Not a Step

Howard is on the stepladder, scraping his house. He scrapes the peeling places; then he scrapes the whole clapboard, just to make sure. Sometimes he gets down to the white, the paint he put on in 1935, fixing up the house for his bride. On top of the white is gray: he painted the house gray three times, nobody can say he doesn't remember that. The first time, Fred was just a baby, a little red thing with a fuzzy head lolloping on Alice's shoulder. She carries the baby easily with one arm; in the other hand she has a bottle of beer for Howard. She laughs at the paint on his face and clothes and she stays at arm's length, handing him the beer. For a long stretch there it seemed like she always had a diaper on her shoulder for somebody to spit up on: Pete, Fred, Janey, Martha. But it was Fred that day, no doubt about it, the house half white, half gray.

And the next time, when the first gray had peeled, Fred and Pete were helping, scraping the house lower down while Howard was up on the extension ladder. He doesn't remember what year it was - who the hell would? But the point is, he remembers every time he painted this house; his memory is quite remarkable, in spite of what certain parties contend. The next time they painted, Pete was home from college that summer. He and Howard had stood on the scaffold like two pros and listened to Red Sox games on the radio. Fred was maybe sixteen, scrambling up and down the ladder, showing off. The little girls helped, too, and Martha cried because Janey was allowed to paint and she wasn't. She always was a fuss-budget.

The outside layer of paint is red. That was Alice's idea; she said it made the house look warmer. Now that she's gone, Howard's going to paint the house gray again. Sure, it would be easier to cover red with red, but he doesn't like red, for a house. A red barn is a different story. After the kids grew up, Alice started reading Yankee Magazine and took to doing things up in this new-fangled Olde New England style. She made rag rugs and even went back to canning, when she'd been putting things by in the freezer for twenty-five years. Martha opened the last jar of Alice's beans for his supper just the other night. When she told him, it reminded him of Alice, the way she'd say "that's it, the last jar" when she finished canning a batch. Howard feels like he could scrape a little harder, scrape a thin place in the kitchen wall and see right through to where Alice stands at the counter with her face in a sweat and her black hair up in a bandana, sealing the last jar of beans from her Victory Garden. If he'd come up to her when she was concentrating on a job like that—give her a little love pat or something - she'd say, "Now, Howie, I don't want to be fooled with right this minute," as if she were talking to one of the kids. So he'd say, "Well, just let me know when you do, Sugar," and she'd laugh, because she did like to be fooled with, when she put her mind to it.