Jane Smiley - Some Luck

Joey had sat up. His legs were crossed and he was staring at her.

And it was true — she had lost her grip on the chair, and both of her hands were waving in the air. It was unprecedented.

Joey crawled toward her, his face bright, then sat back on his heels and said, “C’mon!”

She tilted toward him.

The top edges of the red shoes dug into her.

She bent a knee, the right knee, the knee that knew what it was doing more often.

She did not fall down.

She bent the left knee. She bent the right knee again.

Joey crawled closer and held out his hands.

Her arms waved. She fell into him, and he laughed. She laughed.

Frankie ran into the room again. He said, “Mama’s mad at you.”

Mary Elizabeth got up on her hands and knees and crawled back to the chair she liked. She pulled herself up.

Frankie and Joey were rolling around on the floor again, hitting and kicking. Mama blew into the room and grabbed them and jerked them to their feet. She smacked both of them across the backside with the spoon in her hand, and then she came over to Mary Elizabeth and picked her up. She said, “My goodness me, how am I going to get through the winter?”

WALTER WAS SITTING in his chair at the kitchen table. It was still dark, and Rosanna was upstairs with Mary Elizabeth. Ragnar was feeding the hogs, and at any minute, Frank would come down, dressed and ready to feed the horses, so Walter was a little impatient for his breakfast. At the stove was Irma, Eloise’s official replacement, who might have been five feet tall, but maybe not.

Walter didn’t know what to think of this girl that Ragnar had married. She said she was nineteen, which was a good age, but she seemed much younger, and she was clumsy to a frightening degree. She had nice hair and would have been pretty if she had not lost her two front teeth, and although Ragnar had not told him how this happened, Walter suspected that it was an accident. Already since he’d brought her home, she had knocked herself out standing up in the chicken house — she had gone out to gather eggs, and when she didn’t return, Rosanna went out to discover her flat on her back, two eggs broken in her hand, and the chickens perching on her. It had taken her two days to recover completely from that. She had also dropped two plates and a cup, and smashed her finger in the door. She was as likely as not to stumble over a threshold. “Oh, my goodness,” she always said, “how silly of me!” as if her own clumsiness were an eternal surprise.

Walter couldn’t figure it out — her feet weren’t especially big for her small size. He and Rosanna had looked forward to her replacing Eloise in the house, but she made Eloise seem like a machine of efficiency by contrast. “It’s like having a fourth child,” said Rosanna. At least she was an easygoing girl, and not demanding. The two of them lived in Ragnar’s bedroom for the time being. Walter thought he could get Rolf and Otto to help him put an addition on the west side of the house in the summer, with its own door. Then Mary Elizabeth would get a room of her own, and Frank and Joe would get something a little bigger, anyway.

Irma said, “Well, the yolk split on one of them.”

Walter said, “That’s fine, just scramble them.”

“You want me to scramble them?”

“Yes, Irma.”

She turned and, after a minute or two, managed to dish a mess of eggs onto his plate, right beside his half-eaten patty of sausage. It did not look appetizing. He picked up his bowl of oatmeal and scraped the remaining bits out of the bottom with his spoon. Truly, he wished that Rosanna would go back to making breakfast, but then what would Irma do? She had no skills of any kind — she had not been raised on a farm, and hadn’t done well enough in school to get a teacher’s certificate. Sometimes, Rosanna put her to cleaning the house, but she was slapdash at that, too, and terribly remorseful when spots and stains she had overlooked were pointed out to her. She said, “Oh, Rosanna, I am meant to be a failure, aren’t I? That’s what my ma always said.” Three weeks it was since Ragnar brought her home.

But Frankie loved her. He skipped down the stairs while Walter was cutting his sausage with his fork and taking another bite. He caroled, “Good morning, Papa! Good morning, Irma!”

And Irma said, “Oh, darling Frankie, there you are. I was just wondering when you would come down and have your oatmeal. See, I’ve sprinkled brown sugar on it.” She glanced at Walter. “Just a tiny bit. Did you have a dream, Frankie?”

“I dreamt that I was sitting up in the maple tree, and the grass was green everywhere, and the limbs of the tree suddenly dropped, and I slid down to the ground.”

“That must have been a happy dream!”

Walter thought maybe he had never asked Frankie about his dreams. Surely Rosanna did that. Walter himself had the most prosaic dreams in the world, about trying to turn the planter in the corner of one of the fields and getting stuck.

Frank said, “And Jake was in my room, sitting on a chair in the corner.”

“What a funny dream!” laughed Irma. When she laughed, Frankie laughed with her. Frank ate up his oatmeal, and Irma gave him a piece of sausage and a scrambled egg. He ate them and said, “That was good.”

Irma said, “Oh, you are a silly boy!”

Walter pushed back his chair. He said, “Look, the sky is lightening. It might be a nice day.”

Frankie leapt from his chair.

AS FAR AS Rosanna was concerned, Irma’s useful quality was that she was patient with Joey, who did demand a lot of patience. Perhaps it was simple fellow-feeling, since Irma demanded a lot of patience, too. Rosanna had never been especially patient; she felt herself stamping around the house in a state of permanent irritability, and had even written Eloise a letter down at Iowa State, where she was taking home economics (and doing very well — who was surprised at that?), living in a dorm with lots of girls, and learning to play the piano. To Eloise she wrote, “If I never sufficiently expressed my appreciation for your sense of order and your unflagging energy, I am sorry. I appreciate it now.” Eloise wrote back, “Can you make me a velveteen dress if I send you the pattern? I’m sure Ma would blanch at the very sight of the pattern! Très au courant! ” Yes, Ma would, thought Rosanna, but she made the dress. It was an easy pattern, and made her, too, feel très au courant .

While she did the hem, she watched Irma and Joe with the everlasting box of dominoes, the box that she had given Joe last summer and that he would not let out of his sight. The box itself was shredding, but he wouldn’t let Rosanna replace it. He was also now sporting a bit of tape on his forehead, just above his right eyebrow. There was nothing underneath the tape, but Joey swore that that spot hurt him, and the only thing to ease the pain was a “Band-Aid.” The “Band-Aid” was from a packet that Irma had brought with her. Rosanna had never seen one before, but then it turned out that Dan Crest was stocking them, too. They were good for little cuts, but the only people in the household who needed them were Joey and Irma.

What Irma helped him do was stand the dominoes on end in not quite such long rows, and then knock them down by touching the first one in the line. It was a good game for Joe, time-consuming, and he was getting better at it — he could set up nine or ten dominoes in a row without knocking them over until he wanted to (or until Frankie knocked them over, but Irma was good, and quick, at stopping that, too). Sometimes, she could divert his attention from the dominoes and get him to practice hopping and twirling and riding his hobby horse from Christmas. She was good at creating a circle around Joey into which Frank could not rush with ridicule, shoving, and kicking. This was because (and Rosanna appreciated this and was not jealous) Frankie liked Irma, too. Irma told Frankie stories, and sometimes Frankie told Irma stories. So Rosanna was willing to do a little more work in order to be free of those particular cares that revolved around her two ill-matched sons.