Chapter 2: Established

Carolyn Pierce felt a constant tension between her duties as a mother, as a teacher, and as a scholar. She’d be able to put teaching on hold when the university was closed for the summer. In May of ‘78, though, it took up most of her time, and would expand to take all of her waking time if she let it. That was another demand, sleep, and Bill thought she had responsibilities as a wife, too. She sort of agreed, but couldn’t these responsibilities be put on hold until grades were in? Sex couldn’t, and she enjoyed sex, although she didn’t rate it as far over sleep in importance as she had as an undergraduate.

House hunting, however, had waited for five years of their marriage and four of their being parents. Couldn’t it wait for another month?

“Look,” Bill said. “We’re talking about a place where we’ll spend much of the rest of our lives, where the boys will grow up. We want to look carefully, and we don’t want to limit ourselves. If we plan to move in the day we close, we’ll limit ourselves to places which don’t need any repair. We’ll limit ourselves to the decor, at least the paint job, that the previous owners liked. I’ve got an extension on our lease through August. Do you really want to move in September? You think house-hunting takes time? It’s less hassle than moving. At least, when we’re house-hunting, we’ll have a secure place to leave the twins. At least we will until Barb leaves.” Barb, their daily help and Paul and Johnny’s center of security, was pregnant and engaged.

“Okay. You look. You’re the one with strong preferences.”

“Until you see my choice and veto it.” Did she really have a veto? Did she really want a veto?

“Even so, and I don’t have all that high standards. I’d like a place I could work at home, but the University doesn’t ask my opinion before assigning me an office. You get some places you’d accept, and then I’ll look.” And, with any luck, Bill, who was hard to please in many things, wouldn’t have any choices until classes were over for the ‘77 - ‘78 school year.

Bill took two weeks of vacation in May and started looking. If he was hard to please, he was also a determined man. He wanted the two of them to look at one house on Saturday afternoon. She came home from her Saturday-morning class to find that Mrs. Donnelly, their planned babysitter, couldn’t make it.

After a little discussion, she left the twins with Bill and went to the real-estate agent herself. The agent, Marge Vargas, didn’t look happy.

“You’ll really have to look the place over together,” she said.

“I’m sure.” Although she didn’t see why. She and Bill would have to talk about it, but they could do that from having seen it at different times. “He likes it, though. If I absolutely love it, you’ll have made a sale. If I absolutely hate it, probably not. If I’m somewhere in between, we’ll have to find a time we both can come.” After all, if Vargas thought she was wasting her time, she wasn’t wasting time that had as many demands on it as Carolyn’s time did. And she’d get compensated very well for that time, even if the seller’s agent and the agency would take big slices of that pie first.

She neither hated nor loved the place. What was there to hate or love about a house which you had no past in? She loved, and hated for that matter, the house in which she’d grown up. This house evoked no memories. The parlor off the living room was small for that purpose, but large for an office just for her. That was Bill’s suggestion, though. The upstairs contained more rooms than they’d really need. She knew, though, that they’d find uses for them. ‘Stuff accumulates to fill all the room you have for it, and then more.’

The outside was more problematical. The stand-alone garage was built for two large cars and then some. That was fine. The house to the west, though, was an eyesore.

“The City of Evanston is in court to tear it down,” Vargas told her. “I don’t know when that will be resolved.” Like in this century? Still, it was odd that Bill had even considered the house with that one next door. Well, it was his friends, or his business colleagues who had to pretend to be friends, whom they had to worry about impressing.

“What do you think?” Vargas asked when they went back to their separate cars.

“I’ll talk to Bill.” And she would. Maybe they could each think about it until classes let out. She had already decided that she wasn’t going to any conferences on regional economics in ‘78.

“Okay,” Bill asked when she got home, “did you like it?” The kids were watching Saturday cartoons.

“It’s awfully big.”

“A house for a family of four. The twins will get bigger. They’re four in ‘78. They’ll be sixteen in ‘90. They’ll need a little room, then. This place is cramped for the entertaining I have to do as a vice president, and I want a formal space that can be separate from the family space.”

“Keep Johnny and Paul away from your guests?” Bill so often played the doting parent.

“As far as possible. I’m proud of my boys -- our boys -- but I don’t want to cramp them very long the way they’d have to be cramped among business guests.”

“You let them run in church.” And she sometimes heard about that from other choir members. The majority opinion in the choir, though, was that the twins were cute.

“Yeah. ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me and restrain them not.’” Wasn’t it ‘ ... and forbid them not.’? “It’s His house. He sets the rules. Andalusia, on the other hand, contains some real pricks.” She glanced towards the living room reflexively. The boys were engrossed in TV, too engrossed, she hoped, to notice Daddy’s language.

“If I said that...”

“To me alone, I’d let it go. Of course, I know which executive of Andalusia you know best.”

