Susan Pfeffer: This World We Live In

It’s so hard to think that, with everything terrible that’s happened, we’re the lucky ones.

But we have food and we have shelter and we have family. So along with no broken bones and less gray skies, I guess that means we are.

We had four hours of electricity today, smack in the middle of the afternoon. It’s the longest stretch of electricity I can remember and certainly the best timed.

Mom and I threw rainwater into the washing machine and washed all the sheets, then shirts and slacks, and finally underwear. The dryer stayed on long enough to dry everything except the underwear, which we hung on the sunroom clothesline. There was a time I would have found that embarrassing, but now I’m used to it.

We’re running low on laundry detergent, though. We’re running low on lots of things like that: toothpaste and tissues and shampoo. Now that I know we’re going to have food a little while longer, I get to worry about not enough soap.

Since the mattresses were stripped, Matt and Jon piled them up and Matt washed the sunroom floor. Then, to push my luck, I asked if we could take the plywood off the sunroom windows. Matt put it up when the temperature plummeted, and it may not be all that warm outside, but it isn’t below zero all the time.

Mom thought about it and then nodded. “Go for it,” she said.

Jon and I got two hammers and we pulled the nails out, and we have windows again. With the fire going, the rain in the background, and the smell of clean clothes and clean sheets, it’s positively cozy.

Usually when there’s electricity, Mom turns a radio on so she can listen to the news without using up batteries (we’re running low on them, too). But today she went upstairs, came down with a CD player, and put on some Simon & Garfunkel.

“I’ve missed music,” she said.

I can’t say I’ve missed Simon & Garfunkel, but it was nice to hear “Bridge Over Troubled Water” again. We sang it in middle school chorus about a million years ago.

When it rains, you can forget the sky is gray all the time. If you’re cold, well, that’s perfectly normal on a damp, dreary day. Bad weather = good mood.

Bad weather and electricity, that is.

“I’ve been thinking,” Matt said at lunch. “About a couple of things.”

I’d been thinking, too, about nail polish. But I knew better than to mention it. “What?” I asked instead.

“First of all, if we’re going to stay here, Jon and I should start chopping firewood again.”

“I hate the idea of the two of you out there all day, hungry, doing all that work,” Mom said.

“It has to be done,” Matt said. “But I think before we start on it, Jon and I should try something else.”

“What?” Jon asked.

“We know we have food for a while,” Matt said. “But we could certainly use more. And I can’t remember the last time we had protein. The rain got me thinking. The shad run the Delaware River in spring.”

“They start in April,” Jon said.

“This year they might be a little late,” Matt said. “But it’s safe to bet the river ice has melted. I don’t know if there’ll be a lot of fish, but it’s worth going and catching what we can.”

“Could we go tomorrow?” Jon asked. “How long will we be gone?”

“Wait a second,” I said. “How come I can’t go, too?”

“Wait two seconds,” Mom said. “I haven’t agreed to any of this yet.”

Matt gave Mom a look. We’ve been together so much the past few months, we don’t have to talk anymore. We know each other’s looks to perfection.

“How long would you be gone?” Mom asked.

“A week,” Matt said. “Maybe less. We’re about fifteen miles from the Delaware, so Jon and I should plan on a day’s travel there and back. Then it would depend on how the fish are running, how long we would stay. We’ll camp out, or if there are houses we can use, we’ll sleep in them. Deserted motels. We’ll take some food with us, but if we’re lucky, we’ll catch some shad first thing, and eat that until we get home.”

“You’ll need rods,” I said. “And flies. And I still don’t see why I can’t go.”

“You hate fishing,” Jon said.

“You don’t like it, either,” I pointed out.

“Yeah,” Jon said. “But it’ll be something to do.”

“We have one fishing rod in the attic,” Matt said. “And Mr. Nesbitt used to fish. There’s a pretty good chance I can find his rod. If not, we’ll look for one in other houses around here. It shouldn’t take too long to find everything we need. When people scavenged this fall, they were looking for food, not wading boots. We have sleeping bags, so that’s no problem. Nobody’ll mistake us for professionals, but there probably won’t be much competition, either. If we can bring back a trash bag or two of shad, we could salt them and eat off them for weeks, maybe even months.”

“There’s so much I don’t like about this,” Mom said. “Including breaking into people’s houses and stealing things.”

“We’re not stealing from anyone who’s still here,” Matt said. “Mom, let’s say we leave at some point. Would you object if someone came in and took our firewood?”

Mom sighed. Matt grinned. Jon looked positively giddy.

“I still don’t see why I can’t go,” I said. “I can bike fifteen miles, same as you.”

“Mom shouldn’t be left alone,” Matt said. “And it would be easier for me to go with Jon.”

I knew I wasn’t going to win, and sulking and pouting would only make everybody mad at me. Which was a shame, because I used to be really good at sulking and pouting.

“I want to break into people’s houses, too,” I said. “I bet I could find lots of stuff we can use.”

“Like what?” Jon asked in his best “I chop firewood; I bring home fish” voice.

“Stuff you’re not civilized enough to care about,” I said. “Toothpaste. Deodorant. Shampoo.”

“You’re right,” Matt said. “We should all look around the houses nearby and see what we can find.”

“You can’t go before Tuesday,” Mom said. “Monday you and Jon can go into town to get our food. That’ll give both of you a sense of what it’s like to travel together. What’s today, anyway?”

We all counted back to Tuesday, the last day in our lives that had meaning.

“Friday,” I said, counting the fastest.

“All right,” Mom said. “That will give you the weekend to look for everything you need. Rods and flies and wading boots. How are we on trash bags?”

“We still have a few,” Matt said. “We haven’t been throwing out much garbage lately.”

“Horton will be happy,” I said. “The house will stink offish.”

“We’ll solve that problem when we have to,” Mom said. “Along with any others that come along.”

I love breaking into houses. I mean, I really love it.

We each took a neighborhood. Matt started at Mrs. Nesbitt’s and worked his way down Howell Bridge Road. Jon biked over to the Pine Tree section, and I went to Shirley Court.

It’s easy enough to tell if a house is vacant. No smoke from the chimney, nobody home. But I knocked on doors first, pretty comfortable that no one was watching. Shirley Court has a much more suburban feeling than Howell Bridge Road, but you could tell the whole neighborhood was deserted.

When we left the house after breakfast, Matt, Jon, and I discussed the best ways of breaking in. A lot of the houses, we figured, would be unlocked, because after the house was first left empty, the scavengers would have broken in, taken all they wanted, and not bothered locking up. But if we couldn’t find enough in the houses like that, we should break a window and let ourselves in.