Chapter 2: Established

“Still taking your vacation off the scrambled times?” Roger asked Bill Pierce. Now that Roger Watkins was president and he was vice president of marketing, ‘Mr. Watkins’ had become ‘Roger.’

“Well, Jim can take care of the reps the supervisors can’t. The truth is that we want to move this summer, and I haven’t selected a place yet. I’m taking two weeks in May for looking and two in August for moving.”

“Going to look in Kenilworth?” That was where Roger lived, which was an argument for Kenilworth. It was also, however, an argument against Kenilworth. There were other arguments against Kenilworth that it would be more polite to mention.

“Probably staying in Evanston,” he said. “There are lots of good homes in Evanston, and we have roots there.” And they had only so much for down payment. Carolyn was a reason to stay in Evanston. She was a professor, a professor who happened to be married to him and happened to have twin sons. Her identity, though, was as an economics professor. She wanted to socialize with other professors, and Evanston was knee-deep in them. Socializing with executives was always an effort for Carolyn, and he held his breath every time in worry that she would stop making the effort.

Then, too, he was almost the only corporation vice president attending Aldersgate. Jim, sure, but banks had VPs by the dozen. Jim said so himself.

They respected professors more, but he was a big frog in a small puddle. In Kenilworth, he’d be among presidents of larger corporations than Andalusia. He had plans for his family, and impressing richer neighbors weren’t wasn’t among those plans.

“Well, we’d like to have you. It’s a great place.”

“I’m sure,” Bill said. “Well ... Old story. Do you have time?” Gossip was all very well, but they had jobs to do, too.

“Sure.”

“Story is about a real estate man. Customer asked what people were like in the town.

“‘Well, what were people like where you lived before?’

“‘Greatest bunch of people you ever met, awfully friendly and helpful. I’m real sorry the job moved me away from them.’” Bill changed his voice a bit for the different characters.

“‘Well, you’ll find people here very much like that.’ Next day, another customer asked the same question and was asked about where he’d lived before.

“‘They were a terrible bunch of grumps. The best thing about moving was getting away from them.’

“‘Well, I’m sorry to say that you’ll find your new neighbors very much the same.’

His wife overheard both conversations and challenged him. They couldn’t both be right.

“‘I’ll bet,’ the real estate man said, ‘that both people agree with me after a year. The kind of person you are has much more to do with how you experience your neighbors than your neighborhood does.’

“So, I’m sure that you experience a great neighborhood. But I don’t have to check out the neighborhood to tell that.”

Roger laughed. “You think it’s like that?”

“Yeah. You and I wouldn’t be comfortable in Englewood, and nobody’s safe there, but beyond that it’s more being a neighbor than who is your neighbor.”

“Well, you’d be a good neighbor in Kenilworth.”

“Thanks,” Bill said, “but I’ve saved up an Evanston down payment. I don’t think I have a Kenilworth down payment, and I want the boys out of the apartment. With four-year-olds, crossing two streets before you can run in the grass is constant worry.”

“Well, it wasn’t our first house, by a long shot.”

“There’s that,” Bill said, “but let’s cross one bridge at a time.” Roger’s wife didn’t work. If she ever had worked, she had never had a fucking profession. Her identity was Roger’s wife. Carolyn’s identity was an economics professor. They had enough problems in their marriage. He wasn’t going to try to move her somewhere she’d be seen as simply his adjunct.

He took the vacation. Since he didn’t need to go to the office these days, he would spend more time with the boys. House hunting wasn’t a full-time occupation. When Barb got there Monday morning, he suggested an outing in the park with the kids. She looked at the dishes.

“Look, Barb, the cleaning is your second responsibility. I’ll be gone all afternoon. If some things don’t get done, Carolyn will blame me.” Why Barb worried, he couldn’t figure. She’d already given notice. She was going to get married and have a baby of her own. Carolyn was already in a dither finding a replacement; she wasn’t about to fire Barb and look for a replacement any earlier. “That reminds me, instead of vacation days this year, would you be happy if we paid you for two weeks after you left.”?”

“That would be fine.” So they took the kids to the park to run around. Often, that didn’t require two adults, or even one. Occasionally, Johnny ran towards one street while Paul ran towards another. He expected kids, let alone Carolyn’s kids, to rebel against their parents’ desires; rebelling against their parents’ desire that the kids survive was going a little far. Barb cleaned up the kitchen before fixing lunch. The kids watched TV while she did, and he watched with them. And Carolyn called his programs ‘pablum.’

After lunch, he visited the realtor. Marge Vargas was the agent he saw. He laid out their down-payment maximum.

“Now, that should be 20%. So, what do you have priced below five times that?”

She showed him a book with pictures. She had a map of Evanston and another of the northern suburbs on the wall. He was familiar enough with the town that the map location told him a little about what would be around the places that looked possible.

“No,” he said of one picture. “Those amenities and that decor may well be worth the price, but we have two four-year-old boys. They need space, space inside and space outside.”

