When I was a little kid in Middle School the teachers were always asking what we wanted to be when we grew up. Well, I’m grown up now, and I guess since you’re reading this it’s pretty obvious what one thing I want to be is. I want to be a writer. I also want to be an adventuress. (I’m as liberated as you are, but adventurer doesn’t really mean the same thing, now does it?) I’m going to have a ton of adventures, and write about them when they’re over—like this—and sleep with rock stars and then sue them.
Okay, now you know quite a bit about me, and my father and mother. Barton is a town of about 10,000 and it’s 65 miles by car from the Loop. Lots of pretty wealthy people live in Barton, but the really rich ones live west of it in Barton Hills, where every house has to have at least twenty acres. The high school and fire department are both in Barton. (Barton Hills has its own police force, with maybe three cops and two cars.) I don’t think there’s a building in Barton that’s more than two floors high, not counting the water tower.
From what I’ve told you already, you can guess that in and around Barton there are quite a lot of ladies who have quite a bit of money and quite a bit of spare time. Which means there are lots of social affairs of one kind and another; some of them make me laugh, but it isn’t all bad. Like, they run a regular store, the Snatchpenny, where you can buy donated stuff—clothes that don’t exactly fit somebody any more (or maybe never did), third toasters, and like that. I live in jeans and denim shirts mostly, and they never seem to get those, but even so I’ve found some real bargains, like my sheepskin coat for nineteen ninety-five this winter. The ladies clerk for free maybe half a day a week, and all the money goes to Barton Community Hospital. They put on plays, too, and dances, and there are clubs for handball and horseshoes and so forth, and two literary societies—one for people who want to talk about books that have been dramatized on TV and one for people who don’t.
But the biggie, the really big, big deal, comes at the end of July. Most Barton families take their vacations in January or February and go to Bermuda or the Virgin Islands, because the winters can be really mean here but the summers are nice. But even if they didn’t, I think that almost everybody would try to schedule things so they were in town for it. What it is, is the Barton Antique Fair and Art Festival. Usually we just call it the Fair. People bring antiques from as far as Philadelphia to show for prizes, and there’s a couple of auctions, and a lot of stuff that’s just for sale at a set price, like a thousand bucks for an early colonial banisterbacked chair or maybe twenty-five for a 19th-century sauerkraut crock. There’s a used-book sale where the books go for anything from a hundred dollars to five-for-a-buck, and an art show, and an art auction, and a whole lot of artists who come to sell their work direct—sketches and oils and watercolors, and sculptures and woodcarvings and a lot of other junk. And there’s always a special event that’s different every year.
The Fair takes over all of Barton High and spills out into the grounds in front; and people park their cars in the parking lots, and all over all three softball diamonds, and all up and down Main Street. The really valuable antiques are inside the classrooms just in case it rains, although it hardly ever does. The art show is in the art rooms upstairs, and the book sale’s upstairs in the chem lab. The artists set up outside if they’re selling paperweights and that kind of junk, and inside if they have paintings and real reputations. There’s a Gourmet French Lunch fixed in the kitchen. (Would you believe it’s the Lions who do that? Most years they have quiche Lorraine, fresh French bread and butter, tossed salad, some kind of dessert crepe, and a choice of regular or decaf, tea, or milk. It costs $5.50 or so. My father used to be a Lion, and I helped serve once.) And outside there are burger stands and so on.
So that’s the fill-in on that.
Last year’s is the Fair I want to tell about. Like I said, my father was in the Lions and of course Elaine was big in the Women’s Club, which is the basic outfit that puts on the fair. She had been secretary and treasurer and corresponding secretary and vice president twice and God knows what else, so eventually it got to be her turn to be the chairwoman of the fair. (That’s why they call it: “chairwoman.” I’d say chair, but then I’d never run an outfit like that anyway.) I guess most of it’s pretty cut and dried. They have lists of people—artists and exhibitors—who have to be notified, and there are standing committees for the book sale and parking and auctions and all that. The hard part was, you guessed it, the special event.
Like one year they had this mystery exhibition. There were all sorts of old kitchen gadgets and beauty aids and tools, and you had to write down what everything was called and what it was used for, and there were prizes. (One mystery item was a round iron weight with a handle on top, and I’ll give you half of it, it was called a frog. Do you know what it was good for? I didn’t think so.) Another year it was a hot-air balloon, with a long rope to hold it and the balloonist dressed up in real old circus style like the Great and Powerful Oz; and he’d take your kid up free if you could show a receipt that proved you’d bought something that cost more than fifty dollars.
Now it was my mother’s turn, and you couldn’t repeat. She had to come up with something good if she wanted to hold up her head afterward with the rest of the ex-chairwomen, and I’m here to tell you she damn near went crazy. Elaine wasn’t the easiest person in the whole world to live with even when everything was going right, and that was pure hell. My father used to say that Elaine never had an idea in her life, but there for a month or more—May and the first bit of June—she was having two or three a day, and most of them weren’t worth doodly, just warmed-over things that had been done before and things that nobody but God could do (and maybe not even Him) and things that nobody’d care whether you did or not. A few were maybe halfway good, but she couldn’t even see that. Finally it got so bad I started feeling sorry for her instead of just yelling back and locking myself in my room or going off for a ride on Sidi; she was my mother after all, and when she was at her absolute worst I could see that we were related after all even if she did have creamy big ones and that little heart-shaped face with that cute mouth. Because to tell you the truth I’m like that sometimes. In fact I’m like that a lot.
Anyway, one Saturday morning my father couldn’t take it any longer. It was only about nine o’clock, but he went and got his checkbook and wrote her a check and said, “Here, go shopping. I don’t care how you spend it, but don’t come back till the stores close.” I didn’t get to see how much it was, but it must have been a thousand at least, because when Elaine looked at it her mouth made a little O the way it does sometimes, and to Elaine anything under a grand was chicken feed. Then she ran upstairs to get dressed, and she told my father to call Bill and have him get his uniform on. Bill Hake was the man who took care of our cars and the garden, and helped me take care of Sidi.
So my father called Bill on the house phone and told him to get dressed up and bring around the Caddy, and he said, “Drive slowly, Bill, and if you should find yourself headed back here before dark, have engine trouble.” Bill wasn’t long on brains, but he could be kind of tricky. I’ve never seen a servant yet who couldn’t, unless he was new; it seems like it’s something they all learn.