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?”