Life Among the Savages (21 page)

“I couldn't overhelp hearing,” Laurie said meekly.

“What's your name?”

“What it comes down to,” I said, “is that they might as well have it now as—” I broke off abruptly with a squawk as Sally poked me vigorously with her fork.

“I said ‘What's your name?' ” Sally reminded me.

“She's too young to have a fork,” my husband said. “Little girls should be seen and not heard,” he told Sally.

“You bad bad webbis,” Sally said gratuitously to her brother.

“If Sally came down with a high fever,” my husband said dreamily, “and Laurie came down with a high fever and—”

“Why don't we get a new outside?” Sally asked. “This morning, it was raining and raining.” She thought. “And there was a lion on the front porch,” she said.

“Really?” said Jannie. “Really, was there a lion on the front porch?”

“Cernly,” Sally said.

Laurie put down his fork and turned to his father. “What is long and hard and wears shoes?” he asked. “Bet you a dime you can't guess it.”

His father said tentatively, “A horse?”

Laurie guffawed. “Make it twenty cents,” he said.

“Surely there was a lion on the front porch,” Sally said to Jannie, “and I saw him and he was walking around very softerly and he ate all the cats and part of the fence.”

Jannie addressed me. “I was sick in bed, you know,” she said. “Was there
really
a lion out there?”

“A horseshoe stake?” my husband said desperately.

“That,” Laurie said with relish, “will be twenty cents.”

“But a horseshoe stake is long and hard and it wears—” my husband said. “Look, don't the shoes go
around
it?”

“A sidewalk,” Laurie said. “It
wears
shoes, see? Now, for another dime, what goes under the water, over the water, and doesn't get wet?”

“I left my rubbers somewhere,” my husband said to me.

“You must ask
me
what's my name,” Sally said to Laurie.

“What's your name?”

“Tiger,” Sally said. “You snick,” she told him.

Laurie said triumphantly to his father, who was scowling doggedly at his empty dessert dish, “An old woman crossing a bridge with a pail of water on her head, and counting yesterday and the money you lost to me on the checkers game that's two-seventy-five, and counting my allowance tomorrow that makes two-eighty-five, and the dime you bet me you could eat your bread and butter without using your hands.”

“And when you dropped the book and the feather down the stairs,” Jannie said.

“Galileo,” Laurie told her approvingly, “I forgot. You had a dollar,” he said to his father, “that the heavy object and the light object would . . .” he hesitated, looking at me.

“Fall at the same rate of speed,” I said helpfully. “It looked like a sure thing.”

“Damn it,” my husband said, goaded, “I can show you in the book—”

“And twelve cents,” Laurie went on inexorably, “for swatting twelve hundred flies.”

“
That
wasn't twelve hundred flies,” my husband said, “Mother counted them.”

“You
gave
them to me to count,” I said, “but—”

“
I
can count to twelve hundred,” Jannie said. “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven . . .”

“Showing off,” I said vengefully, “is vulgar.”

“What?” Jannie said.

“Where do you live?”

“Down the lane,” said my husband sadly.

“Four ninety-seven,” said Laurie, who had been figuring silently.

“Mother will give it to you,” my husband said.

 

 

 

DIABOLICALLY, BOTH SALLY and Laurie refused to catch measles after I had gone out and purchased a new thermometer and a large bottle of calamine lotion. My husband and I agreed that it was time that Laurie's natural curiosity about things which did not belong to him should be channelized into a healthy pattern, and that he should be encouraged to give up spending nickels for packs of gum and begin, instead, a coin collection. I did not, at that time—in fact, it seemed like a good idea—perceive any of the parallels which have occurred to me since; the similarity, for instance, between coin collecting and a grasping curiosity about things which do not belong to you, the unfortunate similarity between coins and money; I remember agreeing with my husband that coins were preferable as a collection to, say, stamps, because they wouldn't blow away, or match folders because coins, at least, had some intrinsic value. I remember even saying laughingly that if anything were to be collected, for heaven's sake it might as well be
money
.

My husband and Laurie began on a small scale. I went to the bank and got a roll of nickels and a roll of dimes and a roll of pennies, and they spent an evening examining mint marks and dates and relative condition, and I sat peacefully over my book smiling at them occasionally and thinking how good it was that they should be interested together in such a grown-up fashion. They sent for some little books, named dime books and penny books and nickel books, and each book had a series of little holes large enough for the proper coins, and all coin collectors have to do is find the right coin for the right little hole and put it in. After a while my husband was going to the bank himself with a briefcase. He would get all the money we had changed into coins and then he and Laurie would take all the coins they needed for their books and give me the rest, and I would go out and pay for my groceries in the nickels and dimes which were not needed for the books.

I have never objected to money, as such. But after a while it became necessary to get a huge metal box to keep the coins in, and every mail began to bring heavy little packages of coins from Ruritania and Atlantis and it was suddenly abruptly clear to Jannie and Sally and me that their father and Laurie were planning to get hold of all the money in the world and put it away in their metal box, and a consequent strong bitterness began to show itself around the house. I began to make pointed comments about the last time I had seen a five-dollar bill, and I repeated several times at dinner what the grocer had said to me about people holding up a line at the counter because they had to count out seventeen dollars and thirty-six cents in dimes and nickels and pennies. Jannie took to sleeping with her penny bank under her pillow, and Sally, with a pretty wit, fell to bringing her father small stones and pieces of glass and play money which she embezzled at nursery school. I spent a bag of silver to buy my husband a Piece of Eight for a Christmas present, and had trouble hiding it, since Christmas was still quite a while off, until I thought of keeping it in my pocketbook. Even Sally learned to say “numismatist”; Laurie learned the Greek alphabet from Greek coins and one day turned in his spelling homework done entirely in Greek letters, confounding his schoolmates and thoroughly annoying his teacher.

