Inland Passage

by Jane Rule

  The door opened. A young man seemed to stare at the children a long time, and then, instead of giving them anything, he ushered them inside. Harry dismissed a second of apprehension. They were probably being asked to show off their costumes to the other people in the house. Joey’s open umbrella, like a great bat, rocked gently on the porch.

  Harry looked at his watch and looked at the house again just as a number of lights went out on the main floor. He smiled. Joey and Sally were glowing for them in the dark. He wondered if anyone in there was knowledgeable enough to recognize the authenticity of his work. In his renewed pride, he chided himself for his impatience. All kids needed persistent encouragement sometimes to enter into the spirit of a thing.

  Five and then ten minutes passed. The lights did not go back on. What the devil were they doing in there? Another five minutes and Harry acted. He went up the long slippery stairs two at a time and banged on the door. No one answered. He banged again. Finally, just as he had reached for the handle himself, the door opened, and the same young man stared out at him.

  “Where are my kids?” Harry asked, trying to keep his voice calm.

  The young man didn’t answer, and Harry suddenly got a strong whiff of incense and marijuana.

  “I said, where are my kids?”

  “Man, I don’t know,” came the slow, bewildered reply.

  “They came in here fifteen minutes ago,” Harry said, pushing past the unhelpful, obviously stoned-out-of-his-mind man, and shouted, “Joey! Sally!”

  “It’s my dad,” he heard Joey say somewhere in there in the dark.

  Then he saw the two small skeletons moving toward him out of the murk of a room filled with smoke and the stir of people.

  “It’s a party,” Sally explained happily. “They’re telling funny ghost stories.”

  Harry nodded curtly to the young man still standing in the hall and pushed his children out the door.

  “Why did you go in there?” Harry demanded.

  “You told us to,” Sally answered, the weather of tears in her voice.

  “They’re just a bit high on pot, Dad,” Joey explained. “They’re really okay guys. They grow it on their roof.”

  “But we couldn’t have any brownies. They said they were only for grown-ups.”

  “What did they give you?”

  “A whole bunch of suckers, just like the kind you bought,” Joey said. “I sure hope we like them.”

  “I sure hope you do, too,” Harry said. “Come on. We’re going home.”

  “We still didn’t get very much,” Sally said, peering into her bag.

  The damp costumes were draped over the fire screen to dry, and Harry sat staring at them. Anna came in with a glass of her homemade blackberry wine for each of them.

  “We should have moved to that island when you wanted to,” Harry said bitterly.

  “There’s just no way for kids to be able to be kids in this city. Anyway, Joey’s giving up his paper route. I’ll tell him in the morning. That kid knew all those people were stoned out of their minds, and he knew what it was. He even told me where they grow it…on the roof!”

  “They seem to have had a good time,” Anna said.

  “At this rate, he’ll be on pot himself by the time he’s ten…if he isn’t already!”

  “Joey’s too tight with his money for expensive habits,” Anna said. “He won’t even buy himself an ice cream cone.”

  “The things he knows about this neighborhood,” Harry said, shaking his head. “And even Sally…”

  “We can give a Hallowe’en party at home next year.”

  “They knew it wasn’t safe,” Harry said. “I didn’t.”

  “Harry, knowing is finally safer than not knowing, for the kids as well as for you. That’s the only real protection there is.”

  “You think it’s still all right for Joey to be out there throwing papers at all those drunks and dope fiends and vicious dogs and cripples?”

  “If he wants to and thinks he can handle it.”

  Harry sighed. Then he got up and went over to the window to blow out the candles in the smiling pumpkins. Anna picked up the basket of unclaimed suckers and took them to the kitchen. Harry turned out the lights, and the accurate bones of his children glowed there in the dark.

  MORE THAN MONEY

  “ARE WE REALLY GOING to move?” Freddy asked, not taking the lunch box Maria was holding out for him.

  “That’s what your father says,” she answered.

