Cheaper by the Dozen (22 page)

"I'll back you up," said Ern, "to the hilt. But I don't want to bob my hair. I want a barber to bob it for me. What I'm wondering is who's going to back up Dad. Somebody had better be there to catch him."

"I have a feeling," Anne said, "that I'm in for a fairly disagreeable evening. Oh, well, somebody had to do it, and I'm the oldest."

They sat in Ernestine's room until supper time, and then went downstairs together. Mother was serving the plates, and dropped peas all over the table cloth.

"Anne," she whispered. "Your beautiful hair. Oh, oh, oh. Just look at yourself."

"I have looked at myself," Anne said. "Please don't make me look at myself again. I don't want to spoil my appetite."

Mother burst into tears. "You've already spoiled mine," she sobbed.

Dad hadn't paid any attention when Anne and Ernestine entered the dining room.

"What's the trouble now?" he asked. "Can't we have a little peace and quiet around here for just one meal? All I ask is..." He saw Anne and choked.

"Go back upstairs and take that thing off," he roared. "And don't you ever dare to come down here looking like that again. The idea! Scaring everybody half to death and making your Mother cry. You ought to be ashamed of yourself."

"It's done, Daddy," Anne said. "I'm afraid we're all going to have to make the best of it. The moving finger bobs, and having bobbed, moves on."

"I think it looks snakey," Ern hastened to do her duty to her older sister. "And listen, Daddy, it's ever so much more efficient. It take me ten minutes to fix these pugs in the morning, and Anne can fix her hair now in fifteen seconds."

"What hair?" Dad shouted. "She doesn't have any hair to fix."

"How could you do this to me?" Mother sobbed.

"How could she do it to an Airedale, let alone to herself or you and me?" said Dad. "The Scarlet Letter. How Hester won her 'A.'Well, I won't have it, do you understand? I want your hair grown back in and I want it grown back in fast. Do you hear me?"

Anne had tried to keep up a bold front, but the combined attack was too much and she burst into tears.

"Nobody in this family understands me," she sobbed. "I wish I were dead."

She ran from the table. We heard her bedroom door slam, and muffled, heartbroken sobs.

Dad reached over and picked up his convent catalogues, but he couldn't put any enthusiasm into them, and he finally tossed them down again. Neither he nor Mother could eat anything, and there was an uneasy, guilty silence, punctuated by Anne's sobs.

"Listen to that poor, heartbroken child," Mother finally said. "Imagine her thinking that no one in the world understands her. Frank, I think you were too hard on her."

Dad put his head in his hands. "Maybe I was," he said. "Maybe I was. Personally, I don't have anything much against bobbed hair. Like Ernestine says, it's more efficient. But when I saw how upset it made you, I lost my temper, I guess."

"I don't have anything against bobbed hair either," Mother said. "It certainly would eliminate a lot of brushing and combing. But I knew you didn't like it, and..."

Anne appeared at dessert time, red-eyed and disheveled. Without a word she sat down and picked up her knife and fork. Minutes later, she smiled enchantingly.

"That was good," she said, passing her plate. "If you don't mind, Mother, I'll have another helping of everything. I'm positively starved tonight."

"I don't mind, dear," said Mother.

"I like to see girls eat," said Dad.

That weekend, Mother took the girls down to Dad's barber shop in the Claridge Building in Montclair.

"I want you to trim this one's hair, please," she said, pointing to Anne, "and to bob the hair of the others."

"Any special sort of bob, Mrs. Gilbreth?" the barber asked.

"No. No, I guess just a regular bob," Mother said slowly. "The shorter the better."

"And how about you, Mrs. Gilbreth?"

"What about me?"

"How about your hair?"

"No, sir," the girls shouted indignantly. "You don't touch a hair on her head. The idea!"

Mother pretended to consider the suggestion. "I don't know, girls," she smiled. "It might look very chic. And it certainly would be more efficient. What do you think?"

"I think," said Ernestine, "it would be disgraceful. After all, a mother's a mother, not a silly flapper."

"I guess not today, thank you," Mother told the barber. "Five bobbed-haired bandits in the family should be enough."