“Well...” She had often thought that Bill was a prick, if that wasn’t her preferred term. She had called him worse, but not when the boys would hear. She didn’t, however, think of him in terms of being an executive of his drug firm. He thought of that as his identity. She thought of Andalusia as an appendage to Bill.

“And the office?” he asked.

“It’s really a parlor.” And it would be large for an office. That, too, would fill up, though. She could already imagine it crammed with bookshelves and file cabinets.

“I didn’t say that anyone else had used it for an office. Could you use it for an office? It’s right off the living room, but you could shut the door when we were entertaining. You would be needed, anyway. You couldn’t work then.”

“It looks great.”

“You sure that you still want the changing table? Wouldn’t it smell?” They had talked about her getting her desk back. They didn’t need a changing table now that the twins were four. She hadn’t reclaimed it because there was no other place to put it but the boys’ room.

“We selected it for my desk at home years ago. It doesn’t smell that bad; we kept a pad on it. Get it out of the boys’ room, and its odor will fade fast.” Then she brought up another question. “Isn’t the house far from the EL for your purposes?”

“I drive to the EL anyway. I only walk now when the weather invites it, and the weather hardly ever invites it. Besides, I’ve been thinking of getting a parking space downtown.”

“And the next-door neighbors?” he asked. That house was an eyesore. Regional economics should suggest that it would lower the desirability of the location. Actually, she was blowing smoke. Regional economics didn’t really look at those conditions.

“You mean the Adams family?” He grinned and nodded. “Is it safe?”

“I don’t see how they could get in.”

“Look, my friends wouldn’t bat an eye if we lived next to a graveyard. How about your friends?” The house, indeed, was impressive by college-faculty standards.

“So, we invite them after dark. Actually, I’m not in any danger of getting fired, and I have little chance of getting promoted this coming decade, if ever.”

“Reached your level of incompetence?”

“Not quite, although the presidency might very -well be it. Look, if the board is happy with Watkins, they’ll keep him for another 16 years. If they get unhappy with Watkins, they won’t want to make another marketing guy president.”

Well, really, it fit her needs. Maybe it was larger than fit her needs, but something like that had always been a consequence of her marrying Bill. The problems she saw were more problems he might have, and he said they wouldn’t matter. He visited the place a couple of times more, and she went briefly after church the next week. She agreed that he should try to buy it. When he agreed upon a price, she wasted a couple of hours at the closing only contributing a few signatures. It was legally their house. It would be Bill’s house. Well, it would be the house in which the twins grew up, and they were her boys.

The larger problem was replacing Barb. Luckily, she got time after grades were in before that problem got critical. She took naps and long tub baths for days. Johnny and Paul sometimes interrupted her naps. There was only one bathroom, and each of them always had to use the toilet while she was in the tub. Even so, the luxury of having someone else on hand to deal with them while she could deal with herself could have spoiled her if it had lasted longer than a week. She had some ideas about the housekeeper which had to be cleared with Bill. She brought it up when they were getting ready for bed.

“You know, Bill, that the larger house means someone has to take care of it.”

“Well, I don’t expect you to be that someone.” That he didn’t expect it was his good luck. She hadn’t even considered doing the housework there. “That was perfectly clear before we were married. Anyway, the boys will be less of a problem, and they’ll have a space to make their messes in that doesn’t have to meet entertainment standards.” She thought he meant they’d have some place upstairs to play. That could mean other problems, too.

“Does that mean that you aren’t going to spin them around until they vomit in the living room anymore?”

“That was once, and it was only Johnny. ‘They’ didn’t throw up. He did. Do you really want me to stop dealing with the boys in the living room?” Well, no, not the way he said it.

“I never wanted you to stop dealing with the boys. I want you to deal with them less violently.” What was wrong with reading them a book? What was wrong with a little quiet play?

“Well, they’re boys. You’ll have to admit that I don’t pick on them. Lots of what I say and do pisses them off. Lots pisses you off. What do I do with them that you and they both disapprove of?”

Well, back to the subject she had intended. “Anyway, we’re going to have to get someone new. And that person will have to be a genuine housekeeper.”

“Yeah. Really, I think that’s your pidgin. I have to approve, but you have to deal with her.” That was good news. She didn’t want to hire someone who thought she could go over her head to Bill.

“Well, I’ve been thinking. Remember when Andy and your girlfriend, Marilyn got hitched?”

“She was hardly my girlfriend. I just thought that the kids were getting a rotten deal. The wedding was years ago, and I’ve barely spoken to either one since.” Bill was too sensitive to her teasing about that. Sure, he’d been mad that the UMW bounced the MYF out of their meeting space without a ‘by your leave.’ But Marilyn had also been a pretty girl -- was now a pretty woman. He hadn’t been hitting on her, but her looks was were one thing influencing him. “What about it?” he asked, and that was really the present question.

“Well, one of the guests was their housekeeper, and Andy called her ‘Mrs. Byron’ or something. It seems that when she was hired, Jim thought it was wrong for his young kid to call a grown woman by her first name.”

