“Go home Sunday,” Dena said. “What’s the difference if it’s summer?”
“You don’t need me at the party,” I said. “Wear your halter dress, and Charlie Blackwell won’t be able to take his eyes off you.”
“Listen,” Dena said. “This isn’t negotiable. I’ll pick you up Saturday at five-thirty.”
“I thought the barbecue started at five.”
“We’re arriving fashionably late. We’ll toast to you becoming landed gentry.”
SO FAR, THAT
summer had been an especially nice one. The grief I felt about my father’s death was milder after a year and a half, without the rawness of surprise. Plus, I was filled with purpose, and not just in looking for a house; there was also my library project.
I had graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1968, taught for two years—I taught third-graders, an especially boisterous age—then returned to the university to get my master’s in library science. What I’d realized while teaching was that the part of the school day I loved most was reading period:
the kids sitting cross-legged on the floor, their eyes wide, their bodies leaning forward with anticipation. If I could be a librarian, I decided, it would be like reading period lasting forever. After I’d earned my master’s degree in 1972, I went to work at Liess Elementary, and five years later, at the age of thirty-one, I was still there.
My project that summer was this: I was creating ten large papier-mache figures of characters from children’s books, among them Eloise; the mother and baby rabbits from
and Mr. Sneeze from the
series (I’d used chicken wire to fashion the triangular points of Mr. Sneeze’s oversize head). I’d had the idea the previous fall when I saw a little girl on my street dressed as Pippi Longstocking for Halloween. In the spring, I’d written to publishers asking for permission—I suppose I could have gotten away with not doing so, but the idea of being a librarian who infringed on copyrighted material made me shudder—and in early June, I’d bought the materials. By the time school opened after Labor Day, I planned to have all the characters displayed on the library’s shelves, or, in the case of the
figure in his canoe, hanging over the entrance.
I’d been surprised by the scope of the project—I had thought it would take only a couple weeks—but the longer it lasted, the more absorbed I became. At first I’d worked in my living room, but the characters began taking up so much space, and I didn’t want anyone who might come over (mostly, this meant Dena) to see them before I was finished, so I’d covered the floor of my bedroom and even the bed with butcher paper, then started sleeping on the living room couch. When I was working, I wore a denim skirt and old shirts of my father’s, often dropping globs of the flour and water mixture on myself, and perspiring because I didn’t have an air conditioner.
Every morning, before it got hot, I’d cut through campus and walk along Lake Mendota, the sun sparkling on the water, the waves lapping lightly at the shore (walks by myself weren’t constitutionals—they were just walks), and then I’d come back and work until lunch, or until long after that if Nadine didn’t have any houses to show me. During my walks, and sometimes in the middle of the night, I’d suddenly have an idea about, say, how to create more realistic eyebrows for Maurice Sendak’s “I don’t care” Pierre (by snipping up a black wig, because when I painted on the eyebrows, they just looked flat). Early in the evening, I’d stop working and make a corn-and-tomato salad, or broil a pork chop, and after dinner, I’d perch on the windowsill of the bedroom and drink a beer and admire my progress. I hadn’t mentioned the project to anyone, and sometimes I worried that the other teachers might find it odd or excessive, but when I thought of the children entering the library on the first day of school, I felt excited.
NADINE CALLED EARLY
Friday afternoon. “The seller counter-offered—you interested in going up to thirty-five and a half?”
If I were putting down 20 percent, which was what I had told the loan officer at the bank I probably could do, that would mean seventy-one hundred dollars. “Okay,” I said.
“Jeez Louise, you’re way too easy. Don’t you want to complain just a little?”
I laughed. “I want the house.”
“All righty. Stand by.”
She called me back twenty minutes later and said, “Let me be the first to congratulate you on becoming a homeowner.”
I yelped.
“Why don’t you come by my office now to sign the papers, and I’d recommend calling the inspector before the end of the day. Can I make one more suggestion?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Buy yourself a bottle of champagne. You’ve got a lot to look forward to.”
DENA PICKED ME
up the next afternoon for the Hickens’ barbecue, but first we drove to McKinley Street. In the car, Dena sang, “ ‘Home, home on the range, where the deer and the antelope play . . . ’ ” When I pointed to where she should park, the house was both different and the same as I remembered—it was more vivid somehow, more
