Raising Demons (23 page)

The refrigerator man had told me to boil all the dishes on the table, and anything else which had been exposed to the gas, and after I had boiled all the dishes I was prepared to take a fairly strong stand on the subject of a dishwasher, since the refrigerator people handled dishwashers too and would give us quite a nice discount if we bought them both at once, and there was, in fact, the exact dishwasher I had been wanting for so long, only a page or two past the refrigerator in the catalogue. I went into the study diffidently and told my husband all this, adding that I was terribly sorry but I was afraid that I needed a dishwasher because my hands were so red and rough from washing all those dishes that I was probably not going to be able to do anything else for a long time, and besides, I told him thoughtfully, it did not become a professional beauty contest judge to have a wife with hands toil-worn from housework.

When the dishwasher was installed the next day I went to work and washed all the dishes I owned; it took six loads. It was nice to have everything so clean and sparkling, but the children and I felt that although the refrigerator and the dishwasher looked nice in the kitchen, and there is nothing really shabby about our nice kitchen range, although it is six years old, the kitchen floor, which was done by a previous owner in dark red and brown linoleum, was disgraceful. It quite took away the charm of the acres of white porcelain in the kitchen. I went into the study and told my husband that the kitchen linoleum was shocking, and suppose some of his new friends should decide to visit him, how would he feel about the shocking kitchen floor? We decided on a nice light green, with red and blue and yellow polka dots, and I got a new tablecloth to match it. Laurie and I decided that during the following winter we would paint all the kitchen woodwork yellow.

What with all the installations and getting the linoleum down it was nearly two weeks before we were back to normal, but one Saturday morning at last I was in my bright kitchen, putting dishes into the dishwasher and wondering why I had not had a dishwasher long ago, when Laurie came unhappily down the back stairs and into the kitchen. “Listen,” he said.

“Yes?”

“Dad home?”

“He's gone down to get a haircut. Why?”

“Well, look.” Laurie shuffled his feet, ran his fingers through his hair, and sighed. “Look,” he said.

“Well?” I said.

“You know the sodium bisulphite Dad gave me to do in my chemistry set?”

“Yes. I mean, I guess so.”

“Well.” Laurie hesitated. “I lost it,” he said.

“That's too bad.”

“I put it in a pan with the acid I was using and put it on the radiator there and you remember how cold it was just before we got the new refrigerator because we all said it was too cold for late spring? And the radiator must of gone on? And now I found the little pan but it's
empty.
”

I turned around slowly and looked at him. “Laurie,” I said, “that sodium what-do-you-call-it and the other stuff mixed together—what would they do?”

“I don't know,” Laurie said. “That's what I was going to find out. Why—you know where it is?”

I looked around at my lovely kitchen, with the polka dots on the floor and the new refrigerator glowing, its great shelves heavy with the fancy foods I had never been able to fit into the old one, at my dishwasher and my new tablecloth. “Maybe you'd better just not mention it to Dad just yet,” I said.

“You think he might worry?”

“Well, yes,” I said. “I think he might.” I closed the dishwasher affectionately.

“You think he'd take away my chemistry set?”

“I'm almost certain of it,” I said.

“
Then
can I learn to play the trumpet?”

 • • • 

Before the children were able to start counting days till school was out, and before Laurie had learned to play more than a simple scale on the trumpet, and even before my husband's portable radio had gone in for its annual checkup so it could broadcast the Brooklyn games all summer, we found ourselves deeply involved in the Little League. The Little League was new in our town that year. One day all the kids were playing baseball in vacant lots and without any noticeable good sportsmanship, and the next day, almost, we were standing around the grocery and the post office wondering what kind of a manager young Johnny Cole was going to make, and whether the Weaver boy—the one with the strong arm—was going to be twelve this August, or only eleven as his mother said, and Bill Cummings had donated his bulldozer to level off the top of Sugar Hill, where the kids used to go sledding, and we were all sporting stickers on our cars reading “We have contributed” and the fund-raising campaign was over the top in forty-eight hours. There are a thousand people in our town, and it turned out, astonishingly, that about sixty of them were boys of Little League age. Laurie thought he'd try out for pitcher and his friend Billy went out for catcher. Dinnertime all over town got shifted to eight-thirty in the evening, when nightly baseball practice was over. By the time our family had become accustomed to the fact that no single problem in our house could be allowed to interfere in any way with the tempering of Laurie's right arm, the uniforms had been ordered, and four teams had been chosen and named, and Laurie and Billy were together on the Little League Braves. My friend Dot, Billy's mother, was learning to keep a box score. I announced in family assembly that there would be no more oiling of baseball gloves in the kitchen sink.

