The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate

Chapter 17 HOME ECONOMIES

AGAINST MY WILL, I had arrived at that age when a young girl began to acquire those skills she would need to manage her own household after marriage. And of course, all the girls I knew expected to get married. Everybody did, unless you were so rich that you didn’t have to, or so hard on the eyes that no man would have you. A few girls went off to be teachers or nurses for a while before they got married, and I considered them lucky. And now we had the example of Maggie Medlin, Telephone Operator, an independent woman with her own money who answered to no man other than Mr. Bell. Since there was still only the one telephone in town, her duties were not onerous. She sat before her board, receiver around her neck, eating apples and reading the newspaper until the board buzzed with a call to be relayed. She then plugged in a cord and said in the same crisp voice every time, “Hello, Central, what number please?” She had to say this, despite the fact that there was only the one number. All the girls in school admired her. We played Operator with a scrap of cardboard and a length of twine for a switching station. This looked like the good life to me. But the telephone proved to be so popular that soon everyone had to have one. Maggie was not allowed to leave her station and became a veritable Company slave.

THE PLANT THRIVED. We heard no word from Washington. Granddaddy toiled on with me at his elbow whenever I could escape to the laboratory with him.

One Saturday morning, Mother looked up from her sewing as I was running out the front door, one of Granddaddy’s butterfly nets and his old fishing creel slung over my shoulder. “Stop a minute,” she said as my hand turned the doorknob. I didn’t like the way she looked me over. “Where are you off to?” she said.

“Down to the river, ma’am, to collect specimens,” I said, edging crabwise out the door.

“Come back here. Specimens are all very well,” said Mother, “but I’m worried that you are lagging behind. When I was your age, I could smock and darn and had the essentials of good plain cookery.”

“I know how to cook,” I said stoutly.

“What can you cook?” she said.

“I can make a cheese sandwich. I can make a soft-boiled egg.” I thought about it some more, and then said triumphantly, “I can make a hard-boiled egg.”

My mother said, “Lord above, it’s worse than I thought.”

“What is?” I said.

“Your ignorance of cookery.”

“But why do I have to cook? Viola cooks for us,” I said.

“Yes, but what about later? When you grow up and have a family of your own? How will you feed them?”

Viola had been with us always, since before I was born, since before even Harry was born. It had never occurred to me that she wouldn’t always be there. My world wobbled on its axis. “Viola can cook for my family,” I said.

There was silence. Then Mother said, “All right, you can go. But we will talk about this again soon.”

I ran out of there and did my best to forget the conversation, but it nagged at me all the way to the river like a tooth beginning to go bad. All joy had fled the morning. Mother was awakening to the sorry facts: My biscuits were like stones, my samplers askew, my seams like rickrack. I considered my mother’s life: the mending basket that never emptied, the sheets and collars and cuffs to be turned, the twenty loaves of bread to be punched down each and every week. It’s true that she didn’t have to do all the heavy cleaning herself—she had SanJuanna for that. And a washerwoman came on Monday and spent the whole day boiling the clothes in the dripping laundry shed out back. Viola killed and plucked and cooked the chickens. Alberto dispatched and butchered the hogs. But my mother’s life was a never-ending round of maintenance. Not one single thing did she ever achieve but that it had to be done all over again, one day or one week or one season later. Oh, the monotony.

The day didn’t begin to look up until I caught a spotted fritillary butterfly. They were swift and elusive and difficult to net. I knew Granddaddy would be well pleased, plus it helped keep my mind off cooking and mending. When I got home, it took me a whole hour just to set the delicate body in preparation for mounting, and by then I had forgotten what an ignorant girl I was. Just as well, as the campaign to bring me up to domestic scratch was, without my knowledge or cooperation, ginning up in earnest.

The campaign gained momentum when Miss Harbottle decided that all the girls in my class would enter their handiwork in the Fentress Fair. This was distressing news. I found sewing a waste of time, and I had been easing along doing the minimum. My work could charitably be described as sloppy, like Petey’s cocoon. Stitches dropped themselves and later reappeared at random so that the long striped scarf I was knitting bulged in the middle like a python after dining on a rabbit. I fancied that a malevolent Rumpelstiltskin crept into my room at night and undid my best work, turning the gold of my efforts into pathetic dross on a wheel perversely spinning backward.

Although she’d been watching my knitting to some degree, it had been a while since Mother had inspected my fine sewing. One day she asked to check my work. I reluctantly took her my sewing bag, and she poked through it for a minute. “You did this?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Are you proud of it?”

Was I proud of it? I pondered this. Was it a trick question or not? I couldn’t tell; I didn’t know which way to flop. “Uh . . .”

