A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [138]
I had gone at my tasks methodically and in high gear during those last weeks. The cows and the girls felt my anxiety. Near the end I did not unwind enough to fall asleep. I trained Emma to answer the phone, to ask, “Who’s calling please?” I told her she was my secretary and I paid her a nickel a day. If it was Rafferty she was to tell him I was out working. I kept going over the auction items in my mind. I lay in bed, picturing our things, one by one, as if before me all night long was a great TV auction. I had little doubt that most of it would sell. Smelts knew of two potential buyers for the herd. Each of the parties had come beforehand to look over my Guernseys. When I went out that last morning to milk I didn’t let myself slow down once. I didn’t walk around the barn, or loiter to admire the weathervane. It was just as well that there hadn’t been enough of a hay crop to fill the silo. I didn’t speak to the cows as I milked. I kept right on going when I was finished, out the barn door, into the house, up the stairs to wake the girls, down the stairs with our bags, standing up to eat breakfast, and out the front door, Hello to Dick as he arrived, into the Ford. We buckled up and drove off.
I think the girls had settled into a perpetual state of shock. They didn’t know what was happening to us. They didn’t know either what question to ask that would make me explain the upheaval. I’d packed their beds the day before, but I didn’t tell them as we drove off that we weren’t coming back to stay. They were often quiet, and I think, scared. We would go back and forth to the farm over the coming weeks, but we didn’t ever sleep there again.
Everything in our unit in Pheasant Glade—the carpets, the cabinets, the walls, the doors, the bathtub, the toilet, the faucets, the doorbell, the molding, the shades, the light fixtures—everything down to the carpet tacks was brand new. I couldn’t get used to that. The whole townhouse had the fresh toxic smell of new vinyl. The living room had the all-important cathedral ceiling, a stone fireplace with a small glass door and a grating that barely held one log. The floor was covered with blue-and-gray speckled wall-to-wall carpet. The living room opened into a galley kitchen and breakfast nook. The breakfast nook looked out to a wooden deck that had just enough space for a Weber and a porch chair. Upstairs there were two bedrooms, including the master suite with sliding doors and a deck that faced the highway. There was a bath with a whirlpool tub that was just big enough for two very young children. The whole place was deceptive. Here, it seemed to squeak and stink, is the American dream. Except that everything we were supposed to want, everything that looked so good, was too small or too flimsy to use. I realized as I dragged in our few old scratched pieces of furniture, that even the shabby rooms above the shoe store would have been better than the false cheer of Pheasant Glade.
We did have our own garage and a basement with a laundry room. There was no yard beyond the short deck. The girls sat on the driveway and watched me lug in their beds and the chairs from the U-Haul I’d rented. I managed to move the piano single-handedly, with a lot of cursing. Both Claire and Emma seemed to sense right off, in the second viewing, that what they had given up was in no way compensated for by an asphalt driveway and a six-by-eight wooden deck, a whirlpool bath, and shag carpet. I didn’t answer Claire when she asked, “We’re not really going to live here, are we?” One of the tacky cupboards fell off the wall right to the floor. I hadn’t done anything more violent than put a glass on the shelf. As it smashed I wished for Theresa. She would have taken the girls from room to room and made