Do Not Pass Go (11 page)

The woman with the running outfit stuck her head in the door. “Time's up,” she said, looking as if she was afraid someone would quarrel with her.

Deet hung up his phone and started to the door, looking back over his shoulder at Dad, standing in the other half with Meghan and Ian's mom, Michael's father, and Andy's red-haired girlfriend. Ordinary enough people, talking, having a laugh, waiting for a guard to unlock the door for them. Criminals.

Mom's new schedule made a
lot more work for Deet, but having so much to do kept him from worrying so much.

He worried a lot—about money, about the trial, about Dad's health—and he worried about the corners he was cutting with his schoolwork. Anytime Deet worried, he'd make a list. Two sides: good points and bad points, sure things and unknown things. He was very analytical.

Deet worried about forgetting something important in the daily chores, so he made a carefully printed list of things to do.

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.

M
RS
. P
RITCHARD
: I must dust the blinds and then I must raise them.

M
RS
. O
GMORE
-P
RITCHARD
: 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.