The Stand

Method, perfect for all your bright colors, fragile underthings, and —

She turned around and beheld her man, standing just inside the backyard gate and watching with an expression of amusement. Frannie stopped, a little out of breath.

“Ha-ha, very funny. How long have you been there, smartypants?”

“Couple of minutes. What do you call that, anyway? The mating dance of the wild wood duck?”

“Again, ha-ha.” She looked coolly at him. “One more crack like that and you can spend the night on the couch, or up on Flagstaff with your friend Glen Bateman.”

“Say, I didn’t mean—”

“They’re your clothes too, Mr. Stuart Redman. You may be a Founding Father and all that, but you still leave an occasional skidmark in your underdrawers.”

Stu grinned, the grin broadened, and finally he had to laugh. “That’s crude, darlin.”

“Right now I don’t feel particularly delicate.”

“Well, pop out for a minute. I need to talk to you.”

She was glad to, even though she would have to wash her feet before getting back in. Her heart was hurrying along, not happily but rather dolefully, like a faithful piece of machinery being misused by someone with a marked lack of good sense. If this was the way my great-great-great-grandmother had to do it, Fran thought, then maybe she was entitled to the room which eventually became my mother’s precious parlor. Maybe she thought of it as hazard pay, or something like that.

She looked down at her feet and lower legs with some discouragement. There was still a thin sheath of gray soapsuds clinging to them. She brushed at it distastefully.

“When my wife handwashed,” Stu said, “she used a… what do you call it? Scrub-board, I think. My mother had about three, I remember.”

“I know that,” Frannie said, irritated. “June Brinkmeyer and I walked over half of Boulder looking for one. We couldn’t find a single one. Technology strikes again.”

He was smiling again.

Frannie put her hands on her hips. “Are you trying to piss me off, Stuart Redman?”

“No’m. I was just thinking I know where I can get you a scrub-board, I think. Juney too, if she wants one.”

“Where?”

“You let me look and see first.” His smile disappeared, and he put his arms around her and his forehead on hers. “You know I appreciate you washing my clothes,” he said, “and I know that a woman who is pregnant knows better than her man what she should and shouldn’t be doing. But, Frannie, why bother?”

“Why? ” She looked at him, perplexed. “Well, what are you going to wear? Do you want to go around in dirty clothes?”

“Frannie, the stores are full of clothes. And I’m an easy size.”

“What, throw out old ones just because they’re dirty?”

He shrugged a little uneasily.

“No way, uh-uh,” she said. “That’s the old way, Stu. Like the boxes they used to put your Big Mac in or the no-deposit-no-return bottles. That’s no way to start over.”

He gave her a little kiss. “All right. Only next washday it’s my turn, you hear?”

“Sure.” She smiled a little slyly. “And how long does that last? Until I deliver?”

“Until we get the power back on,” Stu said. “Then I’m going to bring you the biggest, shiniest washer you ever saw, and hook it up myself.”

“Offer accepted.” She kissed him firmly and he kissed back, his strong hands moving restlessly in her hair. The result was a spreading warmth (hotness, let’s not be coy, I’m hot and he always gets me hot when he does that) that first peaked her nipples, then spread down into her lower belly.

“You better stop,” she said rather breathlessly, “unless you plan to do more than talk.”

“Maybe we’ll talk later.”

“The clothes—”

“Soaking’s good for that grimed-in dirt,” he said seriously. She started to laugh and he stopped her mouth with a kiss. As he lifted her, set her on her feet, and led her inside, she was struck by the warmth of the sun on her shoulders and wondered, Was it ever so hot before? So strong? It’s cleared up every last blemish on my back… could it be the ultraviolet, I wonder, or the altitude? Is it this way every summer? Is it this hot?

And then he was doing things to her, even on the stairs he was doing things to her, making her naked, making her hot, making her love him.

“No, you sit down,” he said.

“But—”

“I mean it, Frannie.”

“Stuart, they’ll congeal or something. I put half a box of Tide in there—”

“Don’t worry.”

So she sat down in the lawn chair in the building’s shady overhang. He had set up two of them when they came back down. Stu took off his shoes and socks and rolled up his pants past the knee. As he stepped into the washtub and began gravely to stomp up and down on the clothes, she began to giggle helplessly.

Stu looked over and said, “You want to spend the night on the couch?”

“No, Stuart,” she said with grave repentance, and then began to giggle again… until tears ran down her cheeks and the little muscles in her stomach felt rubbery and weak. When she had some control again she said, “For the third and last time, what did you come back to talk about?”

“Oh yeah.” He marched back and forth, and by now he had worked up quite a bed of lather. A pair of bluejeans floated to the surface and he stomped them back down, sending a creamy squirt of soapsuds onto the lawn. Frannie thought: It looks a little like… oh no, away with that, away with that unless you want to laugh yourself into a miscarriage.

“We’ve got that first ad hoc meeting tonight,” Stu said.

“I’ve got two cases of beer, cheese crackers, cheese spread, some pepperoni that should still be—”

“That’s not it, Frannie. Dick Ellis came by today and said he wanted off the committee.”

“He did?” She was surprised. Dick had not impressed her as the sort of man who would back away from responsibility.

“He said he’d be glad to serve in any capacity as soon as we get ourselves a real doctor, but just now he can’t. We had another twenty-five come in today, and one of them had a gangrenous leg. Came from a scratch she got crawling under a rusty bobwire fence, apparently.”

“Oh, that’s bad.”

“Dick saved her… Dick and that nurse that came in with Underwood. Tall, pretty girl. Laurie Constable, her name is. Dick said he just would have lost the woman without her. Anyway, they took her leg off at the knee, and they’re both exhausted. It took em three hours. Plus they’ve got a little boy with convulsive fits, and Dick’s driving himself crazy trying to figure out if it’s epilepsy or cranial pressure of some kind or maybe diabetes. They’ve had several cases of food poisoning from people eating stuff that’s gone over, and he says some people are going to die of it if we don’t get out a flier real soon telling people how to pick their supplies. Let’s see, where was I? Two broken arms, one case of the flu—”

“My God! Did you say flu?”

“Ease up. It’s the regular flu. Aspirin knocks down the fever no sweat… and it doesn’t come back up. No black patches on the neck, either. But Dick isn’t sure which antibiotics to use, if any, and he’s burning the midnight oil trying to find out. Also, he’s scared the flu will spread and people will panic.”

“Who is it?”

“A lady named Rona Hewett. She walked most of the way here from Laramie, Wyoming, and Dick says she was ripe for a bug.”

Fran nodded.

“Lucky for us, this Laurie Constable seems sort of stuck on Dick, even though he’s about twice her age. I guess that’s all right.”

“How big of you to give them your seal of approval, Stuart.”