  “But can we tell the kids at school?” Tad wanted to know, his lunch already safely under his arm.

  “Maybe you should say ‘maybe,’” Maria decided.

  “‘Maybe’ doesn’t count,” Freddy said. “Aren’t we sure?”

  “Well, I guess so,” Maria said, hearing the problem but still reluctant.

  “Don’t you want to move, Mom?” Tad asked.

  “Sure I do,” Maria said.

  “Dad said everything in an apartment would be brand new, and there might even be a swimming pool,” Freddy pressed.

  “Take your lunch box, dreamer, go on, and try not to make up too many whoppers between here and school.”

  “But he said…”

  “He said ‘maybe,’” Tad reminded his brother.

  “Maybe with a high dive,” Freddy said, and he spread his arms, encumbered with lunch pail and books, for a swan dive.

  “Maybe with a dishwasher, Dad said,” Tad offered, still watching his mother.

  “And carpets so deep you’ll both break your ankles, and a garbage disposal for chewing up planes and cars, and…” Maria paused briefly at the unchanged look of doubt on her older son’s face, “high enough off the ground to think you’re flying. Whatever it’s like, we’ll like it.”

  “So we can tell,” Freddy said. “We can tell, We can tell.”

  He flapped and flew from the kitchen, through dining room and living room, and crashed into the front door before Tad got there to open it. The front porch steps trembled, and they were gone before Maria could shout any of her good natured instructions about considering the foundation of the house, the neighbors’ eardrums. Well, never mind. Freddy would be silenced soon enough unless she provided ear plugs and straight jackets for everyone else in the apartment house.

  “It’ll kill him,” she said to herself, repeating what she had said to Frank the night before.

  “It will be good for him,” Frank had replied. “But that’s not the point.”

  Why had she bought that bottle of brandy? It wasn’t the bottle of brandy. Frank wasn’t even angry about that. He said so. He even used it in her favor, saying now she would be able to get an occasional bottle of brandy for him and not worry about it. She hadn’t worried about it. Buying it had stopped the worry of frozen lobster and two cowboy hats she’d already bought. She felt cheerful then, thinking of Frank having a treat for himself. He wouldn’t buy it. He wouldn’t even buy himself decent shirts if he had his way about it. Thought he could go off to work as if he were on the dole.

  “I will be soon,” he’d say on a bad day, but he’d always relent, not for himself but for the boys, even for her. “Sure, okay, it looks cute,” he’d said about her hair piece, “and I can wear it myself when my hair falls out from worry.” But that was a joke. And on a really good day, he’d say, “It’s a good thing I married you because I could have been a lazy man.” Lots of things she had bought were to save money. She needed an extra large washing machine so that she didn’t have to send out blankets and spreads. The freezer let them have lots of bargain steaks and roasts. Even the hair piece was supposed to save money at the hair dresser though it hadn’t worked out quite like that. Neither had the freezer, Frank argued. “We eat better but not cheaper.” What was wrong with that?

  “I don’t want to sell the house,” she had said.

  “It’s the only way we can get out of debt.”

  “Frank, there are things more important than money.”

  “Honey, I don’t wan
t you ever to say that to me again, and I don’t want you ever to think it again. There is nothing more important than money when you don’t have it. And we don’t have it. If we go on six more months like this, we’ll lose the house anyway.”

  “Losing” the house had struck Maria as comically unlikely, but Frank wouldn’t let her laugh about it. He told her she had an unrealistic sense of humor. If you were going to be realistic round the clock, you might as well be dead.

  Maria wiped the jam smears off Freddy’s chair, then made a pass at the nonexistent crumbs at Tad’s place. Like his father, Tad was, and she mustn’t let him know she didn’t like what was happening. She didn’t want him to know that she was to blame. “Nobody has to be blamed,” Frank said, “Just punished,” she had answered.

  The phone rang. It would be Maria’s mother. Maria sat down and stared at the phone until, after fifteen rings, it stopped. Pointless. Her mother wouldn’t believe any of her lies when she did answer an hour later. Then Maria would have to tell her.

