Domestic Affairs by Joyce Maynard Read Free Book Online Page B

out the door …”
    “I know,” she said. “I had nine.”
    I thought about that for a moment, then asked their ages. She put down the box of straight pins so she could use her fingers to count.
    “There’s Alice, she’s—let’s see—thirty-one. Mary. She’s thirty. Bob, twenty-nine. Douglas—no, not Douglas. Roger, twenty-eight. Then Douglas. Then Noreen …” It went pretty much like that (with a few more years between the last couple of children), all the way down to Joseph, who was seventeen and just finishing up his senior year in high school.
    “Caring for all those children was no big deal,” Peg said. “Everybody pitched in, and everyone behaved, because they just had to.” When it was time to bathe the baby, the others would all gather around, and it would be “go get the powder” to this one and “go get the diaper” to that one. Every night Peg made a list of everybody’s jobs for the next day. “Every one of my children knows how to cook, clean, do laundry, and sew,” said Peg, scrambling around my living room floor, cutting fabric and drawing chalk lines as she spoke, while I stood there, feeling awkward and guilty at having nothing but a cup of coffee in my hands. Still, I wanted badly to talk to this woman. “Forget about the slipcovers,” I wanted to say. “Just sit down and tell me how you did it.”
    She made all her children’s clothes, of course—usually out of her husband’s worn-out shirts and pants (because the sleeves went first, and that left lots of good fabric in the middle). It would be nothing for her to put up two hundred quarts of beans, she said. Every day she baked bread. Every night they ate meat—casseroles mostly. Plus, her husband did a lot of hunting.
    For Christmas there’d be doll beds made out of old oatmeal boxes, and knitted yarn balls, and necklaces of old wooden spools, painted in bright colors. “You should see our house at the holidays,” she said. “My supper table seats twenty-two. But sometimes we’ll feed up to thirty-five people in my dining room.”
    What about when she went places, I asked her.
    “Well,” she said, “except for grocery shopping and church, mostly we stayed home. We raked leaves and jumped in them in the fall. We made snow angels and snow forts in winter. My kids had a two-story tree house. They always had each other. What else did they need?”
    Peg was pinning fabric together on my couch as she spoke. She never stopped moving. I told her she made it look easy. “This is nothing,” she said.
    But surely she didn’t sew slipcovers when the children were small, I asked (I who can’t get a page of a newspaper read until after all three children are in bed). “Of course I did,” said Peg. “Even with my husband working two shifts, we needed the money. The children always knew just how to entertain themselves. Anytime they were idle, I’d just tell them to pick up my washcloth and start scrubbing something.”
    Weren’t there times, I asked her, when it was all just crazy? Out of control? Times you just wanted to throw up your arms and scream?
    Peg looked at me, thought for a moment, took the pins out of her mouth, and shook her head. “No,” she said. “I can’t say there were.”
    “I don’t know how you did it,” I told her.
    “Maybe you don’t have enough kids,” she suggested. “When there’s only three there might be too much leeway. These women who only have one now—I don’t know how they do it.”
    “Of course,” she said, “you young girls are different, and I’m not criticizing. You’ve got your own needs. You want to go jogging. Want to go out at night. Me, I never knew anyone, besides my husband and my kids. I hardly even knew who was president. My children were everything: my career, my friends, my exercise program, my hobby. I guess I was sort of a child myself: down on my hands and knees half the day, playing with them. Your mind goes a little funny. But I’ll tell you, I had