“I’m asking you, Calpurnia.”

“No, ma’am, I guess I’m not too proud of it.”

“Then why don’t you do work you can be proud of?”

I thought again. I had no snappy answer, so I had to fall back on honesty. “Because it’s boring, ma’am?” A truthful answer, but one I knew to be foolish, even as it exited my mouth.

“Ah,” said Mother. “Boring.”

A bad sign when she repeated your own words back to you like a parrot. Now, parrots. Those were some interesting birds, living to such a great age that they were passed down in the family will. Why, Granddaddy had told me about a parrot who had lived past his century and learned over four hundred conversational phrases, as acute a mimic as any human being . . .

“Calpurnia, I don’t believe you’re . . .”

Although I doubted I’d be allowed a parrot (Granddaddy had also told me they were very expensive), this didn’t necessarily exclude the possibility of something smaller, a cockatiel, say, or maybe a budgie. . . . Mother’s lips were moving. . . . Something about practicing?

“Have to do better . . .”

A budgie would do as the bird of last resort. They could be taught to speak, couldn’t they?

“When I was your age . . .”

And if I had a budgie, would I be allowed to let it fly loose in the house? Probably not. It would drop white dollops like antimacassars on the good furniture, and that would be the end of that. And you couldn’t forget Idabelle the Inside Cat in her basket by the stove. Maybe I could let it fly in my bedroom. It could perch on my headboard and chirrup in my ear, a pleasant sound—

“Calpurnia!”

I jumped. “Yes, Mother?”

“You’re not listening to me!”

I stared at her. How could she tell?

“You’d better listen to me. This situation is intolerable. Your work is unacceptable. I expect better from you, and you will do better, do you understand me? I’m surprised Miss Harbottle hasn’t sent me a note about this.”

She had. Two, in fact.

“You will show me your work every night until the fair.”

This meant that I’d have to pay more attention for a few weeks. Gloom tolled its heavy bell in my ear. I was a marked girl.

IT WAS GETTING on in the day. I’d had an inordinate and unfair amount of homework, and there were a couple of hours of decent working light left. I headed for the door at top speed. Mother sat in the parlor reviewing her housekeeping accounts. “Calpurnia,” she called, “the river again?”

Too late. “Yes, Mother,” I said, in my best cheerful-obedient-good-girl voice.

“Bring me your sewing first.”

“What?”

“Don’t say what like that, my girl. Bring me your sewing before there’s any talk about going to the river. And where’s your bonnet? You’ll freckle.”

How could I freckle? It was practically dark out. I tromped back up the stairs, feeling as if I were carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders.

“And stop stamping about like that,” Mother called. “You’re not carrying the weight of the world, you know.”

Her comment startled me into proper behavior. It was scary how she could read my mind. I crept the rest of my way up to my room and closed the door. I pulled my sampler from my sewing bag and looked at it. It had started out life as a perfect square but had evolved into a skewed rhomboid, with all the letters leaning sharply to the right. How were you supposed to make the stitches the same size? How were you supposed to keep the tension even? And, most of all, who cared about this stuff?

Well, I could answer the last one. My mother cared, and the rest of the world apparently did too, for no good reason that I could figure out. And I, who did not care, was going to be forced into caring. It was ridiculous. I threw the embroidery hoop across the room.

Two hours later, I took my work downstairs. The assignment was to embroider “Welcome to Our Home” in flowery script. I had made it as far as “Welco,” but it was all wobbly, so I had picked it out and reworked the entire W to show Mother.

“Is this all you have done?” she said.

“It’s a big letter! It’s a capital!”

“All right, all right. Lower your voice. You have done better, which shows me, Calpurnia, that you can do this if you would only apply yourself.”

Oh, how my brothers and I hated that word apply.

“Can I go?”

“Yes, you may go. Don’t be late for dinner.”

As Mother lit the parlor lamps, I shoved my handiwork away and dashed out the front door. There wasn’t much light left. Too late to collect diurnal samples. Great. I could see the newspaper: Girl Scientist Thwarted for All Time by Stupid Sewing Projects. Loss to Society Immeasurable. Entire Scientific Community in Mourning.

I seethed my way to the river and got there at darkfall. And then Viola’s bell clanged in the distance.

I clomped through the kitchen on the way to washing up and said to Viola, “How come I have to learn how to sew and cook? Why? Can you tell me that? Can you?”

I’ll admit it was a bad time to ask her—she was beating the last lumps out of the gravy—but she paused long enough to look at me with puzzlement, as if I were speaking ancient Greek. “What kind of question is that?” she said, and went back to whisking the gravy in the fragrant, smoking pan.

