# Growing Up (Vorse)/Chapter 45

ONE of the mysterious things of life is that when you go off on a vacation there is never anything fit to clean with when you get back, and with all the money gone you have to begin restocking the house.
It always seemed to Alice that trying to adjust income to expenditure in her family was like trying to cover a bed with a sheet too small for it. Once you got it tucked in at the head a discouraging piece would yawn at the foot. Adjust it to a nicety all over, and there would be a fringe all the way round on the outside. Give it a little haul there, and some other part of the mattress would be laid bare and naked.
And out of whom did it come, she asked herself bitterly, all this pinching and straining about things? Out of herself, of course. It was she who was inevitably the uncovered part of the mattress. Whenever she got around to getting a new dress, wasn't it always just at that moment that she discovered that Jamie hadn't a romper to wear; that every child of hers needed shoes, yes, and shoes in several colors and rubbers to match; that Sara's dresses were all high above the knee; and on that very day, as likely as not, Robert would slide a base and come home with a pair of trousers torn to ribbons. How could a mother of children keep looking decent without clothes in spite of all her worries, and the years whizzing by like anything? And what happened to women when they didn't look decent? Any woman can tell you that—they lose their husband's love, of ​course! And the clashes between her and Tom over the children getting worse all the time anyway.
At this Alice felt her heart quiver, an awful tightening came to her throat, and a tear splashed down on her account book. And to make sure that the bird of joy should die and never be resurrected again, there was a long list of absolutely necessary things to be got. The list ran something like this:
This was a sample of how it went. It extended, it seemed to poor Alice, until it attained the proportions of a serpent, and a very long serpent at that—the kind of serpent that strangles whatever little joy is left in a fast-aging heart—yes, which even strangles a husband's love. At that she gave an outright sob, and another tear dropped upon this document.
You can see for yourself what a tactless moment it was for Sara to come and put a beseeching hand upon her mother's knee, and remark with a voice in which emotion trembled, her face piteous, entreating, but, definite!
"Mother, I want a motor-car!" Alice turned upon her child with something like fury.
"You want a what?" she demanded, incredulously.
"A motor-car," quavered Sara, "and Jamie, he wants one, and Robert wants one! We all want one! Everybody's got one!"
"Sara," said her mother sternly, "you're plenty old ​enough to know that your father isn't made of money." Indeed, he was not, what with the price of things going up like runaway horses and salaries only crawling along!
"Why can't we have a motor-car?" Sara inquired.
"Because we can't afford it."
"What does 'afford it' mean?"
"You know what afford it means!"
Sara fixed her large eyes on her mother. She shook her red head to and fro as if it were a dinner bell that she was ringing.
"Honest and truly, cross my heart, hope to die, I don't!" she announced.
"It means we haven't money enough. We're poor."
"Oh, no, we're not; Poor people don't have parlors—they don't keep a girl—they can go barefoot. They can get as dirty as dirty—they don't never have to have baths. But, of course, sometimes they don't get enough to eat. They do get enough to eat, though, don't they?" Sara's voice was piteous. "And oh, they work! Everybody works—the children work—they make money. Poor children chew gum. Poor children eat penny candies—fierce red or green penny candies. They catch rides. They sell pond lilies at back doors, and cooks give them cookies. They don't go to school until they're as old as old, and then they go just as little as little." Evidently the joys of poverty rated higher in Sara's mind than its drawbacks, now that she came to think of it. "They can play with Ginnys!"
"Hush, Sara!" Alice felt that her reason was rapidly decaying. "Stop, Sara!"
"Ginnys, yes," said Sara. "Why," she now demanded, "has Ginny Tom's poppa got a motor-car when my poppa hasn't?"
"You mustn't say Ginny," Alice admonished.
"Robert don't say Ginny, he says 'Wop.' And how ​can I," she resumed, "how can I say Italian Tom when Ginny is his name? Everybody says Ginny Tom. They're so poor off I can't play with them even—so poor off Laurie drives um away—so poor off you scold me if I talk with um on the street. They've got a motor-car!"
"Sara," Alice remarked seriously, "you know very well that I don't let you play with these Italian children, not because they're foreigners, not because they're poor—it's because their manners are bad. I've told you before."
"Laurie says it's nits and language. Oh, gee, you ought to hear it! Oh, Mother, it's the funniest thing. Every time Robert passes Tom by he gets his goat a little bit—shies a stick at him or something just so he can hear his language. Oh, it's the funniest thing how he swears—and he's so little! I laugh!"
It was one of those times when a moralist finds herself dumb. Sara was unconscious of her mother's displeasure. Her conversation glided along as serenely as a swift little boat before a summer breeze.
"Why, when Tom's father has a motor-car, can't we have one? They're more poor than we're poor—so poor you won't let me play with um."
Alice gave her child a swift glance to see if this statement had been made for the purpose of infuriation. But in Sara's face was candid innocence. Alice gave it up.
"Sara," she said earnestly, "Tom's father spent all his savings for a motor-car because he's had very little pleasure all his life and so has his wife. She's brought up all those children, and mends and scrubs, and has no maid and no new clothes, and now she's got a little bit of pleasure for the first time."
"Well," said Sara brightly, as one who comes up with treasure-trove, "why don't we use our saves, and why ​don't you do the wash and all the work and the beds and sweep, and just have a kimono and we go barefoot? Then we could have a motor-car just like everybody in the world has one."
It was at this point that Tom's mother appeared.
"Good morning, Alice," she said, "and what's my darling Sara doing?"
"I've been having a lovely, lovely talk with my mother!" fluted Sara.
From the other room came an all too familiar rumbling noise. Alice knew very well that Jamie had turned chairs upside down and was playing motor-cars. Then her ears were rent by a sound something between a watchman's rattle and the squawk of a dying fowl. Her already frayed nerves gave way. She jumped to her feet and descended on Jamie.
"What, in heaven's name," she cried, "is that awful, awful noise?"
"It's my motor horn," he returned blithely.
"Give it to me at once," commanded Alice; "whoever gave you that thing is a lunatic!"
"I'm that lunatic," Mrs. Marcey here proclaimed with firm displeasure; "the darling has such a touching devotion to motors that when he so admired that little motor horn I bought it for the dear child. I don't know what we're coming to, the way women's nerves of this generation jump at every little thing! Why, I can remember perfectly when my brother and I had a fife and drum corps and used to drum and toot on penny whistles all day long—and my mother was glad to hear me do it—she knew then that I wasn't breaking a limb somewhere, and that my hands were out of mischief. The time when my mother used to jump was when she couldn't hear my drum."
It was just after the departure of her mother-in-law, ​that Alice sat down and wept. In one afternoon she had lost all hope of any new clothes, her husband's love, her temper, and her nervous system—and the only thing she had gained had been her mother-in-law's disapproval. Her weeping was dismally punctuated by the honking of Jamie's horn.