“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!”