Scales show only a Fraction Over 113
September 24
The house is rented. From now until March first but at only half our regular rent. Still, they have the house for such a short period and through its most uncomfortable months. And, anyway, it’s that much clear profit to me.
All I have to do now is learn how to build an igloo, for that February-March stretch.
September 25
Moved!
Only meant to take a few things of the utmost importance like silver, a few clothes, the records we like, my W.P.B. chart, and the last few volumes of Casanova. We ended up with six carloads of stuff. Lucretia was the first. She observed the swimming pool and terrace, the house that would look at home in a platinum setting, and the kitchen right out of “House Beautiful”, and summed it all up. “Well, anyway, I don’t gotta fix no hot-water furnace.”
When, come nightfall, I fell exhausted into bed -beautiful, great, huge, luscious, pink-painted double beds-it was only to discover that the mattresses (Pat’s too) have dips in the middle like a fresh-dug quarry. Always a worm in the apple, but not every worm eats as deep as this.
September 26 Maybe it’s the excitement, or maybe it’s the effect of this pale pink and wine-red bathroom, but I was dam sick this A.M. I certainly am making a liar out of “Prenatal Care”, which insists that all this ends at twelve weeks.
What I ought to do, of course, is eat. Six meals a day, the book says. But I’m not hungry, like the book says I ought to be, except late at night, when the book says I ought not to be. Wonder if it really knows. We can’t both be right, and it’s me that’s having the baby.
There’s one advantage of no appetite, though, that neither the book nor the doctor mentions. I can still look a full length mirror in its full length.
In the other house, when I wanted to see if my slip showed, I had to climb on the dressing table stool, but this place is lousy with mirrors and bathroom scales. When I get up in the morning, when I climb out of my little pink tub there am I facing myself full length. Anywhere I go I can gloat over my beautiful “no bulge”. The scales show only a fraction over 113. The W.P.B. chart shows the measurements are just the same, except the bust, which is now 33 inches and that pleases me mightily. If my appetite were what the book says it ought to be, I’d probably have another tale to tell.
Later
Spent the day discovering how millionaires live.
The quantity of light switches in this house would baffle Edison himself. There’s a coast-to-coast network of servants’ buzzers-I can imagine Lucretia answering any of ‘em! And, there’s a telephone extension system that will certainly inflate our hitherto modest bills out of all recognition. Well, something has to bulge.
The living room is a story and a half high. It has a pale gold oriental rug, gold drapes at the casement windows, and hoary old Italian antiques all covered with patinas.
I just hope to the lord Harry that among usPat and me and Mickey and Lucretia-we don’t break any of the fragile lamps or scratch the silver grey floors and silver grey woodwork. And personally I hope I don’t get too weary of the mural over the fireplace~a scene out of a child’s fairy tale with a prancing horse, a racing Irish setter, a softeyed doe, grinning elves popping out from behind trees, and a drunken rabbit who glares at me every time I come in the room. I hope too that no one drops a cigarette on that enormous grand piano. In many ways I’m going to welcome the Spring.
And the dining room! On my left, as I dine in solitary splendor (on a bowl of tomato soup and crackers), two miles of French doors that open out on the terrace and swimming pool. On my right, two miles of plain but costly wall. In front, a mile and a half of polished table, at one end of which is me. Uncle Joe is way, way down at the other end.
Uncle Joe is the handsome ole boy in the frame.
He wears eighteenth century toggery and has a knowing look in his big blue eyes. I’ve definitely adopted him for the duration.
F or tea I chose the one thing I wanted-more tomato soup. And to fool Lucretia I prepared it myself. But, just as I was ready to sneak off with it, out popped Lucretia. “Why for you wants more soup?”
Hanging my head in shame, I took my stolen sweet and headed for the terrace, twelve steps above the blue-bottomed swimming pool. Sat me down on a cemetery bench of whitewashed wrought iron and gulped soup the while I gazed smugly over my estate. It looked pretty nice.
And then the brilliant idea struck me and I rushed to the ‘phone and called everyone we ever knew, sprinkled slightly with everyone I ever hated.