He worked for two hours and uncovered and cleared the frozen drain. She was able to clear out the bathtubs and sinks. When he returned the tools she asked him in for his whisky. She was quite drunk herself by then. He poured himself a water glass of whisky and drank it off. “What I really need,” he said, “is a shower. I’m living in a furnished room. You have to take turns at the bathtub.” She said he could take a shower, knowing full well what was afoot. He drank off another glass of whisky and she led him upstairs and opened the bathroom door. “I’ll just get out of these things,” he said, pulling off his sweater and dropping his jeans.
They were still in bed when the children came home. She opened the door and called sweetly down the stairs: “Mummy’s resting. There are cookies on top of the icebox. Be sure and take your vitamin pills before you go out to play.” When the children went out she gave him ten dollars, kissed him good-bye and slipped him out the back door. She never saw him again.
The old plumber fixed the drain and on the weekend Pete filled in the trench. The weather remained bitter. One morning, a week or ten days later, she was wakened by her husband’s huffing and puffing. “There isn’t time, darling,” she said. She slipped on a wrapper, went downstairs and tried to open a package of bacon. The package promised to seal in the bacon’s smoky flavor but she couldn’t get the package open. She broke a fingernail. The transparent wrapper that imprisoned the bacon seemed like some immutable transparency in her life, some invisible barrier of frustrations that stood between herself and what she deserved. Pete joined her while she was struggling with the bacon and continued his attack. He was very nearly successful—he had her backed up against the gas range—when they heard the thunder of their children’s footsteps in the hall. Pete went off to the train with mixed and turbulent feelings. She got the children some breakfast and watched them eat it with the extraordinary density of a family gathered at a kitchen table on a dark winter morning. When the children had gone off to get the school bus she turned up the thermostat. There was a dull explosion from the furnace room. A cloud of rank smoke came out the cellar door. She poured herself a glass of whisky to steady her nerves and opened the door. The room was full of smoke but there was no fire. Then she telephoned the oil-burner repairman they employed. “Oh, Charlie isn’t here,” his wife said brightly. “He’s up in Utica with his bowling team. They’re in the semi-finals. He won’t be back for ten days.” She called every oil-burner man in the telephone directory but none of them was free. “But someone must come and help me,” she exclaimed to one of the women who answered the phone. “It’s zero outside and there’s no heat at all. Everything will freeze.” “Well, I’m sorry but I won’t have a man free until Thursday,” the stranger said. “But why don’t you buy yourself an electric heater? You can keep the temperature up with those things.” She had some more whisky, put on some lipstick and drove to the hardware store in Parthenia where she bought a large electric heater. She plugged it into an outlet in the kitchen and pulled the switch. All the lights in the house went out and she poured herself some more whisky and began to cry.
She cried for her discomforts but she cried more bitterly for their ephemeralness, for the mysterious harm a transparent bacon wrapper and an oil burner could do to the finest part of her spirit; cried for a world that seemed to be without laws and prophets. She went on crying and drinking. Some repairmen came and patched things up but when the children came home from school she was lying unconscious on the sofa. They took their vitamin pills and went out to play. The next week the washing machine broke down and flooded the kitchen. The first repairman she called had gone to Miami for his vacation. The second would not be able to come for a week. The third had gone to a funeral. She mopped up the kitchen floor but it was two weeks before a repairman came. In the meantime the gas range went and she had to do all the cooking on an electric plate. She could not educate herself in the maintenance and repair of household machinery and felt in herself that tragic obsolescence she had sensed in the unemployed of Parthenia who needed work and money but who could not dig a hole. It was this feeling of obsolescence that pushed her into drunkenness and promiscuity and she was both.
