to Joannie, not the wreaths. Now that she'd been reminded of who she was, she thought about Joannie Wagner as she headed toward the junior high. Jane knew her very slightly and had never made the connection between her and Phyllis or even between her and the aggressive volleyball player she was married to. Poor Joannie Wagner
was
a beaten-down sort of woman. Her hair was al ways curled, but badly. Her makeup was never quite right somehow. She wore expensive, but ill-fitting clothing and gave the general impression of a scared rabbit. Of course, she was a rabbit. What else could you be if you were married to John Wagner? You'd have to have the stamina of an Amazon and the temperament of a wolverine to assert yourself around a man like that.

She hoped Phyllis wouldn't be able to find him to invite him over. The last thing Jane needed was John Wagner in her house. If only she could go back to when she stupidly made that halfhearted invitation to Phyllis to visit. But as she pulled into the school parking lot she realized that, even knowing what was in store, she'd have probably done the same thing. Phyllis and Company might be not be any fun, but Phyllis needed a friend and considered Jane to be one.
Ten

It was
a rare and
treasured morning that
Jane
didn't have to drive at least one school car pool. Even when her schedule wasn't thrown off by something like the electricity going out, with three children going to three separate schools that started at three different times, it took planning worthy of General Motors to work out a system that left her free to slop around in robe and slippers on an occasional morning.

This was such a morning. Jane had risen earlier than usual to get a head start on putting out the Christmas decorations. She got out the crèche and set it up on the table just inside the living room doorway. She dragged some greenery in from the garage where it had been waiting, encased in plastic and sprinkled with water, for two days. Draping it along the mantel above the fireplace, she then dug through the Christ mas storage boxes until she found the string of twinkle lights she wanted. She put the traditional red tablecloth on the dining room table and set out her collection of Santas from around the world on the sideboard. Unfortunately, that was all the further she'dgotten by the time she had to get the kids stirring. Now she leaned on the kitchen counter watching the driveway for Mike's ride to arrive. Mike, her high schooler, was in the middle of the kitchen floor trying to force a tuba into its elephantine case. He was mumbling angrily, and Jane was being very careful not to hear the exact words. If she did, she'd have to be motherly about his language, and he was under enough pressure already.