Seed on the Wind

Certain admonitions from certain people were as inevitable as Mother’s goodnight kiss or oatmeal at breakfast. From Miss Wright, “Take your pencil out of your mouth”; from Mother, “Don’t annoy your father, dear”; from Sam who tended the furnace, “Get on out of here now”; from Father, “Pull your skirt down.”

The last was the best remembered of all; she would never forget it; it made her uncomfortable and resentful even now to recall her father’s “Pull your skirt down.” When had she heard it first? No telling, that was lost somewhere back in the origins of things; nor could she remember specifically its farewell performance, after she had graduated into high school and begun to have beaux, had become a young lady in fact; but in between those two forgotten occasions, the first and the last, it had persisted throughout, with or without reason.

Come to think of it, that was her father, “Pull your skirt down.” That was him. Most other memories of him, from childhood and early youth, were fleshless and bloodless, mere punctuations of time, with no significance beyond the chronological. Her first remembered reaction to that command, as a plump freckled youngster of five or six, had been simple and instant obedience. She had pulled her skirt down, though there had been very little to pull. By the time it had undergone a dozen repetitions she had, unconsciously of course, added it to the category of rules headed: Father Specialties, No Exceptions. It first became annoying on account of its indiscriminate use, a purely logical indignation against the requirement that something be pulled down which was already down as far as it would pull. The day came when the command was uttered and her hand did not move; after a brief interval it was repeated, in a tone that surprised and shocked her into a sudden violent tug.

“If you don’t care about decency, I do,” said her father.

She was at that time twelve or thirteen. The plumpness was all gone, and the freckles had disappeared; her hair had already begun to assume the dark rich tone which later became her chief attraction. He, her father, standing near the door putting on his overcoat, looked as to her he had always looked, large, well-built, handsome, not so old as other girls’ fathers but infinitely more terrifying. She liked to watch his mouth when he talked or laughed; his red lips and gums and white teeth made fascinating combinations. At one time, when she was almost too young to remember, he had worn a short moustache, but it had been gone now for some years; of mornings in the bathroom she was often permitted, when necessity required it, to wash her hands and face at the tub faucet while he shaved at the bowl, and on these occasions she consumed a lot of precious time with her surreptitious delighted glances at his distortions and grimaces in the mirror, with the thick creamy lather making his white teeth seem by comparison a sickly yellow, and his skin, as the razor-strokes uncovered it, a fiery pink.

“Come come, you’ll be late for school,” he would say. “I’m not making faces to amuse you.”

There were at that time many things about many people which she did not begin to understand, but she understood her father and mother least of all. Why did it make him angry when her mother said, “Don’t annoy your father, dear,” and why in face of that invariable result did her mother keep on saying it? Why was he always in such a hurry when he told Mother goodbye in the morning, though often, on leaving the house, he would linger in the front yard, leisurely smelling the flowers, pruning with his pocketknife a shrub or rosebush here and there? Why did her mother always cry when he called her “my pale love” in that funny tone? The definitions of “pale” and “love” in the dictionary seemed to offer no basis for tears. Why did he dislike boys so much, and chase them off, even the nicest ones when they were doing no harm? Above all, why did he kick the cat? Four times he did that: the little black and white cat, when Lora was five or six; two years later the same cat, this time blinding it and injuring its jaw so that it had to be killed; somewhat later Brownie, no harm done; and the last time when Lora was in her early teens, a big male Maltese which afterwards limped around for a month or so and then suddenly disappeared.