Four and Twenty Beds. Nancy Casteel Vogel

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СКАЧАТЬ what are they waiting for? I suppose they're going to be sweet about it and let us have the use of them until the day before we leave."

      I was in a bad mood when Grant got home from work. He started to put his lunch bucket where the kitchen table should have been. He put it on the sink instead and asked me why I looked so unhappy.

      "They bought our kitchen table and our dining room set and the bedroom set," I wailed.

      "For the price we wanted?"

      I nodded miserably.

      "Wonderful!" He seized me in his grease-stained hands and swung me above his head.

      "You won't think it's so wonderful after you've slept on the floor a few nights," I prophesied grimly.

      The doorbell rang. "Ah," I said, "it must be the moving vawn."

      While two muscular men dismantled the bedroom set and carried it out, I prepared dinner. I had no idea how or where we were going to eat it, but I decided not to face that problem until it came.

      It came soon enough. The moving van had gone, taking with it all hope for the next month's nocturnal comfort, and the potatoes were done. The pork chops were brown and sizzling, and the peas were steaming.

      I pondered.

      Should we put the plates on the kitchen floor and squat around them?

      That wouldn't be very comfortable.

      I could put the breadboard over the bathroom sink, making a small table out of it. David and I could sit on the edge of the bathtub, and Grant could sit on the–

      No, that wouldn't do.

      I settled it by filling our plates and carrying them into the living room. Grant's and David's plates I set on each arm of the davenport. I put my own plate on an arm of the overstuffed chair. The salt, pepper, bread and butter were in the middle of the living room floor.

      "Are you still glad we sold our tables?" I asked Grant, when we had started eating.

      He's always willing to put up with a little inconvenience if there's profit in it.

      "Yep," he said. "If we hadn't quick sold them the first day, it might have turned out that no one would want them at all, and we'd have to come way down in the price. Please pass the bread."

      "Just the same," I said, getting down on my hands and knees to get him a piece of bread, "I'm going to add twenty dollars to what we planned on asking for the living room set. If anyone wants it tomorrow they're going to have to really pay for it!"

      "You split your infilitive, Mama," David said.

      There's one thing that must be said for David. Maybe he does usually sound more like a herd of elephants than like one small, agreeable little boy, and maybe he does create a very reasonable facsimile of chaos when he gets hold of a piece of gum–but he recognizes a split infinitive when he hears it. My friends all think he's an infant prodigy–in that one respect, anyway. But sometimes I wish I'd never taught him anything about grammar. I didn't know what a split infinitive was until I was in high school, and I got along just as well without knowing. I never made Grandma want to swing me by the heels and smack my head against a wall, either.

      "I'm very sorry I split an infinitive," I told David. "I'll try to be more careful in the future. But just the same," I went on, turning back to Grant, "whoever buys that living room set is going to really pay for it!"

      "Fine," Grant said, getting up and going into the kitchen; "the more money we can raise, the better." He came back carrying a jar of horseradish; he sat down and put some horseradish on his plate, and proceeded to mix it thoroughly with his peas.

      One of the strangest things about Grant, hardly compatible with the efficiency and practicality of his nature, is his passion for weird combinations of food. I have learned to look the other way while he improves upon what I have prepared; if I were to watch while he mixes and eats his little gastronomical horrors, I doubt if I'd be able to do much eating myself.

      I slept–or, rather, spent the night–on the davenport, and Grant slept in David's twin-size bed with David. In the middle of the night I sat up and felt the welts across my back that the ridges in the davenport cushions had made. I went through the empty bedroom where our lovely, comfortable bed used to be, into the children's bedroom.

      Grant was lying slantwise across David's bed, with David draped across him. The baby was sleeping peacefully on her stomach in her crib. I considered crawling in with her, but I was afraid the crib wouldn't hold an additional hundred and twelve pounds.

      I went back into the living room, put another blanket over the davenport cushions to cover the ridges more thoroughly, and lay down again.

      After breakfast I felt more kindly toward the davenport, though. In our hour of need it was serving as table, chairs, and bed. What were a few welts in the face of all that?

      Just then the doorbell rang. It was a short, dark, bristling man who actually tinkled whenever he moved. I was so fascinated by this discovery that he was inside the house punching at the davenport before I realized that he wanted my precious living room set.

      "How much?" he shot at me suddenly.

      I told him, adding twenty dollars to the price we had originally planned to ask for the set.

      "Fine! Sold!" he barked, tinkling as he peeled off crisp green bills into my hands.

      "What are you staring at?" he cried.

      I backed away timidly. "It's just that–that noise you make," I said. "I was just wondering–"

      He put a thumb under the watch chain that was draped against his vest and thrust it out where I could see it. There was a tiny golden bell attached to the chain.

      He let go of the chain suddenly and strode to the overstuffed chair, picking it up as though it had been a child's chair.

      "Open the door, please."

      He loaded the chair and davenport onto his pickup truck and drove away.

      I sat down in the middle of the living room floor, my hands full of the crisp green bills, and burst into tears.

      The rest of that month crawled by. I visualized the angel in charge of time chortling and slowing down the time machine so that he'd have longer to watch us sitting on boxes and eating from boxes, and to watch me sleeping on the floor–which I chose in preference to sleeping with David and being kicked all night.

      The general inconvenience, and living in such a state of upset and excitement, didn't seem to bother Grant very much. What annoyed him most about the whole proceeding, I think, was the fact that since a part of our savings was in small government bonds that had to be cashed, he'd had to sign his name and address seventy-five times. He learned from experience what the term "writer's cramp" means.

      We had sold our home, of course, getting all cash for it and retaining possession of it until the day we were to take over the motel. Actually it was the real estate broker whose advice we had asked about its value, who bought it. The rise in prices that followed the war had made it worth a lot more than we paid for it, and we knew that the realtor too would make a profit on it. But we needed the cash in a hurry, so we were glad to sell it to him.

      Grandma had lent us two thousand dollars. Grandma is a short, sturdy widow without a lazy bone in СКАЧАТЬ