“Space and a low budget,” Marge said. “How does a fixer-upper sound?”

“It depends. First, as I said, we have two small boys. A hole in the floor that we could fix next year would mean that at least one of them would fall through and break his neck before we got around to it. Second, I’m not going to do the job myself. A roof that we’d have to replace in a couple of years is fine if that knocks the price of the roof off the price of the house. I’m not going to put in sweat equity.”

He spent the first day looking through books she gave him. She would arrange a route to see those which looked possible. Marge went out twice while he was in the office, but he didn’t mind. The choices were what he’d come for. They made another appointment for Tuesday morning.

Tuesday, they went looking at his choices in the northwest quadrant. Even that was a lot of driving.

“I’m sorry,” he said after one house. “It looked a lot different in the photographs.”

“Don’t be sorry. In the first place, any time I can deal with customers during school hours is a bonus. In the second, I’m getting a better picture of what you want. We’ll make a list of the places where you want to see the interiors. I’d like your wife along for that.” Well, if she wanted Carolyn, she wouldn’t get school hours.

That afternoon, he got back to the apartment early. Barb hadn’t started dinner prep, and he told her not to. When Carolyn got home, she and he took the kids to the park. They didn’t have enough of these family excursions, even ones this short.

“I figured I’d get take-out. Can you handle the kids in the car while I go in?”

“Why don’t I go in? You can drive around and pick me up.” And that’s the way they did it. The kids were reasonable, as well as locked in their car seats, while the car was moving. They raised a ruckus when it was parked more than a couple of minutes.

“This looks too good to be true,” he told Marge about a picture Thursday. “The description looks like a lot more house than the price does.”

“Well, the description is accurate, and the price is, too. But you’re right. Let’s stop off there, and you’ll see.” The house looked fine when you were looking east. The house to the west of it was a boarded-up eyesore. Still, the house looked fine.

“The City is going to tear that down one of these days, and the price of this one will go up. The owner, however, was transferred. He can’t wait.” Bill went to the boarded-up house. The doors and ground-floor windows looked totally secure. There weren’t any basement windows. He didn’t want Paul and Johnny anywhere near a vacant house they could get into, but this one looked safe.

“What about the basement?” he asked. “I don’t see how they got light down there.”

“No basement. It’s built on a slab. That’s what went wrong. Look at that.” She pointed at a crack in what he’d taken for the foundation. “It could have been repaired, but it’s stood for too long. As I said, the City of Evanston wants to tear it down sometime, but the matter of who pays for that is in the courts.”

Well, the house next door wouldn’t impress the people from Andalusia that he needed to impress, but the house fit his desires otherwise. “I’d like to see the inside sometime. Put it on the list.”

Friday, they looked at the house. It fit his requirements and his wallet, and it was the first house to do so. It had a master bedroom with its own bath, with two other bedrooms, a full bath, and some other rooms upstairs. It had large living and dining rooms downstairs and a small ‘parlor’ off the living room. That would make a good office for Carolyn. He made an appointment with Marge for him and Carolyn to see it together.

The best laid plans of mice, men, and husbands (who are something of both), went agley. Carolyn kept the appointment by herself, while he stayed home with the kids. She came home and got lunch on the table.

“Okay,” he asked Carolyn when the kids had eaten and returned to the TV, “did you like it?”

“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?” she asked.

“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.”

“Yeah. ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me and restrain them not.’” he quoted. “It’s His house. He sets the rules. Andalusia, on the other hand, contains some real pricks.”

“If I’d said that...” She said after a glance at the boys.

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

“Well...” she began. But this wasn’t the time for a fight; it was the time to reach an agreement.

“And the office?”

“It’s really a parlor.”

“I didn’t say that anyone else had used it for an office. Could you use it for an office?” he asked. “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?” Her old desk had become a changing table when her old home office had become a nursery. Was that really 4 years ago? It must be; often as they seemed to, the boys didn’t age more than one year per year. He had no problem replacing the desk.

“We selected it for my desk at home years ago,” she reminded him. “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. But 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 continued.

“You mean the Adams family?” Yeah, but it wasn’t really a haunted house. He nodded. “Is it safe?”

“I don’t see how they could get in.” Of course, with boys, your not seeing how they could didn’t mean that they couldn’t find a way to get in.

“Look, my friends wouldn’t bat an eye if we lived next to a graveyard,” she said. “How about your friends?” Well, the house next door might be a problem, but any place he’d seen would have some problem.

“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,” he said, “though 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.”

They talked more, and they each visited the house again. Finally, he made an offer. The owners haggled a bit, but they finally settled.

The place needed a bit of sprucing up, including a paint job for most of the interior, but they would move the first week in August. Carolyn didn’t try for any conferences that summer. They would put the boys into the same room for the time being. Sooner or later, they would want their own rooms, and that house had the space for that. It also had the space for a sort of rec room for them and their future friends. That would leave the living room free for adult entertainment. For boys, those provisions were probably less important than the yard. Carolyn objected to rough-housing in the living room. Very well. In good weather, they would rough-house outside.

