A Big Storm Knocked It Over
Page 21
They drove off, leaving Jane Louise alone with Harriet and Miranda. The day was hers. She breathed in the clean air. In front of her was a long stretch of almost peaceful time, even if the house she was living in had never been hers, and this countryside was hers on loan. She could actually say: “This is my daughter and my goddaughter.”
She would lend Harriet her straw hat, and Miranda would wear her tiny piqué sun hat. Together they would go down to the beach. With Miranda in her arms and Harriet by her side, Jane Louise might even feel—if just for a second—that she was here by some sort of right.
CHAPTER 34
On the Fourth of July, Edie and Mokie served a big celebratory lunch on the unstable, wrecked, splinter-strewn porch of Paul and Helene Schreck’s house. Edie’s brother Fred, his wife Stephanie, and their two perfect boys had threatened to come up and then changed their minds. Jane Louise could never figure out why Edie still never got to stay at her parents’ house: Fred and Sam had first dibs. Even though Edie was far better off renting, it made Jane Louise angry that Edie so easily submitted to putting up with being just a girl, but that was Edie’s style, and the form her rebellion took was never to ask for a thing.
Fred was tall and bony, with a big political agenda. He had been in the district attorney’s office and had then run successfully for Congress. It seemed to Jane Louise that the entire family had run for Congress. Even the small Steinhaus children seemed preternaturally well behaved.
It was Mokie’s opinion that these children, too, had had speechwriters hired for them. He particularly detested Fred, whom he considered an unreconstructed racist. Nevertheless, he forbore him and tried in the gentlest possible way to make him very uncomfortable. He had found that any allusions to himself and Edie sharing the same bed caused Fred to squirm and his flesh to creep.
As for Edie, her present preoccupation was the unabated dire state of the Schrecks’ housekeeping. Their kitchen was most unsanitary. She had found moidering vegetables in the refrigerator and fetid potholders that had been torn to shreds by mice. It was clear that only the most cursory cleaning job had been done before they arrived. Helene Schreck had told Edie more than a dozen times how wonderful it was that Paul would, at great peril to his back, bring down the crib for them. Naturally, when they arrived, the crib was in the attic, and a note had been left saying that Paul’s back had gone out at the last minute.
No complaints could be lodged against the Schrecks, however, since their son was Fred’s congressional assistant. As for Beth and Peter Peering, they had only a bare idea who the Schrecks were: The Schrecks belonged to that segment of Marshallsville life that had no interaction whatsoever with the locals, but lived in a kind of bucolic, hermetic jar in which they saw and socialized with other weekenders and only knew the locals as tradespeople.
After lunch the babies took their naps at the lake, and the adults went swimming. It was the perfect Fourth of July: hot, breezy, and clear. The sky was a deep, deep azure.
At six o’clock everyone collected on the town green for a chicken barbecue, and then began the exodus to Ford Bridge Racetrack for the annual fireworks. Jane Louise and Edie had packed cupcakes and a thermos of iced tea. Mokie brought a six-pack of beer, and Teddy toted several enormous bags of potato chips.
They spread their blankets on a hill overlooking the racecourse. From where she sat Jane Louise could easily see a dozen people she knew. Teddy probably could identify everyone from Marshallsville. He explained that even the seating was traditional. The Marshallsville contingent usually occupied the hill and slope. The people from Heath seemed to prefer the meadow near the track. The Avesbury crowd sat on the plain opposite the hill, and the rowdy teenage boys from Gloucester milled around on the racetrack itself, setting off squibs and roman candles. Slowly, slowly the light began to fade.
Teddy sat with one arm around Harriet and the other around Jane Louise, who held their drowsing baby in her arms. Next to her sat Edie with Tallie in her lap, then Mokie. The Peerings sat behind them.
“I hope the noise won’t wake them up,” Edie said.
“These babies would sleep through a hydrogen bomb attack,” Teddy said. “It’s the little things that wake them up, like telephones ringing, and sneezing.”
It seemed that it would never be dark enough—the light failed so slowly.
“If it doesn’t start soon, I’m going to pass out,” Edie said.