My Lord, what a dismal response. Was the answer such an ingrained, obvious part of the way we lived that no one stopped to ponder the question itself? If no one around me even understood the question, then it couldn’t be answered. And if it couldn’t be answered, I was doomed to the distaff life of only womanly things. I was depressed right into the ground.

After dinner I went to my room, put on my nightie, and read. I was munching my way, so to speak, through Granddaddy’s volumes of Dickens with great satisfaction and had made it all the way to Oliver Twist. Please, sir, could I have some more? The poor wretch’s circumstances were grim enough to make me reconsider my own situation.

I went downstairs for a glass of water. Mother and Father were sitting in the parlor with the door open.

“What will we do with her?” said Mother, and I froze on the landing. There was only one her they ever talked about, and it was me. “The boys will make their way in the world, but what about her? Your father feeds her a steady diet of Dickens and Darwin. Access to too many books like those can build disaffection in one’s life. Especially a young life. Most especially a young girl’s life.”

I wanted to yell, We’re doing important work! There’s the Plant! But then I’d really catch it for eavesdropping.

“I don’t see the harm in it,” said Father.

“She runs wild all day with a butterfly net. She doesn’t know how to sew or keep house,” said Mother.

“Well, plenty of girls her age don’t know yet,” said Father. “Don’t they?”

“She can’t cook a dry bean. And her biscuits are like . . . like . . . I don’t know what.”

Rocks, I thought. Isn’t that the word you’re looking for?

“I’m sure she’ll pick these things up,” said Father.

“Alfred, she keeps frogs in her room.”

“She does?”

I wanted to call out, That’s a lousy lie—they’re only tadpoles.

But then it happened. My father fell silent. And it was his silence, his long pause while he digested this information, that filled the hallway and my heart and soul with such a great whooshing pressure that I couldn’t breathe. I had never classified myself with other girls. I was not of their species; I was different. I had never thought my future would be like theirs. But now I knew this was untrue, and that I was exactly like other girls. I was expected to hand over my life to a house, a husband, children. It was intended that I give up my nature studies, my Notebook, my beloved river. There was a wicked point to all the sewing and cooking that they were trying to impress upon me, the tedious lessons I had been spurning and ducking. I went hot and cold all over. My life did not lie with the Plant after all. My life was forfeit. Why hadn’t I seen it? I was trapped. A coyote with her paw in the trap.

After an eternity, Father sighed, “I see. Well, Margaret, what shall we do about it?”

“She needs to spend less time with your father and more time with me and Viola. I’ve already told her I’m going to supervise her cookery and her stitchery. We’ll have to have lessons. A new dish every week, I think.”

“Will we have to eat it?” said Father. “Heh, heh.”

“Now, Alfred.”

Tears sprang to my eyes. That my own father could joke about his only daughter being pressed into domestic slavery.

“I trust these things to you, Margaret,” he said. “I always feel such matters are safest in your hands, despite the burden it places on you. How are your headaches these days, my dear?”

“Not so bad, Alfred, not so bad.”

My father crossed the room, and I saw him stoop and drop a kiss on my mother’s forehead. “I am glad to hear it. Can I bring you your tonic?”

“No, thank you, I’m fine.”

My father returned to his seat, rustled his newspaper, and that was that. My life sentence delivered.

I leaned against the wall and stood there, empty, for a long time. Empty of everything. I was only a practical vessel of helpful service, waiting to be filled up with recipes and knitting patterns.

Jim Bowie came padding down the stairs. Without speaking, he wrapped himself around me and gave me one of his long, sweet hugs.

“Thanks, J.B.,” I whispered, and we walked upstairs together hand-in-hand.

“Are you sick, Callie Vee?” he said.

“I reckon I am, J.B.”

“I can tell,” he said.

“It’s true. You can always tell.”

“Don’t feel bad. You’re my best sister, Callie.” We climbed onto my bed, and he curled up next to me.

He said, “You said you were going to play with me more.”

I said, “I’m sorry, J.B. I’ve been spending time with Granddaddy” But it’s all coming to an end soon enough, I thought.

“Does he know about Big Foot Wallace?”

“He does.”

“Do you think he’d tell me about Big Foot Wallace?”

“You should ask him. He might, but he’s kind of busy.” Busy without me, I moped.

“Maybe I’ll ask him,” said J.B. “But he scares me. I got to go. Good night, Callie. Don’t be sick.”

He gently closed the door. My last thought, before I fell into a restless sleep, was of the coyote. If only I could figure out how to gnaw my own leg off.