An American Childhood - Annie Dillard [91]
This was the known world. Women volunteered, organized the households, and reared the kids; they kept the traditions, and taught by example a dozen kinds of love. Mother polished the brass, wiped the ashtrays, stood barefoot on the couch to hang a picture. Margaret Butler washed the windows, which seemed to yelp. Mother dusted and polished the big philodendrons, tenderly, leaf by leaf, as if she were washing babies’ faces. Margaret came sighing down the stairs with an armful of laundry or wastebaskets. Mother inspected the linens for a party; she fetched from a closet the folding felted boards she laid over the table. Margaret turned on the vacuum cleaner again. Mother and Margaret changed the sheets and pillowcases.
Then Margaret left. I had taken by then to following her from room to room, trying to get her to spill the beans about being black; she kept moving. Nothing changed. Mother wiped the stove; she ran the household with her back to it. You heard a staccato in her voice, and saw the firm force of her elbow, as she pressed hard on a dried tan dot of bean soup, and finally took a fingernail to it, while quizzing Amy about a car pool to dancing school, and me about a ride back from a game. No page of any book described housework, and no one mentioned it; it didn’t exist. There was no such thing.
A woman at our country club, a prominent figure at our church, whose daughters went to Ellis, never washed her face all summer, to preserve her tan. We rarely saw the pale men at all; they were off pulling down the money on which the whole scene floated. Most men came home exhausted in their gray suits to scantily clad women smelling of Bain de Soleil, and do-nothing tanned kids in Madras shorts.
There was real beauty to the old idea of living and dying where you were born. You could hold a place in a kind of eternity. Your grandparents took you out to dinner Sunday nights at the country club, and you could take your own grandchildren there when that time came: more little towheads, as squint-eyed and bony-legged and Scotch-Irish as hillbillies. And those grandchildren, like figures in a reel endlessly unreeling, would partake of the same timeless, hushed, muffled sensations.
They would join the buffet line on Sunday nights in winter at the country club. I remember: the club lounges before dinner dimly lighted and opulent like the church; the wool rugs absorbing footsteps; the lined damask curtains lapping thickly across tall, leaded-glass windows. The adults drank old-fashioneds. The fresh-haired children subsisted on bourbon-soaked maraschino cherries, orange slices, and ice cubes. They roved the long club corridors in slippery shoes; they opened closet doors, tried to get outside, laughed so hard they spit their ice cubes, and made sufficient commotion to rouse the adults to dinner. In the big dining room, layers of fine old unstarched linen draped the tables as thickly as hospital beds. Heavy-bottomed glasses sank into the table-cloths soundlessly.
And sempiternal too were the summer dinners at the country club, the sun-shocked people somnambulistic as angels. The children’s grandchildren could see it. Space and light multiplied the club