# Growing Up (Vorse)/Chapter 58

THIS was all very well, but the paper was not written, and, what was more, it had to be. With awful inevitableness the day when it must be finished was approaching.
"What ails me?" thought Alice. "Are my nerves so frail that I can't do this thing unless I live in a vacuum?"
Now she had a new plan. A word dropped by Tom gave it to her.
"Telling them to, is no way to keep children quiet," he said; "if I had a few minutes more time I would have got them something they really wanted to do. But, of course, as you wanted to finish writing right away, I just had to sit on the lid."
Alice inquired separately of each one of her children what they would rather do than anything else in the world.
What Robert wanted to do was simple. There was nothing the matter with it except that it was not a thing that Alice had ever allowed, and that in allowing it once she would have permitted that thing feared so by her mother-in-law, the Entering Wedge. She knew that by permitting it she was bringing on her head arguments without limit, "Whys" without number to be answered. What Robert wanted to do was to go to the movies alone. Alice did not approve of the afternoon movies with all the children in town cooped up in an inflammable, germ-laden, unventilated Black Hole of Calcutta, as she de​scribed the local show. But it definitely and completely disposed of Robert for that afternoon.
"If I let you play with anything you wanted to," Alice then asked Sara, "what would you play with in this house?"
"Anything?"
"Anything," said Alice firmly.
"Fire and matches?" asked Sara.
"No," Alice had to confess, "not fire and matches."
"Climbing on the roof with a ladder, like you made Robert reflect for?" asked Sara.
"No," again Alice had to confess, "nothing that can hurt you."
"Would paddling in the bathtub hurt me?" inquired Sara with artful cunning.
Alice had to admit that that occupation was not lethal.
"Sailing paper boats and paper boats and paper boats in the bathtub all the afternoon, and sailing the soap dish and sailing the tooth glass, and washing dolls' clothes, and putting the rubber animals in and the bath animals in," asked Sara, "and everything in, like a 'quarium? I could do that if I wanted?"
"Yes," said Alice faintly.
She saw a desolate waste of splashed up house. She saw chaos and confusion indescribable. She foresaw, also, that Jamie would want to play this game, and she had made one condition in doing just what you wanted, which was that each child must play alone. The bright vision of a peaceful afternoon was fast dimming itself when, after a moment's reflection, Sara broke forth with—
"Well, I don't want to do it. Because," she explained, "I want to do something else more. Do you know what I want to do? I want to dress up. I want to be a lady. I want to put a little shawl over my ​shoulders and walk up and down the front lawn with my Japan paper parasol. I want to walk up and down—like this."
With dignity and elegance Sara started up and down the hall, her imaginary sunshade held over her head, her hand clasping imaginary skirts so they should not trail behind her in unseemly confusion.
"I want to do that all the afternoon. I'll dress up in this and then I'll dress up in that." She indicated garments of her mother's.
"You'll want to come and show me," said Alice suspiciously.
"Oh, no, I won't," said Sara, "I'll walk up and down where everybody will see me."
As for Jamie, he was equally definite, as Alice had known he would be, for, undiverted by the thought of the bathtub, she saw the garden hose would be his objective point.
Oh, lovely and forbidden garden hose! For how many punishings are you not responsible!
More surely than the snake in the Garden of Eden, the serpentlike garden hose has forever lured the feet of the children of men from the path of obedience.
So, with Robert at the "pictures" and Sara ministering to her vanity with selected clothes of Alice's, and Jamie at the hose, Alice repaired to her delayed paper. She wrote along serenely, tranquilly, wrote along swimmingly, her mind's eye picturing to her the vain Sara peacocking up and down the lawn, the grave Jamie holding the hose proudly, running and turning it off and running and turning it on, and getting sopping.
Late in the afternoon there was but one paragraph to finish when she heard her children's voices and, rising above them in firm remonstrance, the voice of their grandmother.
​"I cannot believe your mother let you do anything of the kind," she was saying.
In Sara's hand was a soaked and shredded umbrella. Alice's silk scarf was dripping. Round Sara's legs was wound a green chiffon length, also part of her spoils. This, too, was soaking, and the color had come off upon her clothes.
"I found Sara lying in the yard," said Tom's mother grimly, "dressed up as you see her, Alice, with an umbrella in one hand and a comb in the other, and Jamie turning the hose on her."
"We didn't play together, Mother," Sara proclaimed; "I just spoke to him once. I told him to turn the hose on me so I could be a mermaid. . . . She said, Grandma, I might dress up like anything I wanted, and if I couldn't get wet how could I be a mermaid?"
"I suppose nothing will happen to them for this," said the grandmother, her voice rising, "but at least, Alice, you might tell me how it was they happened to be doing what they were."
Alice explained to her. She explained about her need for a peaceful day and about her paper.
"Woman and Civics," her mother snorted. "I can tell you, Alice Marcey, when I was young we had more practical civics than you seem to know in this generation. If a woman had wanted a peaceful afternoon, I'll warrant she wouldn't have had to be at any such tricks to get it. In sickness and health, there are times when you need your neighbors, times when children have got to be got rid of. We could nurse our neighbors through their sicknesses and we were not above asking a friend to take care of a couple of children for a few hours. But you don't send a child anywhere unless he's invited, and the more you need your neighbors the less you use them. Why didn't you send the children to me, for goodness' sake?"