I SPENT the rest of the day doing the hundred little chores that consume an assistant innkeeper’s day at a failing hotel, chores that leave no visible sign of their having been done, but which if left undone scream, “Look at me, look at me! Fix me, clean me, mend me!” In the evening, I read the twenty-second episode of Dead Air, “No Sale.”
IN THE HOPE that there might be a market for the flying-saucer detectors that I was building in my cellar, I had begun canvassing my neighborhood, door-to-door. I had started at the Jerrolds’, but Mrs. Jerrold had been busy choosing baked goods from the Yummy Good delivery man, so I went next door, to the Breeds’.
There was a throng of children in the Breeds’ yard, as there always was. It was difficult at times to say just how many of the children who swarmed around the Breeds’ house were actually part of the family and which were only there to play. Mr. Breed was the only person I knew, at that time, who had given his house a name; he called it “The Breeding Ground.” He had carved the name into a wooden plaque that he hung beside the front door.
I had never managed to sell anything to the Breeds — not the Babbington Reporter, not raffle tickets, not even the Babbington Cub Reporter, the neighborhood newspaper that I published for three weeks one summer. Because I had found that there was no real news in my neighborhood, I had reported the things I overheard while I was standing around, minding my own business. Before my father shut it down, the Cub Reporter was so popular that many people came directly to my house to get a copy hot off my Little Giant press — but not the Breeds. They borrowed a copy, read it, and returned it with coffee stains. Nevertheless, I knocked at their door.
Inside, a dog began to bark, a child began to cry, and Mrs. Breed began to call out, “Just a minute! Wait a minute! Just a gee-dee minute!” In a little less than a minute, she parted the soiled curtains that hung inside the kitchen door. When she saw me, she opened the door at once and said, “Peter! My favorite informant. Come on in and tell me what’s going on outside this kitchen.”
I allowed myself to be pulled into the kitchen, which stank. Most of the Breed children were boys, and boys have a well-known tendency to miss the toilet when they urinate, so the house smelled of piss most of the time, but this may not have been the exclusive fault of the boys; the Breeds may have had a few cats that I never saw because they were hiding under the sofa all day long, away from the little Breeds’ feet, until at night it was finally safe, and then the cats would come out and mark their space. Maybe.
“Did you start publishing again?” she asked.
“No. My father said, ‘Everything that comes off that Little Giant printing press from now on has to be subjected to my scrutiny.’”
“I guess that shut you up.”
“Not quite,” I said, brightly, since I could recognize an opening when I saw one. “He said I could print these flyers.” I handed her one of my flyers for the saucer detectors. “This is what I’m selling now. They can help you sleep if you’re worrying about saucers and missiles.”
“Ha!” she said, balancing a tot on her hip while she read the flyer. “Trouble sleeping? Are you kidding? By the time the day is over, I can hardly hold my head up. I get into bed and I go into a coma. You could burn this house down, and I wouldn’t wake up. Saucers could land, bombs could go off — I wouldn’t know anything about it. In the morning I’d say, ‘It looks like a bomb hit this place! Funny it didn’t wake me up.’ As it is, one morning a year I say, ‘Hey, I’m pregnant! Funny it didn’t wake me up.’”
“What?” I said.
“Oh, nothing. Never mind.”
“You can get pregnant while you’re asleep?”
“Never you mind,” she said. “Why don’t you go sell one of your detectors to Mrs. Jerrold? I’ll bet she’s in the market for one.”
“I tried, but she’s busy.”
Mrs. Breed looked out the window over her kitchen sink, toward the Jerrolds’ house.
“Ah, yes,” she said, more to herself than to me, “I see she’s getting a delivery from Mr. Yummy. That can take a while.” The baby, without any particular fuss, threw up on her shoulder.
“I guess I’ll go try the Learys,” I said. Mrs. Breed said nothing. She continued to move the mop around the floor while singing, softly, the Yummy Good Baked Goods jingle.
Who’s that knockin’ at my back door?
It’s the Yummy Good man with goodies galore!
Let me in, let me in, let me in, I implore!
You’ve never had goodies so good before!
[to be continued]
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