Main Street (Barnes & Noble Classics Ser - Sinclair Lewis [165]
The Jolly Seventeen were delighted at Carol’s desertion by the loyal Oscarina. They reminded her that she had said, “I don’t have any trouble with maids; see how Oscarina stays on.”
Between incumbencies of Finn maids from the North Woods, Germans from the prairies, occasional Swedes and Norwegians and Icelanders, Carol did her own work—and endured Aunt Bessie’s skittering in to tell her how to dampen a broom for fluffy dust, how to sugar doughnuts, how to stuff a goose. Carol was deft, and won shy praise from Kennicott, but as her shoulder blades began to sting, she wondered how many millions of women had lied to themselves during the death-rimmed years through which they had pretended to enjoy the puerile methods persisting in housework.
She doubted the convenience and, as a natural sequent, the sanctity of the monogamous and separate home which she had regarded as the basis of all decent life.
She considered her doubts vicious. She refused to remember how many of the women of the Jolly Seventeen nagged their husbands and were nagged by them.
She energetically did not whine to Kennicott. But her eyes ached; she was not the girl in breeches and a flannel shirt who had cooked over a camp-fire in the Colorado mountains five years ago. Her ambition was to get to bed at nine; her strongest emotion was resentment over rising at half-past six to care for Hugh. The back of her neck ached as she got out of bed. She was cynical about the joys of a simple laborious life. She understood why workmen and workmen’s wives are not grateful to their kind employers.
At mid-morning, when she was momentarily free from the ache in her neck and back, she was glad of the reality of work. The hours were living and nimble. But she had no desire to read the eloquent little newspaper essays in praise of labor which are daily written by the white-browed journalistic prophets. She felt independent and (though she hid it) a bit surly.
In cleaning the house she pondered upon the maid’s-room. It was a slant-roofed, small-windowed hole above the kitchen, oppressive in summer, frigid in winter. She saw that while she had been considering herself an unusually good mistress, she had been permitting her friends Bea and Oscarina to live in a sty. She complained to Kennicott. “What’s the matter with it?” he growled, as they stood on the perilous stairs dodging up from the kitchen. She commented upon the sloping roof of unplastered boards stained in brown rings by the rain, the uneven floor, the cot and its tumbled discouraged-looking quilts, the broken rocker, the distorting mirror.
“Maybe it ain’t any Hotel Radisson parlor, but still, it’s so much better than anything these hired girls are accustomed to at home that they think it’s fine. Seems foolish to spend money when they wouldn’t appreciate it.”
But that night he drawled, with the casualness of a man who wishes to be surprising and delightful, “Carrie, don’t know but we might begin to think about building a new house, one of these days. How’d you like that?”
“W-why—”
“I’m getting to the point now where I feel we can afford one—and a corker! I’ll show this burg something like a real house! We’ll put one over on Sam and Harry! Make folks sit up an’ take notice!”
“Yes,” she said.
He did not go on.
Daily he returned to the subject of the new house, but as to time and mode he was indefinite. At first she believed. She babbled of a low stone house with lattice windows and tulip-beds, of colonial brick, of a white frame cottage with green shutters and dormer windows. To her enthusiasms he answered, “Well, ye-es, might be worth thinking about. Remember where I put my pipe?” When she pressed him he fidgeted, “I don’t know; seems to me those kind of houses you speak of have been overdone.”
It proved that what he wanted was a house exactly like Sam Clark’s, which was exactly like every third new house in