Part 9

The children were at school. Eleanor hadn’t slept in days, but didn’t dare try. She wandered across the house in a daze. She scrubbed the bathrooms. She pulled all of books off of the shelves and stacked them on the floor, looking at each one, and then replacing them again. She drifted into Jack’s room, picked cars from his train set off the floor and put them into a drawer in the train table. The wooden track wound around the table in an involved pattern, hills and bridges, slopes and curves. She recalled briefly the days when the track would be broken into its main pieces at least twice a week. Now it sat, basically undisturbed day after day, unless Jack decided to change it. The train station and other buildings sat at perfect angles to the track, the trees and people set at regular intervals. She pulled the sheets off of the bed and threw them with his pillowcases down the stairs, brought the hamper to the top of the stairs to carry down later.

In Cailyn’s room, Eleanor paused for a moment to look at the shafts of sunlight falling through the gauzy curtains. It reminded her of something. Something from a long time distant. Her mind grasped at it, but it flitted away. She slid her fingers over the dresser, the horses frozen in mid-prance in the sunlight, the music box with the ballerina that would stand up and pirouette when the lid was opened, bedside lamp with the yellow shade, the books the girl had been reading in the small armchair under the window. She folded down the quilt, picked up the pillows and tugged the cases off. A folded photograph fell to the floor. She bent to retrieve it.

It was an image that had gone missing from one of the photo albums some months ago. Elijah and Madelyn sat smiling with Jack in the shade of a tree on a summer day that seemed ages ago. Eleanor gazed at the photograph. She put one hand on the bed and then slowly turned and sat under the canopy. She fell back onto the mattress, staring up at the pattern of dragonflies swirling around one another stitched into the white fabric.

Harvest leaned in through the doorway. “What’s going on?” he asked.

She didn’t answer.

He came into the room and looked down at her. “What do you have there?” He indicated the photograph. He turned his head to examine the picture and then nodded. “Ah, yes. Found it did you?”

“You knew she had taken this?”

He nodded.

“Why didn’t you tell me? I thought I had lost it.”

He shrugged. “I knew you would run across it eventually.”

Eleanor glared at him, sitting up. “You know Harvest, sometimes I think your sole purpose is to drive me crazy.”

He laughed. “My dear, you were crazy long before we met.”

“Very funny.”

She put the photo on the dresser and gathered the linens into her arms. Once they were stuffed into Cailyn’s hamper, she stacked the two loads and carried it all down the stairs to the laundry room.

At the washer, she poured a cup of detergent through her fingers under the warm stream of water. Her hand in the basin swished the water around. Filling it with clothing and linens, she watched the water compress and darken the fabric.

“What is it about automatic washing machines that fascinates you so much?” Harvest

wondered.

For a moment she didn’t answer, watching the spindle begin to turn, pulling the clothing down toward the bottom of the basin and then letting it rise again. “It’s interesting,” she said, “to think about the way things used to be.”

“What do you mean?”

“Back when women spent all their time preparing food and cleaning. They didn’t have time for anything else.”

Harvest nodded

She went on. “They spent their days baking bread, milking cows, washing dishes and clothes, stoking fires, mending, sewing, tending children, growing and harvesting food, preparing meals and serving them. Every daily moment was oriented at the maintenance of the domestic mundane. It took days or weeks to get somewhere, for mail to reach a loved one. Children worked and were often educated at home.” She moved out of the laundry room, closing the door behind her to block the sound of the gurgling washer. “Now we have the corner grocery store, electricity, microwaves, automatic washers and dryers, refrigerators, drive-thru ATMs, combustion engines, email, cell phones, HMO’s, daycare… Wal-mart.”

“You think all that, just looking at a washing machine?”

She shrugged. “It’s just interesting. To see how things change.”

“Which way is better?” he asked.

She sighed. “Sometimes I wish things were simpler, I mean, the way they used to be. If I had to concentrate on mopping floors and gathering eggs and sewing clothes, maybe there wouldn’t be so much empty time for things to fill my head.”

“So move to a farm,” said Harvest.

“And,” she continued as if he hadn’t spoken, “sometimes I wonder, if things had been that way when I was a kid… if things would be different now.”

“You mean, if your mother had been home instead of at work, that you might not be crazy?”

Is that what I mean? she thought.

“Essentially,” she said.

Harvest looked at the ceiling. “People are who they are and nothing can change it.”

She was at the kitchen sink, her eyes fixed on the window. She said to the back lawn, “So I would be the same, whether she had been there or not.”

Harvest replied, “Yes. There was always something a little wrong with you, from the beginning, which is why people treated you the way that they did. Having her there wouldn’t have changed that.”

She was very tired suddenly. She looked over at Harvest. “Why don’t you go find someone else to bother?”

He returned her look with a fond smile. “Because you’re my favorite.”