Free Some Luck by Jane Smiley Page A

the dining room, and Mary Elizabeth heard Mama call, “What are you boys up to now? If I hear any more screaming, I will tie you together like I did last week, and you can learn to cooperate all over again! Your fighting is driving me out of my mind!”
    Mary Elizabeth sidestepped two more steps, but her feet and her shoes weren’t working very well, and though her one hand was still on the chair, her other was still waving in the air, and, what with one thing and another, she was beginning to lose confidence in her ability to get all the way around the chair to the table. Yes, she was confused, no doubt about it. She stopped moving and looked at Joey.
    Joey had sat up. His legs were crossed and he was staring at her.
    And it was true—she had lost her grip on the chair, and both of her hands were waving in the air. It was unprecedented.
    Joey crawled toward her, his face bright, then sat back on his heels and said, “C’mon!”
    She tilted toward him.
    The top edges of the red shoes dug into her.
    She bent a knee, the right knee, the knee that knew what it was doing more often.
    She did not fall down.
    She bent the left knee. She bent the right knee again.
    Joey crawled closer and held out his hands.
    Her arms waved. She fell into him, and he laughed. She laughed.
    Frankie ran into the room again. He said, “Mama’s mad at you.”
    Mary Elizabeth got up on her hands and knees and crawled back to the chair she liked. She pulled herself up.
    Frankie and Joey were rolling around on the floor again, hitting and kicking. Mama blew into the room and grabbed them and jerked them to their feet. She smacked both of them across the backside with the spoon in her hand, and then she came over to Mary Elizabeth and picked her up. She said, “My goodness me, how am I going to get through the winter?”

1925

    W ALTER WAS SITTING in his chair at the kitchen table. It was still dark, and Rosanna was upstairs with Mary Elizabeth. Ragnar was feeding the hogs, and at any minute, Frank would come down, dressed and ready to feed the horses, so Walter was a little impatient for his breakfast. At the stove was Irma, Eloise’s official replacement, who might have been five feet tall, but maybe not.
    Walter didn’t know what to think of this girl that Ragnar had married. She said she was nineteen, which was a good age, but she seemed much younger, and she was clumsy to a frightening degree. She had nice hair and would have been pretty if she had not lost her two front teeth, and although Ragnar had not told him how this happened, Walter suspected that it was an accident. Already since he’d brought her home, she had knocked herself out standing up in the chicken house—she had gone out to gather eggs, and when she didn’t return, Rosanna went out to discover her flat on her back, two eggs broken in her hand, and the chickens perching on her. It had taken her two days to recover completely from that. She had also dropped two plates and a cup, and smashed her finger in the door. She was as likely as not to stumble over a threshold. “Oh, my goodness,” she always said, “how silly of me!” as if her own clumsiness were an eternal surprise.
    Walter couldn’t figure it out—her feet weren’t especially big forher small size. He and Rosanna had looked forward to her replacing Eloise in the house, but she made Eloise seem like a machine of efficiency by contrast. “It’s like having a fourth child,” said Rosanna. At least she was an easygoing girl, and not demanding. The two of them lived in Ragnar’s bedroom for the time being. Walter thought he could get Rolf and Otto to help him put an addition on the west side of the house in the summer, with its own door. Then Mary Elizabeth would get a room of her own, and Frank and Joe would get something a little bigger, anyway.
    Irma said, “Well, the yolk split on one of them.”
    Walter said, “That’s fine, just scramble them.”
    “You want me to scramble them?”
    “Yes,