Seed on the Wind

Lora, lying on the couch in precisely the same position as when Steve had entered a brief fifteen minutes earlier, heard faintly through the closed door the quick nervous rhythm of Janet’s footsteps descending the stairs. Then her ears, despoiled of that diversion, caught at other sounds: other tenants’ voices that came from the court through the open window in the bedroom, the pattering of an animal’s feet — she had never known whether it was a cat or a small dog — on the floor above which topped her ceiling, the rumble of a distant elevated train, the confused medley from the street. For a while nothing was alive but her ears; she had no thoughts or feelings, not even the feeling of herself as a phenomenon; she was neither conscious nor unconscious.

Then she stirred and turned over on her side, and the sounds all at once ceased to exist; her brain awoke. “How do you do,” she said aloud, “you’ve done it this time, haven’t you, darling.” A thought darted at her: how about Steve’s overcoat and two suits? He wore good clothes; the tailor at the corner could probably get a good price for them. Or what about his false information to the draft board? Weren’t rewards offered for things like that? Momentarily the idea diverted her, and she smiled into space; then, frowning, she turned to serious considerations. She might get a loan from Janet Poole, or Mrs. Crosby at the tea-room, or even Mr. Pitkin. She pictured herself making the request, and her frown deepened; she would almost rather steal than borrow; however, it was just as well to have the possibilities in mind in case of desperate emergency. Surely there were other means.

Again she spoke aloud, more for the companionship of her own voice than anything else. “Money is the root of all evil,” she said clearly and distinctly. Ha, it hasn’t any roots, she thought, it’s like that plant in the picture in geography in school which went crawling around through trees without any roots of its own. It was in school too that she had written the sentence, money is the root of all evil, in a clear round hand which, according to the teacher, however legible she might painfully make it, never did sufficiently slant.

I still write that way, she thought, only I almost never write.

The chief difference between her school days and the present, she reflected, was that then other people had always been on hand to point out her mistakes, whereas now she had to find them out for herself. Childhood, so it seemed, had been nothing but an endless process of fresh discoveries of the remarkable and often bewildering boundaries of the permissible. The hardest part of it had been the unbelievable confusion: a thing perfectly all right in one place was utterly wrong in another; actions strictly prohibited in school were overlooked, even encouraged, at home. It changed with people, too; one teacher would smile indulgently at something which another severely reprimanded. And as for time, that was the most confusing of all; you never knew today whether yesterday’s rules still held, you simply had to try it out and see; whereas on Tuesday Mother snatched the scissors out of your hand the minute you picked them up, on Wednesday she sat and placidly read a book while you clipped all the arms and legs off your paper dolls. In the end you felt despairingly that the jungle of complications was much too vast and intricate for any exploration you might attempt; you gave up all idea of rules and fastened a wary eye on each situation as it presented itself. That simplified the problem enormously; if Mother’s face looked like this, for instance, you let the scissors alone; if like that, you used them for any reasonable purpose that occurred to you. Obviously, the point was Mother’s face, not the scissors at all.

You were aware though that this was true only relatively; the purpose must be reasonable; you could not cut the borders off of window curtains, or leaves out of books, anywhere at any time observed of anyone. You could not use pee as an intransitive verb, meaning go-go, except slyly with other children, who did not count anyway, being in the same precarious and anomalous situation as yourself; and since go-go was at an early age discarded as infantile, you were left without any verb at all for that particular function and were driven to the expedient of expressing the need for its performance by a series of facial and bodily contortions which seemed to you grotesque and shameful, so that you always felt yourself blushing; though your elders appeared to find them vastly amusing, since invariably they laughed and giggled when they saw you. One result of this was that now and then your underthings got wet; on those occasions the only desire left to you was that the crust of the earth should open under your feet and swallow you into the oblivion of hell.