FullReads

Marcia had a list…. Let’s see … Those smocked dresses for Joan would probably be all picked over by this time … Light-weight underwear for Peter … Joan’s cape …

Hannah Winter felt herself suddenly remote from all this; done with it; finished years and years ago. What had she to do with smocked dresses, children’s underwear, capes? But she went in and out of the shops, up and down the aisles, automatically, gave expert opinion. By five it was over. Hannah felt tired, depressed. She was to have dinner at Marcia’s to-night. She longed, now, for her own room. Wished she might go to it and stay there, quietly.

“Marcia, I don’t think I’ll come to dinner to-night. I’m so tired. I think I’ll just go home—-“

“But I got the broilers specially for you, and the sweet potatoes candied the way you like them, and a lemon cream pie.”

When they reached home they found Joan, listless, on the steps. One of her sudden sore throats. Stomach, probably. A day in bed for her. By to-morrow she would be quite all right. Hannah Winter wondered why she did not feel more concern. Joan’s throats had always thrown her into a greater panic than she had ever felt at her own children’s illnesses. To-day she felt apathetic, indifferent.

She helped tuck the rebellious Joan in bed. Joan was spluttering about some plan for to-morrow. And Marcia was saying, “But you can’t go to-morrow, Joan. You know you can’t, with that throat. Mother will have to stay home with you, too, and give up her plans to go to the country club with Daddy, and it’s the last chance she’ll have, too, for a long, long time. So you’re not the only one to suffer.” Hannah Winter said nothing.

They went in to dinner at 6.30. It was a good dinner. Hannah Winter ate little, said little. Inside Hannah Winter a voice–a great, strong voice, shaking with its own earnestness and force–was shouting in rebellion. And over and over it said, to the woman in the mirror at the north end of Peacock Alley: “Three score–and ten to go. That’s what it says–‘and ten.’ And I haven’t done a thing I’ve wanted to do. I’m afraid to do the things I want to do. We all are, because of our sons and daughters. Ten years. I don’t want to spend those ten years taking care of my daughter’s children. I’ve taken care of my own. A good job, too. No one helped me. No one helped me. What’s the matter with these modern mothers, with their newfangled methods and their efficiency and all? Maybe I’m an unnatural grandmother, but I’m going to tell Marcia the truth. Yes, I am. If she asks me to stay home with Joan and Peter to-morrow, while she and Ed go off to the country club, I’m going to say, ‘No!’ I’m going to say, ‘Listen to me, Ed and Marcia. I don’t intend to spend the rest of my life toddling children to the park and playing second assistant nursemaid. I’m too old–or too young. I’ve only got ten years to go, according to the Bible, and I want to have my fun. I’ve sown. I want to reap. My teeth are pretty good, and so is my stomach. They’re better than yours will be at my age, for all your smart new dentists. So are my heart and my arteries and my liver and my nerves. Well. I don’t want luxury. What I want is leisure. I want to do the things I’ve wanted to do for forty years, and couldn’t. I want, if I feel like it, to start to learn French and read Jane Austen and stay in bed till noon. I never could stay in bed till noon, and I know I can’t learn now, but I’m going to do it once, if it kills me. I’m too old to bring up a second crop of children, I want to play. It’s terrible to realize that you don’t learn how to live until you’re ready to die; and, then it’s too late. I know I sound like a selfish old woman, and I am, and I don’t care. I don’t care. I want to be selfish. So will you, too, when you’re sixty, Martha Slocum. You think you’re young. But all of a sudden you’ll be sixty, like me. All of a sudden you’ll realize—-“

“Mother, you’re not eating a thing.” Ed’s kindly voice.

Marcia, flushed of face, pushed her hair back from her forehead with a little frenzied familiar gesture. “Eat! Who could eat with Joan making that insane racket in there! Ed, will you tell her to stop! Can’t you speak to her just once! After all, she is your child, too, you know…. Peter, eat your lettuce or you can’t have any dessert.”

How tired she looked, Hannah Winter thought. Little Martha. Two babies, and she only a baby herself yesterday. How tired she looked.

“I wanna go!” wailed Joan, from her bedroom prison. “I wanna go to-morrow. You promised me. You said I could. I wanna GO!”

“And I say you can’t. Mother has to give up her holiday, too, because of you. And yet you don’t hear me—-“

“You!” shouted the naughty Joan, great-granddaughter of her great-grandmother, and granddaughter of her grandmamma. “You don’t care. Giving up’s easy for you. You’re an old lady.”

And then Hannah Winter spoke up. “I’ll stay with her to-morrow, Marcia. You and Ed go and have a good time.”