Free On Keeping Women by Hortense Calisher

“For a haffa cup sugar, who put salt?”
    Now and then one appeals to her as referee. Although both this habit and her authority are dwindling, tonight she’s deep in the human fabric, and honored too. What power she’s had over these souls before her! Over there is Charles, the oldest, who could have been named James. Or Alex, after her, and her grandfather. The power of the name. And of the nose—for in three of these faces her pudgy one, handed down scarcely blended, from the power of her own father, has pushed out Ray’s. To be sure, a slender version of Ray’s has appeared in Chessie, the older girl, insuring her beauty, what with those large soft eyes which descend—who would believe it?—from Ray’s father, the veterinarian.
    Chessie’s the difficult one. “The talented one,” people say, or ask? So many talents, but she’s always putting salt for sugar; will she qualify? Charlie is hellbent for aerodynamics, and these days silent as a deposed king—does she think this because he’s said to be “pure Ray”? He’s made a time-wheel to show them what his father may be doing at this moment in Monte Carlo and Spain, and Ray had given him a detailed itinerary which Charles has hung on the opposite wall. He’s jealous, even passionate about his father’s position in this house. Perhaps when the males are with themselves, do even their very features veer obediently due-male-center, toward the father and his family? Perhaps heredity’s a movable dock, which dips conformably with the weight of whoever’s standing on it.
    Now dinner’s on the table, prepared by children’s hands.
    “What a lovely sight,” she says, “—how magnificent,” and means it—she’s near tears. The rice steams with a biblical mist. Mustard pot, pepper, water pitcher march naive across table, in caravan. The chili glows. When the candle stumps are lit, she does cry. Finding that she can only make the dry face for it.
    “Mother!” This is Maureen, the in-betweener, the sturdy one with the least personal face. She’ll nurse me when I’m senile, Lexie thinks; Maureen will settle for a life of devotion if we’re not all very careful, but she plays the piano more than serviceably, like her maternal grandmother, always finishing the pieces to the end; perhaps if we push very gently we can at least get her out of that drysink of devotion she’s in, if not quite to the Juilliard. Or perhaps she’s only in that phase when adolescents crave service, when they go to be monks and nuns. Let her have it then. “Maureen—” Lexie says, smiling, “—my rock.”
    When little Royal, the youngest, creeps into her lap, though at going-on-ten he’s too old for it, she nuzzles him. Nobody jeers. Roy was born with one leg shorter than the other and a wry foot. His infirmity is good for the others; does he know this? It won’t sway him; look at the long James-jaw on him, those careful Ray-hands; he’s going to be a doctor too. And when asked what kind has already answered: “Like me.”
    … Was that the particular night also the one when Chessie burst out “Salt, salt, salt—what do I care?” and ran from the table, and was brought back by little Royal, the only one who could—because she knew he’d limped upstairs to do it? Or was it the evening of that day Maureen, the sturdy one, got lost in the city, losing her wallet too and just managing to quaver out the city corner she was phoning for Lexie to drive in and pick her up from, before her telephone dime went down? When we drove in here and Maureen saw the three others waiting on the steps, how she bloomed—a flowering. She’s begged the dime, on the corner—would I have been able to do that?
    Or was that night the one when, in return for a remark about James, I smacked Charles on his cheekbone, seeing in the wide-open second after that my authority with him was forever gone?
    Or was it the night… ? They parade before her, these nights, their alignments shifted beyond