Susan Pfeffer - This World We Live In

But you have to cross the kitchen to get to the downstairs bathroom and the sunroom, and even the cellar stairs. And it’s the kitchen. We keep our food there and plates and silverware.

The dining room may only have fake privacy. But the kitchen has no privacy whatsoever.

So I’m going to keep sharing the sunroom with Mom, at least for the time being. We moved our mattresses away from the back door, and then we moved the clothesline into the kitchen so the sunroom feels less like a dorm and more like a family room.

It’s rained on and off since Matt and Jon got home. It’s not like I expect to see sunlight, but I’d like it if things dried out.

Just what we needed. A cold spell. The rain turned into snow last night, and there are a couple of fresh inches on the ground.

“Sometimes it snows in the spring,” Mom said. “It’ll melt soon enough.”

Matt and Syl took advantage of the snow day by spending it in Matt’s room. Occasionally there were shrieks.

Jon reorganized his baseball cards. Good thing we hadn’t sacrificed Mickey Mantle.

I looked out onto the backyard and pictured the mound of bodies covered once again with snow.

Matt and Syl came back from town, and Matt was in a much better mood. It couldn’t have been easy biking through the snow, but he didn’t care.

“The mayor was in, and he performed the ceremony,” Matt said, waving a marriage certificate. “Syl and I are now married in the eyes of the great state of Pennsylvania.”

“You should have come with us,” Syl said. “All of you.”

“Maybe next time,” Mom said.

“And look,” Matt said. “Five bags of food!”

I did look. I looked even harder as Mom and I put the food away. There were a few cans more than last week, but I think what Mr. Danworth did was give us our standard amount and put it in five bags instead of four.

Mom decided, since the fish has been cleaned and salted and is already stinking up the garage, that we should only have it a couple of days a week and then just two shad for the five of us. I’m glad, even though I know she’s doing it because she’s scared of what’s going to happen when we run out and when we no longer get any cans from town.

What will become of us then? Where will we go? Will Matt and Syl leave by themselves and I’ll never see him again?

I know I should be happy for him, but with everything I’m scared of, I think I’m scared most of losing Matt forever.

“Did Horton eat last week?” Jon asked me. “When I was away?”

“A little,” I said.

“He isn’t eating very much,” Jon said.

“Cats eat less in the spring,” I said. “Horton always loses his winter weight.”

“Yeah, but he’s really getting thin,” Jon said.

I know he’s right, but there’s nothing we can do about it. When Horton feels like eating, he’ll eat.

We spent the day drying the cellar out, pail by pail. The electricity came back on for the first time in weeks, and Matt got the sump pump running.

Mom acted like this was Christmas and New Year’s. I’m surprised she didn’t burst out singing.

Matt and Jon are back chopping firewood. As far as I’m concerned, that means the official end of the school year.

Nothing good happened to Romeo or Juliet.

The third day in a row with electricity. All three days the electricity’s been on for hours, and last night it came back on for a few hours as well.

We don’t get any TV reception, and the news on the radio remains bad, but Mom announced that we should spring clean. So that’s how she and Syl and I spent the day. The menfolk chopped wood. Us women vacuumed and scrubbed.

Matt came home exhausted, but when he saw how clean things were, his mood brightened. “Syl, you’re fantastic,” he said.

Syl worked every bit as hard as Mom and me but no harder.

Sometimes I’d like to kill him.

I can’t remember the last time I was in a good mood. It feels like all I do is crab and mope and feel sorry for myself.

Since the house is as close to spotless as it’s ever going to get and Romeo and Juliet are totally dead, I told Mom I was going house hunting. I think she was glad to get me out of here, so she didn’t put up a battle.

“I’ll go, too,” Syl said, which wasn’t my idea at all. “Laura, do you want to come with us?”

Thank goodness Mom said no. “See if you can find any more books for me,” she said instead.

I didn’t want to go house hunting with Syl. I wanted to spend time by myself. I was looking for a tactful way of explaining that to Syl, but before I could, she said, “Let’s split up. We can meet here at noon.”

“How will you find your way back?” I asked. Matt would kill me if I let Syl out of my sight and she wandered off, never to be seen again.

“I never get lost,” Syl said. “I’ll be back here. Don’t worry.”

I thought about how lost I’d gotten and I’ve lived here practically my whole life. But Syl’s an old married woman and I’m just the kid sister-in-law. And I really did want some alone time. “Fine,” I said. “I’ll see you, then.”

We biked together until Schiller Road, and she turned to the left. I kept biking down Howell Bridge Road until the right onto Penn Avenue. Lots of nice houses there. A very literate neighborhood.

I really do love breaking and entering, and I got positively cheery seeing how the wealthier people in Howell used to live. Not that I found that much we could use, since everybody else must have realized Penn Ave. would have good pickings.

But there were books for Mom, and one space heater, and best of all, two pairs of blue jeans, price tags still attached, in a size I never could have fit in before. I tried on one pair, and it was a little loose (I guess shad doesn’t have that many calories) but definitely wearable. Syl weighs even less than I do, but I figured the second pair could stay up with a belt, and I was sure she’d appreciate having something new to wear.

I also took a can of ocean breeze room freshener. Now that the temperature’s up to 50, Mom’s been opening the windows to air the house out, but everything smells like fish anyway. That and a travel-sized bottle of aspirin were my best finds.

I balanced the handlebars with one trash bag on one side and one on the other and began biking to the rendezvous spot. My mood was much better than it has been in ages. I pictured how pleased Syl would be with my gift of blue jeans, and how Matt would appreciate my generosity, and how Mom would love the books I’d found, and how Jon… Well, how Jon would turn out to be a secret ocean breeze air freshener freak. Okay, I couldn’t think of why anything I brought home would make Jon happy, except maybe the aspirin, for when his muscles ache from chopping wood.

Jon’s never been easy to shop for.

Even with nobody to hear me for miles, I didn’t burst into song, but I did whistle as I biked. I liked the splashy way the bike rode through puddles on the road. And I had this great realization: I don’t have to be happy all the time. With everything that’s happened, no one should expect to be happy. But moments of happiness can sneak up on you, like pairs of unworn blue jeans, and you need to cherish them because they’re so rare and so unpredictable.

I even understood why Matt married Syl ten minutes after meeting her. Finding her was rare and unpredictable.

Of course it hadn’t hurt that she had long hair at the time.

I was whistling “I Dream of Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair,” a song I learned in third grade and haven’t heard since, when I rode my bike straight into a pothole and went flying off.