One thing about Mr. Maddox, he always made it darned hard to argue with him.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
We hadn’t been working for the Maddoxes long when it dawned on me that Doris and the kids hardly ever left the house except to go into the front yard. Some days I’d sit on the front steps watching Cindy, Jerry Jr., and Randy and studying the extensive hubcap collection that hung on the chain-link fence. There was something hypnotic about those rows and rows of hubcaps—shiny and bold, like shields, with spokes or arrowheads or sunburst patterns—and when they caught the sun, they were almost blinding.
The funny thing was, even when the kids were out in the yard, they didn’t really play. They just sat on the grass or in the plastic toy cars bleached by the Virginia sun, staring straight ahead, and I couldn’t for the life of me get them to pretend to drive or even make car noises.
But they didn’t even go into the yard that often. One reason was because Mr. Maddox and Doris had a fixation about germs and bacteria. That was why they were always having me scrub down their walls, floors, and countertops and why they had more cleaning products than I knew existed: ammonia, Clorox, Lysol, different cleaners for carpets, leather, glass, wood, sinks, toilets, upholstery, chrome, brass, even a special aerosol spray to remove stains from neckties.
Cindy Maddox was the most obsessed with the idea of contamination. She wouldn’t eat her food if other food had touched it. The grease from the burger wasn’t allowed to run onto the potatoes, the canned corn couldn’t bump up against the meat loaf, and she wouldn’t eat eggs at all because the white and the yolk had shared the shell. Cindy didn’t like her toys to be touched, either. Most of her dolls were still in their boxes, lined up on a shelf in her room, staring out from behind the cellophane.
Cindy was the only Maddox kid who was school-age. Her parents homeschooled her, however, because Doris was afraid she’d catch germs. Cindy hadn’t done well on the last exam she’d been given, so even though it was summer, she had schoolwork. But Cindy wasn’t really interested in learning, and Doris wasn’t really interested in teaching. The two of them usually sat on the Naugahyde couch, watching TV together. Sometimes Doris had Liz or me read to Cindy. Cindy loved being read to. She also loved the way Liz would change the ending to a story if Cindy found it upsetting, having the little match girl survive instead of freezing to death, or saving the one-legged tin soldier and the paper ballerina rather than letting them wind up in the fire.
Doris wanted me to tutor Cindy, who knew how to read on her own but didn’t seem to enjoy it. One day I had her read aloud from The Yearling. She made it through a chapter just fine, but when I asked her what she thought of it, she went completely blank. I asked her a few more questions and realized she didn’t understand a darned thing about what she’d just read. She had no problem with the individual words but couldn’t string them together to mean anything. She treated the words like she did her food, keeping each one separate.
I was trying to explain to Cindy how words depended on other words for their meaning—how the bark of a dog is different from the bark of a tree—when I heard Mr. Maddox start shouting at Doris in the bedroom. He was going on about how she didn’t need any new clothes. Who was she trying to impress? Or was she trying to seduce someone? I looked at Cindy, who acted as if she didn’t hear anything at all.
Mr. Maddox came into the living room carrying a cardboard box and he handed it to me. “Put this in the Le Mans,” he said.
Inside the box were Doris’s three faded housedresses and her one pair of street shoes. Doris appeared in the hallway in her nightgown. “Those are my clothes,” she said. “I don’t have anything to wear.”
“They’re not your clothes,” Mr. Maddox told her. “They’re Jerry Maddox’s clothes. Who bought them? Jerry Maddox. Who worked his butt off to pay for them? Jerry Maddox. So who do they belong to?”
“Jerry Maddox,” Doris said.
“That’s correct. I just let you wear them when I want. It’s like this house.” He swung his arm around. “Who owns it? Jerry Maddox. But I let you live here.” He turned back to me. “Now go put that box in the car.”
I felt like I was being drawn into the middle of the fight. Since I worked mainly for Doris, I glanced at her to see what she wanted me to do, half expecting her to tell me to give her the box. She was just standing there looking defeated, so I carried the box out to the breezeway and put it in the backseat of the Le Mans.
As I closed the car door, Mr. Maddox stepped outside. “You think I was being hard on Doris, don’t you?” he said. “Not for nothing. She’s one of those people who needs to be disciplined.” Doris was fast when he first met her, Mr. Maddox went on. She wore too much makeup, her skirts were way too short, and she let men take advantage of her. “I had to step in to protect her from herself. I still do. If I let her go out whenever she wants, she’ll fall back into her old ways. Without her clothes, she can’t go out. If she can’t go out, she can’t get in trouble. I’m not being mean. I’m doing it for her own good. You see?”