  “Did I bring you up to squander? Did I bring you up to put your husband in the poor house? Do I live to see my own grandsons in rags?”

  Yes. Yes. No. Maria answered each one. She loved her mother. She was like her mother. Neither one of them had any sense about money at all. The difference between them was that Maria’s father was as tightfisted as Frank was generous. Her mother had never been allowed to be extravagant except in small ways; so she’d never suffered the humiliations Maria had: bounced checks, angry letters and phone calls, a truck outside to carry away repossessed furniture. Well, the bunk beds had been a bad idea anyway, Freddy either shaking Tad out of his nest or bombing him from above. There was the shame of it. She just tried not to think about that.

  “The most important thing is to be cheerful,” Maria said to a silent Frank, to her horrified friend, Elsie.

  All very well for Elsie to be horrified. She was a vicarious spender who could be a whole day in the shops without parting from a dime as long as someone else did the buying. It wasn’t a fault really. Maria loved to go shopping with Elsie because she admired everything Maria bought. She’d say, “Oh, do you think you should?” but in a way to make the purchase even more exciting. And, after Maria had made her decision, Elsie always said, “It’s really such a bargain, you know; you’re saving dollars.”

  Maria put the last of the breakfast dishes into the sink and tried to think about a dishwasher. The idea of simply using one, already there, wasn’t as appealing as going out and buying one. Now, in this kitchen, a new dishwasher would be marvelous. She saw one the other day, nothing down and only about fifteen dollars a month. Practically nothing.

  “That’s where the money goes every month,” Frank said, “on about two hundred payments on practically nothing.”

  Maybe tonight, when the brandy seemed familiar, the way the dining room rug and the floor polisher did even though they weren’t quite paid for, Frank would be more relaxed, have some other idea. Probably they could increase the mortgage, though Maria had some memory of Frank’s having done that not very long ago. And he reminded her that they had never paid the down payment back to her father. If he hadn’t needed it for ten years, surely he could get along without it a little while longer. He wasn’t going to retire for another year or two. She could probably get something for the stuff in the basement, Tad’s old bike that hadn’t really been good enough to give Freddy, the old refrigerator—except where would she keep the watermelon and soft drinks?

  Maria didn’t like the smell of the new soap, and the free scrubbing brush that had come with it polished rather than loosened the egg on the plate.

  “Just junk!” she said. She felt very sad, sad enough to cry.

  She was a fool. Everything her father said. But sometimes it was all right. She could pay attention, but then Tad would be home in bed with the flu or her mother was just low or Frank would get depressed about the news, and then Maria forgot about money and bought things. Once she started that, she’d get back into the habit, and she’d graduate from bottles of perfume and funny books to coats and couches. Once Frank sold their car. Once he had a night job. Now the car belonged to the company, and he had to work at night anyway sometimes.

  The phone was ringing again, and this time Maria answered it.

  “So what’s the bad news?” her mother demanded.

  “It’s not bad news,” Maria said.

  But, when she had explained it to her mother making the move sound like a Hollywood success story, she got no response at all.

  “Mama?”

  “And so in this penthouse, what’s Frank going to do with the next set of bills—jump?”

  “What I’m explaining to you is we can pay our bills—all of them.”

  She hadn’t expected to start crying, but there she was blubbering at her mother, who stopped being sarcastic right away and told her it was probably a very good idea, and, if there wasn’t a dishwasher, she’d see to it Papa bought one for Maria. She said to Maria, “There are things more important than money.” She said to Maria, “The most important thing is to be cheerful.”

  Maria hung up the phone, both comforted and resolute. She washed her face and changed her dress. Then she called Elsie. This time the penthouse had triple plumbing—carpeted—and a built-in hi fi. Maria wasn’t sure the couch they already had would be big enough. Why didn’t they just go out and begin to shop around?