We lived only a block or so from the baseball field, and it became the amiable custom of the ballplayers to drop in for a snack on their way to the practice sessions. There was to be a double-header on Memorial Day, to open the season. The Braves would play the Giants; the Red Sox would play the Dodgers. After one silent, apoplectic moment my husband agreed, gasping, to come to the ball games and root against the Dodgers. A rumor got around town that the Red Sox were the team to watch, with Butch Weaver's strong arm, and several mothers believed absolutely that the various managers were putting their own sons into all the best positions, although everyone told everyone else that it didn't matter, really,
what
position the boys held so long as they got a chance to play ball, and show they were good sports about it. As a matter of fact, the night before the double-header which was to open the Little League, I distinctly recall that I told Laurie it was only a game. “It's only a game, fella,” I said. “Don't
try
to go to sleep; read or something if you're nervous. Would you like an aspirin?”

“I forgot to tell you,” Laurie said, yawning. “He's pitching Georgie tomorrow. Not me.”

“
What
?
” I thought, and then said heartily, “I mean, he's the manager, after all. I know you'll play your best in
any
position.”

“I could go to sleep now if you'd just turn out the light,” Laurie said patiently. “I'm really quite tired.”

I called Dot later, about twelve o'clock, because I was pretty sure she'd still be awake, and of course she was, although Billy had gone right off about nine o'clock. She said she wasn't the least bit nervous, because of course it didn't really matter except for the kids' sake, and she hoped the best team would win. I said that that was just what I had been telling my husband, and she said
her
husband had suggested that perhaps she had better not go to the game at all because if the Braves lost she ought to be home with a hot bath ready for Billy and perhaps a steak dinner or something. I said that even if Laurie wasn't pitching I was sure the Braves would win, and of course I wasn't one of those people who always wanted their own children right out in the center of things all the time but if the Braves lost it would be my opinion that their lineup ought to be revised and Georgie put back into right field where he belonged. She said
she
thought Laurie was a better pitcher, and I suggested that she and her husband and Billy come over for lunch and we could all go to the game together.

I spent all morning taking movies of the Memorial Day parade, particularly the Starlight 4-H Club, because Jannie was marching with them, and I used up almost a whole film magazine on Sally and Barry, standing at the curb, wide-eyed and rapt, waving flags. Laurie missed the parade because he slept until nearly twelve, and then came downstairs and made himself an enormous platter of bacon and eggs and toast, which he took out to the hammock and ate lying down.

“How do you feel?” I asked him, coming out to feel his forehead. “Did you sleep all right? How's your arm?”

“Sure,” he said.

We cooked lunch outdoors, and Laurie finished his breakfast in time to eat three hamburgers. Dot had only a cup of coffee, and I took a little salad. Every now and then she would ask Billy if he wanted to lie down for a little while before the game, and I would ask Laurie how he felt. The game was not until two o'clock, so there was time for Jannie and Sally and Barry to roast marshmallows. Laurie and Billy went into the barn to warm up with a game of ping-pong, and Billy's father remarked that the boys certainly took this Little League setup seriously, and my husband said that it was the best thing in the world for the kids. When the boys came out of the barn after playing three games of ping-pong I asked Billy if he was feeling all right and Dot said she thought Laurie ought to lie down for a while before the game. The boys said no, they had to meet the other guys at the school at one-thirty and they were going to get into their uniforms now. I said please to be careful, and Dot said if they needed any help dressing just call down and we would come up, and both boys turned and looked at us curiously for a minute before they went indoors.

