Marguerite (part seven)
Abigail Biddell was sick and tired of housework. Widowed before 50, she had continued to keep house for her only son while he tended to the cows and the planting. It was only a couple dozen acres, but mortgage free; you could make do if you were careful. But she was growing old and he showed no sign of finding a wife to help her out! As she had a right to expect! Hinting, making suggestions, even outright asking were all to no avail. She didn't know what the trouble was; he was good-looking, had good manners, but he just didn't take up with people, especially young females!
Just about then, Clarissa was finishing her last year at high school, lost and lonely without Charlie, being graduated mainly because they couldn't see any point in keeping her for another year. She had to get a job! There wasn't enough work at home to earn her keep. She went to stay with Allison Marton when the baby was born, then cooked and cleaned for old Mr. Grebs while his wife was in the hospital. She tried at the dry cleaners where Charlie had worked but the sisters were not at all alike. She stammered and turned red in the asking. They were sorry, but...
Coincidentally, on the other side of the small community, Abigail had decided strong measures were needed. She moved a couple of carloads of her personal things over to her sister's who was in similar circumstances. They could comfortably share their lives together. She would throw her son in the deep end; he would sink or swim! A little sex might cure his sulkiness and temper tantrums anyhow.
“Take Clarissa; she's a good cook and housekeeper, a gentle person of child-bearing age,” she emphasized to a shocked Ralphie. “I might yet be a grandmother!” He was in a panic and a fury but there was no way he could survive on his own; he'd always been looked after! I guess he finally telephoned.
They met at the Mercury Theater. He had instructed Aunt Cissa when to be there and where to sit so he could find her in the darkness. Probably just as well; it saved them both embarrassment.
They got married at city hall one morning in October. Cissa brought over her few belongings. Ralph's mother left them most of the furniture.
In the meantime, Charlie had started the new life, her real life, as she saw it. Far from being the incompetent perceived by her mother and mother-in-law, she had been a good student, from physics and Latin to home economics which she had taken for all four years of high school. Not for her the outmoded ways of the older generation; she had read books and learned the new ways of cooking and nutrition, of cleaning and laundry and child rearing!
She had a house to fix up. She and Dad went to the auctions, people selling up, unable to meet the mortgage payments, jobs having dried up with the Depression. A 9x12 for the living room floor, brown with faded pink roses here and there, worn through in one spot that could go behind the chair; a second chair, sort of brown and sunken at the front so you sat downhill but she would find a cushion to put under your legs. Llew already had a few dishes and pans and they added a few more from the sales. Charlie brought embroidered pillow cases and towels from the hope chest stocked by Little Grandma and used up all the money she had saved from her job for the few other things they needed. Llew sold a pig.
By autumn, Charlie had harvested the vegetables and the fruits from the garden and preserved them all in the Mason jars lining the dirt-floored cellar beneath the house. She had painted the dining room floor blue and stenciled a border of bright daisies around the edge. There were curtains at the downstairs windows, but the second floor was left bare; it would be too difficult to heat in any case. Aunt Cissa came to help, especially with the sewing, and Llew's two sisters, Emma and Harriet, pitched in on the canning. Charlie welcomed Llew's friends and their wives and girl friends, reveling in being able to have people over for the first time in her life. She baked and cooked and entertained. She was strong and energetic.
She imagined a rock garden at the end of the drive, huge boulders with climbing flowers and shrubs all over. Instead of being an indistinguishable dirt lane, people would know the place, would be able find it. It would have a location and make them smile. Llew and the mules pulled the rocks into place with Charlie pointing and directing. She dug in the small bushes and seedlings her father brought. He was good with plants.
The very air spit and sparkled ideas. With her hands held out, she described wide circles of beauty and pleasure. It was a place of her own with no mother or grandmothers. The mother-in-law also stayed away.
Charlie doesn't always wear underpants. When she got married, she bought two pairs of silk panties and put the homemade thick cotton bloomers in the trash bin at work. For going out, she wears a dainty little pink girdle with a dainty pink detachable crotch. Well-endowed, she never goes without a bra. That's totally uncivilized! Besides which, it hurts.
Two panties didn't go far. The summer sun baked down on the farmhouse and the panties were in the wash. Simple. This was cooler and, well, free! Her light cotton house dress allowed the air to flow around her hips and thighs quite pleasantly. She liked to feel the shift of fabric across her skin.
Llew ran his hand down her back experimentally as she stood at the hot stove turning over fried potatoes with a spatula.
"Ummm!" he said appreciatively and moved his hands farther around her body. Charlie flushed, smiling, but wriggled away. The potatoes had to be turned now!
Winter came but Charlie was reluctant to give up the no-pants feeling. She didn't like spending money on things you couldn't actually see and anyhow she didn't have much money or many opportunities to go to town. She didn't like sweaters either or anything that made her feel held in so the little cotton dress went all winter long except for church or shopping or parties. If there was any money left, she bought a hat or the tiny high-heeled shoes from shop window displays at the end of the season. With more coal on the furnace, it glowed red beneath the open grid between the living and dining room floors.
Llew came in the back door stomping snow from his boots. "My God, woman!" he would cry. " You've got it eighty in here!"
She said she’d come straight back from town and ran to the field to tell him, stopping the truck halfway up the drive, the door flung open, the woman running across the tall dry grasses, the tail of her dress blowing in the wind, careless of her stockings and high-heeled shoes, her arms held out to the man she loved who would soon be the father of her baby.
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