One Saturday morning an intensely awaited package of coins arrived, and I had to pay thirty-one cents duty charges on it; while I was irritably counting out the money for the postman, Sally took the mail into the study where Laurie and his father were rearranging their classifications, and when I came stamping into the study shouting “Don't we pay enough for this money without—” I found Laurie and his father sitting one on either side of the coffee table, Laurie rocking back and forth and moaning, and his father holding his head in his hands and saying “Oh, no,” over and over, and Jannie and Sally regarding them with unwilling sympathy.

“Something wrong?” I asked brightly.

“Something wrong?” Jannie repeated.

“Wrong?” Sally asked.

“Yes,” said my husband.

“Look at these darned old
coins
,” Laurie said, almost in tears. We looked at the heap of coins on the table, Jannie and Sally and I.

“They're
mixed
,” Laurie said.

“Well, my goodness,” I told him, “it certainly wouldn't be much fun
collecting
coins if all you did was just put them in the little books and put them in the cabinet. My goodness, half the
fun
in collecting coins—”

My husband raised his head and looked at me. “Listen,” he said wanly, “what we ordered was two lots of coins from the same place. One of them was a lot of a hundred and fifty assorted coins of the world.”

“Splendid,” I said. “I suppose they cost—”

“The other,” my husband said, raising his voice, “was a lot of a hundred assorted
counterfeit
coins of the world. And the boxes,” he said, “the boxes . . .” He put his head back in his hands.

“They broke,” Laurie said. “We got two hundred and fifty coins. Assorted. Mixed.”

“Splendid,” I said again. “Then all you have to do is sort the counterfeit coins into
one
pile and the
real
coins into
another
—”

“Yeah,” Laurie said. “Daddy doesn't feel very well.”

This did not seem like the time to enforce my rightful claims to thirty-one cents, so I collected the rest of the mail and left the study with the girls. We sat down on the couch in the living room and opened a letter from the electric company and bills from three department stores and an announcement of the annual fund drive of the Boy Scouts and a pamphlet from a toy company. This last caught the attention of the girls, and we opened it to read. It turned out to be one of those maddening documents in which the desire of children to play with toys is explained and justified, and the desire of parents to buy toys for their children is made painless by a sugar-coating of sound educational advice; “The child's natural impulses are harmlessly directed—” I read, under a picture of a hammering set, and, with a block set, “Little fingers learn busily sense of balance . . .” “Ar,” I said, through my teeth.

“What does it say?” Jannie asked. “Read it to us.”

The center of the pamphlet was occupied by an article entitled “Healthy Children are Happy Children” or else “Happy Children are Healthy Children,” and there was a picture of a sweet-faced mother bending earnestly over her child, guiding his little fingers as they learned a busy sense of balance with a set of blocks. “Who's
that?
” Jannie asked, leaning over to see, “who's that lady? What's she doing?”

I consulted the article. “Children are naturally cooperative and reasonable,” I read at random.

“What?”

“
That
means that little girls like you and Sally and boys like Laurie
like
to do things right. That you
want
to learn the best and nicest ways to act.”

“I
do?
”

“
I
don't,” said Sally emphatically.

“That's not reasonal,” Jannie said critically. “Like eating with my fingers; I want to eat with my
fingers
.”

“I think the people who wrote this would
let
you eat with your fingers,” I said. “Constructive something-or-other.”

“Hah,” said Jannie.

“Only snicks,” Sally opined. “Only snicks.”

“Children are happier and better adjusted,” I read grimly, “when given responsibility. The feeling of participating—”

“
I
know,” Jannie said. “Pick up your room, set the table, hang up your jacket, brush your teeth, wash—”

“No good,” Sally said. “Not washing.”

“—your hands, put away your toys, fold your napkin—”

“And it means that when I ask you to run upstairs to get me a handkerchief you should go cheerfully,” I said, patting her on the head.

“You just read more of that,” Jannie said. “I don't think it's sensal at all, except about eating with my fingers.”

“Parents should never show anger before the child,” I read. “Parents should never show anger before the child. Parents—”

“Hah,” Jannie said again.

“Run in the study, dear,” I said. “Ask Dad how he's coming with his coins.”

“Not
me
,” Sally said. “Not
me
.”

“But
you
—” Jannie said.

“I do
not
,” I said. “I never show anger at all, except that you and your sister and your brother can be far and away the most irritating, the most infuriating, the most maddening—”

“Snicks.”

“Snicks,” I said. I took a deep breath. “Anyway,” I went on, “it says here that Sixes
enjoy
helping around the house.”

“What's a Six?” Jannie scowled. “Am
I
a Six?”

“You're a
snicks
,” Sally said, leaning forward to look around me at her sister, “an old snicks.”

“And Sally is a Three and Laurie is a Nine.”

“Then are you a Thirty-Four?”

“Thirty-Two.”

“I will tell Laurie he is a Nine,” Sally said, sliding in one movement off the couch and landing walking. Jannie and I watched her open the study door. “You are both snicks,” she announced.

“—Thaler,” my husband's voice said. “See if there ever
was
such a country as Thaler.” He sounded a little shrill. Sally closed the door. “
I
told them,” she said, coming back and climbing onto the couch.

“Mother is of course,” I read, “interested in her
own
activities, such as Parent-Teachers meetings, cooking for the Girl Scouts, sewing costumes for—” I stopped. “Now what?” I inquired vaguely.