Jill Churchill: Grime and Punishment

“Furnace—" she mumbled to herself. Every fall Steve did things to the furnace before it was turned on for the winter. But not this year. One more thing she'd have to figure out.

It was amazing how many things there were to learn when you were a single parent and a homeowner. There seemed to be hundreds of boring chores somebody else had always done and which had to be learned. What surprised her most was how many of them seemed to be seasonal. Every time she thought she had a grip on things, the weather changed, and she had to start all over with a whole new set of problems.

First it had been the snowblower. The rubber blades had worn down, and she and Mike had spent a hideous Saturday morning the previous February in a hardware store finding replacements. That was very soon after her world had caved in, and she'd made a fool of herself, breaking into tears, in public, when the hardware clerk told her how to have her husband attach the damned blades.

Then spring had come, and there'd been all the assorted jobs and implements associated with keeping a suburban yard looking decent. The lawn mower had been bad enough, but Mike had manfully assumed responsibility for it. Then the underground sprinkler system had suffered a breakdown that caused all but one of the heads to put out a pitiful mist and the remaining one to look like Old Faithful. That she'd just abandoned. She bought a rotating sprinkler head and a couple of lengths of hose. She'd always felt an underground sprinkling system was a symbol of decadence anyway. Spring had also meant having the snow tires taken off the station wagon, and she'd stupidly bought an entire new set of tires without realizing they weren't an annual purchase and the old ones were in green plastic bags in the basement.

When the weather had turned warm, the air conditioning had graciously consented to simply go on when she flipped the switch to "cool," and through some stroke of luck had worked all summer. But she was certain the furnace needed more than that. Something to do with the filter, she thought. Taking her last section of sandwich along, she went to the basement to look over the situation. She spent a useless half hour studying the thing and never found anything that faintly resembled a filter, but she did finda self-adhesive tag on the back of a little door that gave the name of the furnace repair company. Steve must have put it there.

Giving up, Jane went upstairs to make an appointment for the company to send a man out to look the thing over, then got to work on the carrot salad. She peeled and sliced the carrots with her new knife and put them into a steamer. While they cooked, she went out to hose off the patio. She had just turned off the water and was surveying her work with a sense of accomplishment when she heard a car door. Dear God — Shelley back? She glanced at her watch. One o'clock. It couldn't be. She peered around the corner through the hedge that ran all the way from her house to Shelley's and saw Joyce Greenway approaching Shelley's kitchen door.

“She's not home," Jane called out.

Joyce peered into the shrubbery, trying to spot the source of the voice. "I know. She told me. Could you get the door? I'm about to drop this thing." Joyce was tiny — barely five feet and probably not over ninety-five pounds, all of it in exactly the right places. She had curly, silky-fine blond hair, and a very soft voice which hardly ever seemed to rise much above a whisper, but which she managed to project superbly. She'd been a professional actress for a few years and was still active in community theater. Jane supposed that's where she'd honed the skill of being heard.

Jane went in through her garage and back out into the adjoining driveways. She opened Shelley's kitchen door and followed Joyce inside. "What've you got?"

“Brisket. I'm not sure it's well enough done, but I was afraid to wait. Shelley's such a terror about getting the food over early. What did you make?"

“Carrot salad — oh, Lord! — I forgot, the carrots are cooking! Gotta run. Can you find a place in the refrigerator for that?" Jane didn't wait for a reply. She was relieved to have a legitimate excuse to escape. Joyce was very nice, but awfully solicitous of Jane's single state — always asking how the children were doing without their father and was there anything she could do to help out. It got a bit tiresome.

The water under the carrots had reduced itself to a mere skin on the bottom of the pan, but nothing had started to burn yet. Jane speared a carrot slice to see if it was done, and it practically dissolved under the assault. Damn it, she'd have to start over. This stuff would turn to carrot paste if she tried to stir it. Good thing she'd got plenty of carrots.

This time she stood by the stove and turned the kitchen timer on for good measure. She spread the morning paper out and browsed through, but found nothing of earthshaking interest. Least of all ads for sales on tangerine juice. She paced, wishing the carrots would hurry up. She still had to find the last ingredient and put the salad together before Shelley got home and discovered her lapse. Finally, the timer went off. She jerked the pot off the burner, dumped the carrots into a bowl, and set it in the refrigerator. Time to find the health food store.

Yet another cook was arriving next door and, thinking it would be surly to ignore her — they’d had words once when Mike and her Eddie were in third grade about the room-mother assignments, and Jane was still feeling the need to mend fences — she stopped and said, "Hi, Laura.”

Laura Stapler nearly threw her dish in the air. "Oh, Jane! I didn't see you. You shouldn't sneak up on people like that!"

“Sorry. Shelley's not home, but you can go on in."

“I know. She called and told me she'd be out. Doesn't she lock up the house when she leaves?”

This question from Laura wasn't surprising. She was a timid, mousy woman who always looked like she had inside information that the world was about to end and was under orders not to tell anyone. Her husband had a franchised "safety store" in the nearest shopping mall. He had a tendency to bring his work home. Their house, which Jane had visited once, was locked up like an Egyptian tomb. They had dead bolts, alarm wires, and even a padlock on the side gate. "I'll bet she wears a chastity belt that's hooked up to the alarm system," Joyce had once said. To which Shelley replied with a malicious grin, "I've met her husband — I don't imagine the alarm goes off very often!"

“There's someone there, Laura. The cleaning lady," Jane reassured her, thinking Laura would be afraid to even set foot in a house that wasn't properly secure.

“Oh, I'm so glad!" Laura said.

Jane found the health food store with difficulty. It was located, as she felt only proper, around the side of a line of shops, almost entirely out of sight. The derk, a man of enormous proportions, tugged at his skimpy beard and said, "Tangerine juice?Naw. We got peach nectar and unstrained apple juice and apricot nectar and unsweetened grapefruit juice and pressed carrot essence and some heart of celery cocktail — no liquor, of course. I think we've maybe got some plum nectar. You wouldn't like that, would you?"

“Definitely not.”

Even though she needed to hurry, Jane couldn't resist looking around a bit. Everything, she discovered quickly, was brown. Light brown and dark brown, pinkish brown or greenish brown. She glanced back at the clerk, now trying to squeeze his way along behind the counter, and wondered how in the world he had got that shape eating only the kind of stuff sold in the store. Maybe brown was a fattening color. That, she mused, might make a best-selling diet book. The NonBrown Way to Beauty.

Musing about food colors, Jane returned to the car. Could you eat only red food? Rare steak, candied apples, new potatoes in their pink skins, cranberry juice, strawberry pie — she'd have to fix all that sometime and see how it looked. What about green? Okay for the vegetables, and some sort of mint dessert, but she couldn't think of a green meat, except some she had accidentally turned that shade in the refrigerator from time to time.