Philip Wylie - Tomorrow!

Nora ate two eggs, three pieces of toast with apple jelly, some bacon, a bowl of Wheaties, a glass and a half of milk and a few prunes. She didn’t say a word but consumed the food with the glowering look of a condemned and unrepentant criminal. She watched with an aloof, almost disdainful eye, as her mother cleaned up, as Ted washed the dishes, as Charles came down in his blue suit and best tie and her father returned from town, merry as Santa Claus himself, laden with packages, and reporting the place “crowded as an oyster bed.”

It didn’t concern Nora.

She looked out the front window for a while. The Jarvis kids went by: Alf and Penny and Kate. All three pulled sleds. The runners squeaked on the dry, hard snow and rang when they bumped over the frozen slush in Walnut Street. They were evidently going over to slide down terraces and out onto the ice at Crystal Lake.

Nora, however, was sure she was going to have to help Mrs. Bailey houseclean.

Probably, she thought, old blood-eye Bailey would make her stand on a stepladder and dust chandeliers and poke at cobwebs all day. Probably the stepladder would fall and she’d break her back. Maybe she’d be told to scrub. Nora had read, once, of a farm woman who decided to clean out the gurry imbedded between some floorboards in an old house. She’d come down with diphtheria, the germs of which had survived in the dirt for twenty-six years. It had been the Black Diphtheria, and the woman had died.

Nora felt her mother and father might easily be damned good and sorry they’d deserted her that day.

In what seemed like no time at all, her mother stood there, in her pretty new gray suit and her fox fur saying, “We’re just about ready! Get your hat and coat and scarf, Nora.”

“Just to go next door?”

“And your arctics. You tell Netta I said you could play outdoors awhile, after lunch. And we’ll come right Lack from Ruth’s dinner, so expect us around three. Four, at the latest.”

“Can’t I go with you?”

“No, Nora, you can’t. And I want you to show Netta what a fine cleaning woman you are, too!”

Looking at the old, spotty, brown dress she’d been ordered to wear, Nora felt the Cinderella legend applied to her—backward. Her last hope died. Solemnly, thinking of the Williams home, of tables heaped with goodies, of the fun of riding all the way to Ferndale, of cousins to play with, Nora put on her scarf, her winter hat, her winter coat, her red galoshes.

“Now,” her mother said, “run on over.”

Nora’s run, Chuck said, was “the most halfhearted in the history of feet.”

The Conner family, mufflered to the eyes, climbed into the Oldsmobile and drove away.

Nora saw them go as she looked through the Bailey front window and listened while Netta scoldingly instructed the colored woman.

Netta, her face covered with a greenish substance called Chloropack and her hair in curlers, as usual, turned to the child. “Upstairs,” she said, “in the linen closet, are stacks and stacks of papers. The first thing I want you to do, dear, is to carry them down cellar. Pile them beside the ash cans.”

Nora went up. The sloppy Baileys had simply tossed what looked like about twenty years’ supply of papers and magazines in the closet. Nora figured it would take a person a thousand years to cart it all to the cellar. She put her mind on the problem. Downstairs, the vacuum was going. The colored cleaning woman, briefly interesting to Nora because she was named Harmony, was now in the kitchen, scrubbing.

She went into the front bedroom and looked out sorrowfully at her own yard. The Bailey cellar door was on that side, which gave Nora her idea. She opened a window. Icy air gushed in from the deceptively sunny outdoors.

Nora carried an armful of magazines down the hall. She pushed them over the window sill. They fell with a satisfying flurry. She brought another. In due time, she had amazingly depleted the stocks of printed matter in the closet. From downstairs came a voice, “What’s that cold draft?” The vacuum slopped and feet pounded. Mrs. Bailey raced into the bedroom. “Good heavens, you idiot! Don’t you know how much it costs to heat a house!”

“I wasn’t going to keep it open any longer. Much. And I can drop the magazines again, into the cellar.”

“Don’t talk back! You’ve chilled the entire upstairs, you lazy thing!”

Netta Bailey was not in a good mood. Cleaning house was far from her favorite task. The new hired woman was proving incompetent. And having Nora about was a liability. The imp had cooled off the hall and bedroom, spread magazines over half the yard, and left a trail of papers from the closet to the window. Furthermore, Mrs. Bailey now realized, having I he child in the house made it practically impossible for her to relax, now and again during this hectic day, with a highball. Nora would unquestionably report the practice as extreme alcoholism.

Nora, on her part, was not in a much better mood. “I’m not talking back,” she said calmly. “I’m explaining. What I’m doing is efficient. If you want me to slave around here for you all morning—”

“Shut up,” Mrs. Bailey said. “Pick up everything in the hall. Then put your things on and go out there in the yard. You’ll have to stack the stuff on the back porch, now. Beau hasn’t been able to get those cellar doors open for two years .”

Fuming silently, Nora obeyed.

She was appalled at the amount of snow-covered lawn upon which the falling periodicals had been distributed. She began to pick them up in a desultory way.

A theory she had often entertained in the past now absorbed her: people picked on her.

There was something about her—maybe she was a genius, and people cannot tolerate superiority—that caused everybody to want to hurt her feelings, make things difficult for her, scold her, measure out a full and acrid—whatever that was—dose of injustice.

Old lady Bailey was on her high horse, too. Nora thought that probably by the time her family got back, old lady Bailey would have locked her in a closet. Things seemed to work out that way for Nora. Her own home was right there, a couple of hundred feet away, and she couldn’t even get in. Probably. She stopped collecting magazines and listened. The vacuum was droning.

She ran across the yard and checked. Front door, back door, cellar, garage. All locked.

Locked against their only daughter.

The Lindner kids, also headed for Crystal Lake, though with only one Flexible Flyer, passed by.

“Whatcha doin’, Nora?”

Nora stared across the Bailey yard, the snow-capped evergreens, the brown wrecks of last summer’s annuals. “Blowing soap bubbles.”

Annabelle laughed. ‘Where’d all those magazines come from?”

“Fell out of a Flying Saucer,” Nora answered. “They’re all printed in Martian.”

Tim Lindner said, “Aw—you’re crazy.”

The sled banged and squeaked down Walnut Street.

Six big airplanes went by. They were above the clouds. There hadn’t been a cloud in the sky, earlier. Ted had said so. Ted was always looking aloft at the weather.

Old needle-face, curler-durler Bailey stuck her pickle puss out the door and whoo-whooed. “Nora! Hurry with those magazines! I want you to pull rugs while Harmony and I lift things.”

And you couldn’t pull them exactly where she wanted them, Nora calculated, if you measured with a solid gold ruler. They’d be lifting and straining and getting red faces—old snoodle-snozzle Bailey would—did colored people get redder?—while she tried to get the Orientals the way they wanted them. Tried and tried and tried and tried.

Nora didn’t so much run away as drift away.

She didn’t so much desert her assignment as take time out.