“I think it’s nice just to sit here,” said Jane Louise.
“You’re transparent,” Edie said. “I can read your mind. You’re sitting here thinking how steady it all is, and that you really don’t belong here.”
“I married in,” Jane Louise said. “I’m just a poor wayfaring stranger.”
“Oh, please,” Edie said.
“It’s easy for you to say,” Jane Louise said. “You grew up here.”
“I was a weekender, honey doll. A summer person. A snappy New Yorker from a private school.”
“Don’t I wish,” Jane Louise said.
“No, you don’t,” Edie said. “You just be happy being your own moved-around, anxious self. The world isn’t going to fly apart.”
“Really?” Jane Louise said.
“What are you two muttering about?” Mokie said.
“Anxiety,” Edie said.
“Oh, that,” said Teddy. “Look alive! It’s about to start.”
A great boom echoed over the hill, and a point of light burst into a shower of green sparkles, which then burst into tiny silver stars. Jane Louise held her breath. These things never lost their charm for her. She gasped.
Fireworks, in Sven’s opinion, were exactly like sex. “First there’s the waiting, right?” he had said. “Lead-up, tension, a brilliant release. Just like the act itself.”
As she sat next to Teddy, her leg pressed close to his and their baby breathing softly on her lap, on the same hill from which Teddy had seen these fireworks almost every year of his life, Jane Louise contemplated this.
Around her the dark sky hung like a curtain. In back of her Lynn Hellman’s children were making rude noises. Under the tree, the Paulings, a couple in their late seventies, sat peacefully, holding hands. They were Marshallsville’s great love story: married to others, madly in love for years and years, they had been widowed around the same time and had finally married in the Congregational Church and were now never seen apart. They seemed perfectly happy; everyone said how patiently they had waited for each other. He was tall, gray haired, and smoked a pipe. She was willowy, gray haired, and languid. For years he had been the headmaster of the Heath School. It was not hard to imagine them as lovers.
Jane Louise leaned her head against Teddy’s shoulder. She had heard about the Paulings for years. She did not find this story sweet. She thought about the years and years in which the Paulings were not married to each other but suffered in secret. How fraught their lives must have been, but now the world had settled down and made for them—for an instant—a kind of peaceful sense.
She watched the sky light up and flash. She watched the sparkling drops that burst into brilliant sprinkles and disappeared into the velvety sky. It was magical: that deep, echoing noise, that glowing tension, that unexpected, magnificent, beautiful release, like the unexpected joy that swept you away, like life itself.
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ISBN 0-06-097392-7 (paperback)
The story of a woman’s attempt to remain true to herself in a world of diminishing returns.
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A BIG STORM KNOCKED IT OVER
ISBN 0-06-092546-9 (paperback)
An exploration of marriage and friendship, motherhood and careers, as experienced by a cast of delightfully idiosyncratic Manhattanites.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
LAURIE COLWIN is the author of five novels: Happy All the Time; Family Happiness; Goodbye Without Leaving; Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object; and A Big Storm Knocked It Over; thre collections of short stories: Passion and Affect, Another Marvelous Thing, and The Lone Pilgrim; and two collections of essays: Home Cooking and More Home Cooking. She died in 1992.
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ALSO BY LAURIE COLWIN
NOVELS
Shine On, Bright & Dangerous Object
Happy All the Time
Family Happiness
Goodbye Without Leaving
STORIES
Passion and Affect
The Lone Pilgrim
Another Marvelous Thing
ESSAYS
Home Cooking
More Home Cooking
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COPYRIGHT
A BIG STORM KNOCKED IT OVER. Copyright © 1993 by The Estate of Laurie E. Colwin. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
First Harper Perennial edition published 1994.
Reissued in Perennial in 2000.
Reissued in Harper Perennial in 2014.
The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows: Colwin, Laurie
A big storm knocked it over / Laurie Colwin—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-06-017019-0
EPub Edition June 2015 ISBN 9780062434906
1. Women—United States—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3553.04783B531999
813’.54—dc2092-56219
ISBN 978-0-06-230823-8 (reissue)
14 15 16 17 18 RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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