At the same time that books become doors promising light for Saffee, her mother begins to spiral downward into darkness.
CHAPTER NINE
DISCONTENT
Throughout the winter, Joann grows more resentful of Nels’s absences. She broods. She frets. She gives minimal attention to her daughters, choosing instead radio episodes of The Guiding Light, The Right to Happiness, and The Romance of Helen Trent. The romantic poets continue to be her nighttime companions. She asks Nels to buy her a spiral-bound notebook. In it she tries her hand at her own poetry. At times throughout the day she whispers a word or phrase that fancies her, rolls it around in her head, tries it out on the mirror, and when satisfied, scribbles in the notebook, murmuring. At first her poetry dissects loneliness. The loneliness she learned as a child. Then she begins to fantasize what her life would be like with a man more handsome, more entertaining than Nels. She wonders if perhaps he also desires . . .
As is Saffee’s habit, she watches her mother. She notes that Joann’s hands, when quiet, are fists. Not fists that pummel, but neither do they stroke, or pat, or beckon. Their clench seems to restrain something within. At other times the same hands are fastidious, precisely stacking towels for the shelf as if on display, then moving on to pound flour with the edge of a saucer into sinewy round steak until it is pink and flaccid.
It’s not unusual that when Nels returns home from work, Saffee hears her parents argue.
“Don’t you forget, Nels,” her mother will say, “I was alone all those years you were at sea, working my fingers to the bone and so worried about you. When the war was over, I thought you’d stay home.”
“I work hard for you, Joann,” Nels will counter, “so we can have things. Don’tcha understand?”
On weekends, Nels pays bills, buys groceries, and tends to neglected household chores.
With little to occupy her time and mind, baseless suspicions spread across Joann’s void. She quizzes Nels about what he does at work each day and what he does each night.
Exasperated, Nels sputters, “If you’d just git out, Joann, meet folks, make some women friends—”
She cuts him off. “Gregarious is for you, Nels”—she tosses her head—“not me.”
In February, Joann declares, “If I don’t see more of you, Nels, I’m going to die! So I’ve made a decision—I’m going to travel with you.”
“Joann, don’t talk nonsense. What about the girls?”
“I don’t know about them, Nels, but I’m just not going to be alone in this house anymore.”
Nels knows that his wife’s feelings, although not understood, cannot be treated casually. Wearied by her discontent, he offers a compromise. “How ’bout if we move, then? If we get a place more the middle of my territory, I can be home more.”
Joann agrees and shakes off some of her recent melancholy. The next three Saturdays, with Saffee and April in tow, they travel miles of highways, bordered by drifting snow, to evaluate small towns that dot the interior of the state. On the third week, they consider Miller’s Ford, a community of four thousand residents, where fathers work, mothers keep house, and children grow up to follow suit.
“I can see it’s a decent place,” Joann says as they explore. “Churches outnumber beer joints more than two to one.” She’s made a careful count. “And there’s a minimum of garish neon signs,” she adds. Nels notes there seems no need for traffic lights. “Uptown,” Main Street has a variety of stores, a movie theater, and a bank. They drive past a two-story redbrick school, a small hospital, and a Carnegie library.
The following Saturday they find a six-bedroom, fifty-year-old house for sale on the west end of town. With great enthusiasm, Joann recognizes its potential and leaves behind her season of inertia, replacing it with one of creativity.
“Look, Nels. This huge kitchen could be made into an efficiency apartment to rent out.” In her exuberance, she fairly flies to the next room. “The big dining room can be divided, making a small dining room for us, with a new kitchen at that end.”
With ideas bubbling like a percolator, Joann quickly notes that the four upstairs bedrooms are large enough to make two more apartments. “And, oh!” she gushes. “The living room French doors downstairs can be closed to give the upstairs renters private access. We won’t even have to see them at all,” she says, “except to collect the rent, of course.” Eventually, however, she will make sure that through those French doors she is able to see and hear them.
Nels, more cautious than his wife, tries to temper her, commenting that such a huge remodeling project is beyond him and would need to be hired out. While April scampers with delight from room to room, Joann solicits Saffee’s support. “Saffee, wouldn’t you just love to sit and read on the wraparound screened porch? And here, look out this window, there’s a river down that hill, right across the street. You can learn to swim in the summer and skate in the winter.” Saffee looks dubious.