  By the time they had walked through two department stores, Maria was considering a pool table for the boys, something that would take up less space and replace the ping-pong table they would have to give up. Probably they should have their own television.

  “What’s Frank going to do without a garden?” Elsie asked.

  Tropical fish, maybe. House plants. Games. None of them sounded very much like Frank, really. Pool and television didn’t sound much like Freddy and Tad either. Maria felt guilt flip in her stomach. Buy something for them, she thought. Buy something! She hurried along the narrow corridors of space through worlds of furniture, toys, clothes. Buy something! Buy something!

  “Elsie,” she said, “get me out of here.”

  “What’s the matter?” Elsie asked, taking Maria’s arm. “Are you sick?”

  “I’m sick,” Maria said.

  And she knew what her sickness was as she stood shaking and breathing deeply on the sidewalk. Her spending sprees were just like drinking sprees. Wasn’t there an organization for people who couldn’t handle money the way there was for people who couldn’t handle drink? She’d already lost their car, the beds their children slept in, and now she had lost their house. Where would it end? In pool tables and tropical fish. How could she stand her shame without them?

  “Elsie,” she said, “I need help.”

  “Let’s go treat ourselves to a nice cool drink,” Elsie said. “That will make you feel better. Then we’ll just take a cab home.”

  Oh, that was what Maria wanted, something with five flavors of ice cream in so tall a glass she had to tip it to drink, then a cool, luxurious ride home. She hadn’t, after all, spent any money in the stores. It was a very small reward. Reward? Shame turned in her again.

  “I can just wait here and take a bus,” Maria said, and she sat down, clutching the bench for resolve.

  “Please yourself,” Elsie said.

  Their bus was a block away at the stop light. Just before the light changed, a taxi turned into the street.

  “Taxi!” Maria called out, an arm thrown up to stop the traffic, to halt the indifferent flow of events, to take charge of her life again. “Taxi!”

  THE INVESTMENT YEARS

  IF ROGER HAD WANTED to explain his mood, there were plenty of ordinary, unflattering reasons for it: his thirtieth birthday last month, the measles that Peter had brought home from school and given the younger two, the argument Nancy had started about his taking business trips just to get out of the house. But Roger didn’t want to explain his mood, being a man who found it easier to take than
to lay blame, in his marriage anyway. After all, Nancy had good reason to be exhausted and to dread five days alone, and, though he could not postpone the trip, he was certainly glad of it.

  “My wife,” said Bert as they sat in the car eating hamburgers after a long, uncertain sales meeting, “thinks these business trips are just a piece of cake: five hundred miles on the road, hamburgers so you can get a mickey out of your expenses in order to put yourself to sleep in a second rate motel while some other guy is still watching tv or making it with somebody he won’t have to listen to the next morning.”

  “Some other guy?” Roger asked, to be flattering. He only saw Bert on these trips and worked at being good humored without being really friendly.

  “Well, if there wasn’t one for the road occasionally, who’d ever take a job like this?” And cheered, Bert contemplated the possibilities of two or three of the carhops.

  There was nothing to make the swallowing of Roger’s hamburger any better, neither mickey nor girl. He couldn’t even use the few dollars he was saving to buy a present for Nancy or more than candy bars or a few pencils for the kids. The hot water heater had gone last week, two months before they’d finished paying for a new roof.

  “How about that one?” Bert suggested, gesturing with the last bite of hamburger. “Maybe we could go halves.”

  “Thanks anyway,” Roger said.

  “Trouble with you, boy, is that there’s never any cake at all.”

  True. Unless you could call a night when he didn’t have to get up with a sick child cake. And that’s all Nancy would mean, for just those few hours to die into her own sleep. Thinking of Nancy like that depressed him. He tried to think, instead, about the vacation they were planning, the same one they had planned and not gone on last year and the year before because of their endless calendar of chicken pox, broken arms, and unexpected bills.

  “I’ll walk back to the motel,” Roger suggested. “I need the exercise.”