“Well, he calls you by your first name. Me, too.” Yeah, now. They’d been ‘Mr. Pierce’ and ‘Mrs. Pierce’ when Bill had pulled his coup.

“Yeah. But he’s not so young anymore. The twins, on the other hand...”

“So, you want them to call the new hire ‘Mrs. Smith,’ or something. I can see your point, or Jim’s point.”

“And that means we call her that, too. After all, we’re talking about an authority figure -- for the boys, not for us.”

“Well, I’m not sure names influence whether boys that age obey. They obey Barb faster than they obey you or me.” Well, the twins weren’t going to be four forever.

“That age, sure, though even now I’m not sure. But I’m looking for a permanent hire. I’m planning to spend lots of time looking and then more time persuading the boys to trust her. I sure don’t want to do that over again. Do you really think that they’d obey someone they call ‘Barb,’ a Black woman they call ‘Barb,’ in 10 years?”

“Fourteen? Do I think they’ll obey anyone at 14? Not likely.”

“Well, that’s true, but I think the name would give us a little edge.”

“Sure. I don’t care. Actually, your idea makes sense.” A rare acknowledgment from Bill. “It’s bad management to deny your employees dignity. It’s highly valued and costs you almost nothing.”

“There are days I think you learned something valuable in getting that MBA.”

“I learned lots in business school.”

“Yeah, but much of it was nonsense.” Bill let her have the last word. They were, after all, in their bedroom. Bill was very interested in arguing, but less interested in arguing than he was interested in sex.

Then she looked for a housekeeper. Isabelle Jackson looked good. She was old enough that her own kids were out of the nest but young enough that she thought she could keep up with two four-year-olds. Carolyn doubted that; she was decades younger and she couldn’t keep up with them -- sometimes had trouble keeping up with either one of them. Well, she wasn’t expecting miracles.

“It’s 8:30 to 4:30 five days a week. If I get earlier teaching hours, we might have to modify that, but we’ll talk about it if that happens. Two weeks’ vacation and damn few holidays. Sometimes, I’ll need you to stay longer if I’m planning on entertaining. That will be only if you agree to do it in the particular case. It will be overtime, which means time-and-a-half if you do. Don’t depend on that; it won’t be often. Your first task is the kids. If they need you and nothing else gets done, deal with them. That’s if they need you. They may very well want you every minute of the day. Don’t be afraid of putting them off. Other days, they won’t want you to even notice what they’re doing. Well, you would be in charge.

“We’re moving to a house, soon. So your housekeeping tasks will be much more than the apartment makes it seem.

“We’re thinking of a long-term arrangement. We only let Barb go because she wanted to start her own family. Talk to her when I can’t hear; she’ll tell you the same thing. Obviously, when they start school, your tasks will be different. But we’ll still need someone, and if you work out that someone will be you.”

“That sounds good. They look like nice boys.”

“You have children, don’t you?” She got a nod. “How many boys?”

“Two, and three girls.”

“Twins are worse. Well, as I said, you’re in charge. We would rather that you don’t spank them. Please report to me if you do, and for what.” The ‘we’ in that was a little white lie. Bill spanked them, spanked them too often. “And part of being in charge is what they call you. I don’t mean dirty names; report those, too. But you’ll be ‘Mrs. Jackson’ to them. Probably to my husband and me, too, at least when they’re around.”

“I can accept that.”

“Meals. You’ll cook lunch for them -- and for me when I’m home in the summers. I expect you’ll eat them, too. You’ll cook most dinners days you’re here. We have coffee, and you’re welcome to it. Anything else special is negotiable. Keep me informed about anything we run out of, food or cleaning items. In an emergency, buy it and we’ll reimburse you.” She thought that Mrs. Jackson might be doing more and more of their shopping, but time would tell.

“Snacks?” asked the woman who, after all, had raised five kids of her own.

“Sure. They have to leave an appetite for dinner, for lunch, too, but you’ll be the judge of that more often than I will. I don’t like sugary snacks. PBJs are fine. When you’re in a hurry, they still eat Cheerios -- not with milk and sugar, just get a saucer for each and shake some Cheerios into them.”

But the discussion of snacks raised another issue. “That’s another thing. We don’t encourage them to eat. We give them half what they want, and then the other half after they’ve finished everything on the first plate. If one says he’s not hungry, fine. Just no snacks until he’s finished the lunch he’s left.”

Sometime in the conversation, they’d gone from discussing what the job would be like if she hired Mrs. Jackson and she accepted to saying how Mrs. Jackson would handle the job. She never actually hired Mrs. Jackson, but one Monday morning she showed up and Barb didn’t. She had scheduled the day to get Johnny and Paul used to Mrs. Jackson, but the snacks did it for her. Mrs. Jackson was much more generous with the jelly than Barb had been.