“My goodness,” I said to Dot, “I hope they're not nervous.”

“Well, they take it so seriously,” she said.

I sent the younger children in to wash the marshmallow off their faces, and while our husbands settled down to read over the Little League rule book, Dot and I cleared away the paper plates and gave the leftover hamburgers to the dog. Suddenly Dot said, “Oh,” in a weak voice and I turned around and Laurie and Billy were coming through the door in their uniforms. “They look so—so—
tall
,” Dot said, and I said, “Laurie?” uncertainly. The boys laughed, and looked at each other.

“Pretty neat,” Laurie said, looking at Billy.

“Some get-up,” Billy said, regarding Laurie.

Both fathers came over and began turning the boys around and around, and Jannie and Sally came out onto the porch and stared worshipfully. Barry, to whom Laurie and his friends have always seemed incredibly tall and efficient, gave them a critical glance and observed that this was truly a baseball.

It turned out that there was a good deal of advice the fathers still needed to give the ballplayers, so they elected to walk over to the school with Billy and Laurie and then on to the ball park, where they would find Dot and me later. We watched them walk down the street; not far away they were joined by another boy in uniform and then a couple more. After that, for about half an hour, there were boys in uniform wandering by twos and threes toward the baseball field and the school, all alike in a kind of unexpected dignity and new tallness, all walking with self-conscious pride. Jannie and Sally stood on the front porch watching, careful to greet by name all the ballplayers going by.

A few minutes before two, Dot and I put the younger children in her car and drove over to the field. Assuming that perhaps seventy-five of the people in our town were actively engaged in the baseball game, there should have been about nine hundred and twenty-five people in the audience, but there seemed to be more than that already; Dot and I both remarked that it was the first town affair we had ever attended where there were more strange faces than familiar ones.

Although the field itself was completely finished, there was only one set of bleachers up, and that was filled, so Dot and I took the car robe and settled ourselves on top of the little hill over the third-base line, where we had a splendid view of the whole field. We talked about how it was at the top of this hill the kids used to start their sleds, coasting right down past third base and on into center field, where the ground flattened out and the sleds would stop. From the little hill we could see the roofs of the houses in the town below, half hidden in the trees, and far on to the hills in the distance. We both remarked that there was still snow on the high mountain.

Barry stayed near us, deeply engaged with a little dump truck. Jannie and Sally accepted twenty-five cents each, and melted into the crowd in the general direction of the refreshment stand. Dot got out her pencil and box score, and I put a new magazine of film in the movie camera. We could see our husbands standing around in back of the Braves' dugout, along with the fathers of all the other Braves players. They were all in a group, chatting with great humorous informality with the manager and the two coaches of the Braves. The fathers of the boys on the Giant team were down by the Giant dugout, standing around the manager and the coaches of the Giants.

Marian, a friend of Dot's and mine whose boy Artie was first baseman for the Giants, came hurrying past looking for a seat, and we offered her part of our car robe. She sat down, breathless, and said she had mislaid her husband and her younger son, so we showed her where her husband was down by the Giant dugout with the other fathers, and her younger son turned up almost at once to say that Sally had a popsicle and so could he have one, too, and a hot dog and maybe some popcorn?

Suddenly, from far down the block, we could hear the high school band playing “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” and coming closer. Everyone stood up to watch and then the band turned the corner and came through the archway with the official Little League insignia and up to the entrance of the field. All the ballplayers were marching behind the band. I thought foolishly of Laurie when he was Barry's age, and something of the sort must have crossed Dot's mind, because she reached out and put her hand on Barry's head. “There's Laurie and Billy,” Barry said softly. The boys ran out onto the field and lined up along the base lines, and then I discovered that we were all cheering, with Barry jumping up and down and shouting, “Baseball! Baseball!”