366: For the next . . .
Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 16 begins
16
In Which Herb and Lorna Fan Ardor’s Still-Flickering Flame
FOR THE NEXT FIVE YEARS, Bert and Ella and I lived with Herb and Lorna. The automobile business entered a boom period right after the war. Business was brisk at Babbington Studebaker, and Herb was able to get Bert a job there, in the service department. He and Bert left for work together every morning and came home together every night. My mother and grandmother stayed at home, kept house, and took care of me.
Bert worked hard in the service department. He and Ella opened a savings account at the Babbington Five Cents Bank, and each week they put a little something away for The House, which is to say, the house that they hoped to have someday, when Ella and Bert and I could afford a place of our own. Because Bert insisted on paying rent for the rooms that we used and contributing three-fifths of the cost of food and heat and all the other expenses of running the ménage on No Bridge Road (despite Lorna’s calculations of the true, accurate, much-lower percentage of those expenses that the three of us represented), the savings account grew slowly, far more slowly than Ella’s yearning and disappointment. Bert took on a second job, working evenings and Saturdays at Speedy’s Reliable Service, the garage across from the police station, on Main Street, the spot where Herb and Lorna had stopped to ask directions on the rainy night when they first arrived in Babbington more than twenty years before. This garage is, in my memory, a trim, exciting, happy place. It was the place where my mother and father and I spent our Saturdays. Because Bert came home late at night during the week, neither of us saw much of him then. Saturdays and Sundays were our only chance. On Saturdays Speedy took the day off, and Bert was in charge of the station. My mother and I would spend the day at the station, watching him work. My mother would buy bottles of Coca-Cola from a machine that resembled a squat red refrigerator, and sometimes she would let me buy a scant handful of nuts or a gumball nearly too large for my mouth, from machines that stood side by side on steel poles. My mother called these machines Mr. Nuts and Miss Gumball, because they looked like a pair of busts, one male, one female. Mr. Nuts seemed strong, hard-working, and opinionated. He had a thick neck, a head of cubic stolidity, and a gaping rectangular mouth. He wore a cast-metal cap that resembled the ones workingmen wore in those days. Miss Gumball was smaller. She had a slender neck, a spherical head, and a mouth shaped in an O of surprise. Her head was filled with a riot of colored balls. If they’d been able to speak, he would have groused and grumbled, and she would have been light-hearted and witty.
I remember well the sounds and smells of Saturdays in the garage, and, because the days I spent there were so uniformly pleasant, I developed a lifelong affection by association for the odors of gasoline, brake fluid, and motor oil and for the sounds of the bell that rang ching-chang when a car drove over the pressure hose, the quite different bell that rang ding at widening intervals from the air pumps when someone was filling a tire, and the bell that rang bing (pause) bing (pause) bing with measured regularity when Bert pumped gas. I realize now, recalling those days, that they couldn’t have been as pleasant for Bert, not only because he was at work, but because my mother’s favorite topic, about which she could chatter tirelessly for entire Saturdays, while Bert fixed flat tires, pumped gas, changed oil, and so on, was The House.
[to be continued on Monday, October 24, 2022]
In Topical Guide 366, Mark Dorset considers Businesses: Service Stations; and Gadgets: Mechanical: Vending Machines from this episode.
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