Meanwhile, Barb was going. Carolyn brought the matter up.

“You know, Bill, that the larger house means someone has to take care of it.” He had, after all, lived alone in an apartment. He knew that cleaning was required.

“Well, I don’t expect you to be that someone. 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 adult entertainment standards.”

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

“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?”

“I never wanted you to stop dealing with the boys. I want you to deal with them less violently.” She wanted him to deal with them as if they were girls. Well, they weren’t.

“Well, they’re boys,” he said. “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?”

“Anyway,” she retreated, “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.” He didn’t expect Carolyn to do housekeeping, ; he did think that housekeeping was her responsibility.

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

“She was hardly my girlfriend,” he said. Carolyn had been jealous at one point. It had been early in her pregnancy, and the hormones caused emotions which went looking for reasons. Carolyn had never understood how sexy her pregnancy had made her, but she’d chosen the wrong target for jealousy, even so. He was a T&A man, and Marilyn had almost no tits. Damn little hair, either, and Carolyn knew he liked hair. Actually, Marilyn had been an attractive teenager, when you could think she was growing into a beautiful woman. She hadn’t, had hardly grown at all. “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. What about it?”

“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. But we asked him to, and 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.” For all of him, they could call her anything but ‘mommy.’

“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.”

“That age, sure,” she said. “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?” Would the boys turn into racists? At 14? Probably. Prejudice reaches its maximum in high school.

“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,” he said. “Actually, your idea makes sense. It’s bad management to deny your employees dignity. It’s highly valued and costs you almost nothing.” And, as she’d said, the twins were unlikely to obey their parents’ slavey.

“There are days I think you learned something valuable in getting that MBA.” She was damn snotty about his degree. It paid several times more than her Ph. D. did. But, then, she never trusted the market.

“I learned lots in business school.”

“Yeah, but much of it was nonsense.” She was just being snotty. Well, she was on edge. Could he remember when she hadn’t been on edge? He could remember the girl he’d married, who hadn’t seemed on edge, though she’d been snotty even back then. Still, Carolyn was pushing herself closer and closer to a nervous breakdown. He couldn’t help by giving her more leeway. Every minute she had to spare went to her God-damned research. Then the thought was driven from his mind.

They were, after all, a married couple in their bedroom. Damn! Whatever her other faults, Carolyn was a very hot woman. She’d been hotter before the twins, but the difference wasn’t sagging breasts. Most of the difference was that she was exhausted.

He thought about that on his way home from work the next day. Well, for all her snottiness about his MBA, he was the manager. He’d have to manage his family. They were moving into a new place. Somehow, he’d experienced this apartment as camping out since the birth of the twins. The boys would have a yard, and he’d see they got the equipment for having a boyhood in the yard -- and in the house in bad weather. Now, he would have to manage Carolyn if he wanted to keep her.

Whatever the danger of losing her to someone else, and his estimate of that danger fluctuated wildly from one day to the next, he was in real danger of her going off the deep end. Of course, she didn’t accept her need for his management, but that was just one more problem. His task was to get her in better shape, not to have an excuse with which to cover his ass when she flew apart.

Really, her problem was fairly simple. She had too many tasks. If he had his choice, she would dump the economic research. As far as he could tell, Circle paid her to teach and didn’t care whether she did research or not. If it meant promotion, the promotions had been damn slow coming, and the pay raises were no longer necessary.

But he clearly didn’t have his choice. Carolyn saw herself as a researcher, an economic researcher. One possibility was to have her give up teaching. That wasn’t within their budget constraints this year, but it might well be next year. They’d saved up for the down payment, and that was more per month than the present house payments were. They were no longer paying rent, too. Still, this wasn’t the time to suggest that. She’d made a commitment this year at least.

She had two groups in the church that took time, if not a hell of a lot of time. She could drop those, but she didn’t look more drained when she came back from her circle or from choir practice. She liked to sing, and the circle was no longer her responsibility. It was probably better for her to have some life away from the twins, too. When she and they were in the apartment together, she was always at their beck and call. Now, he enjoyed his time with the boys. Carolyn seemed to experience her time with them as one more duty. He was no further along with his problem when he got home. The boys took all his attention until they were in bed. Carolyn went in and kissed them good night, and he read the story. When he came out, Carolyn was at the kitchen table, buried in some phase of her research. She looked harried again, and the boys weren’t what was harrying her.

Although he’d said something about approval of the housekeeper, Mrs. Jackson was in the apartment when he got home one Monday evening without Carolyn’s even having mentioned her before. Well, she didn’t look impossible. He could exercise his veto if she didn’t work out. The boys hadn’t taken to her completely, but they were remarkably accepting when you consider how important Barb had been in their lives. On the other hand, they might not have realized that the change was permanent. Then, too, kids were resilient, often remarkably resilient when you least expected it.