Having capitulated on the hair question, Dad put up an even sterner resistance against any future changes in dress. But Anne and Ernestine broke him down a little at a time. Anne got a job in the high-school cafeteria, saved her money, and bought silk stockings, two short dresses, and four flimsy pieces of underwear known as teddies. These she unwrapped with some ceremony in the living room.

"I don't want to be a sneak," she said, "so I'm going to show these to everybody right now. If you won't let me wear them at home, I'll change into them on the way to school. I'm never going to wear long underwear again."

"Oh no you don't," Dad shouted. "Take those things back to the store. It embarrasses me to look at them, and I won't have them in my house."

He picked up a teddy and held the top of it against his shoulders. It hung down to his belt.

"You mean that's all the underwear women wear nowadays?" he asked incredulously. "When I think of... well, never mind that. No wonder you read about all those crimes and love nests, like that New Brunswick preacher and the choir singer. Well, you take the whole business right back to the store."

"No," Anne insisted. "I bought these clothes with my own money and I'm going to wear them. I'm not going to be the only one in the class with long underwear and a flap in the back. It's disgusting."

"It's not so disgusting as having no back of the underwear to sew a flap on," said Dad. "I just can't

believe that everybody in your class wears these teddy-bear, or bare-teddy, things. There must be some sane parents besides your mother and me." He shook his head. But he was weakening.

"I don't see why you object to teddies," Anne said. "They don't show, you know."

"Of course they don't show, that's just the trouble. It's what does show that I'm talking about."

"There's only one other girl in high school besides Anne and me who doesn't wear teddies," Ernestine put in. "If you don't believe us, come to school and see for yourself."

"That won't be necessary," Dad blushed. "I'm willing to take your word for it."

"I should say not," said Mother.

"Aside from the possibility of being arrested for indecent exposure every time they crossed their legs or stood in a breeze," Dad muttered, "I'd think they'd die of pneumonia."

"Well, I'm glad there's one other sensible girl in school besides you two," Mother said, clutching at a straw. "She sounds like a nice girl. Do I know her?"

"I don't believe so," Ernestine whispered. "She doesn't even wear a teddy. And if you don't believe me..."

"I know," Dad blushed again. "And it still won't be necessary."

He picked up one of the stockings and slipped his hand into it.

"You might as well go bare-legged as to wear these. You can see right through them. It's like the last of the seven veils. And those arrows at the bottom—why do they point in that direction?"

"Those aren't arrows, Daddy," Anne said. "They're clocks. And it seems to me that you're going out of your way to find fault with them."

"Well, why couldn't the hands of the clock have stopped at quarter after three or twenty-five of five, instead of six o'clock?"

"Be sensible, Daddy," Anne begged him. "You don't want us to grow up to be wallflowers, do you?"

"I'd a lot rather raise wallflowers than clinging vines or worse. The next thing I know you'll be wanting to paint."

"Everybody uses makeup nowadays," Ern said. "They don't call it painting any more."

"I don't care what they call it," Dad roared. "I'll have no painted women in this house. Get that straight. The bare-teddies and six o'clock stockings are all right, I guess, but no painting, do you understand?"

"Yes, Daddy."

"And no high heels or pointed toes. I'm not going to have a lot of doctor's bills because of foot troubles."

Anne and Ernestine decided that half a loaf was better than none, and that they had better wait until Dad got used to the silk stockings and short skirts before they pressed the makeup and shoe question.

But it turned out that Dad had given all the ground he intended to, and the girls found Mother a weak reed on which to lean.

"Neither my sisters nor I have ever used face powder," Mother told Anne and Ernestine, when they asked her to intervene in their behalf. "Frankly, girls, I consider it nonessential."

"Don't tell me you'd rather see a nose full of freckles!"

"At least that looks natural. And when it comes to the matter of high heels, I don't see how your father can be expected to travel around the world talking about eliminating fatigue, while you girls are fatiguing yourself with high-heel shoes."

Dad kept a sharp lookout for surreptitious painting, and was especially suspicious whenever one of the girls looked particularly pretty.

"What's got into you tonight?" he'd ask, sniffing the air for traces of powder or perfume.

Ernestine, after playing outside most of the afternoon, came to supper one evening with flushed cheeks.

"Come over here, young lady," Dad yelled. "I warned you about painting. Let me take a look at you. I declare, you girls pay no more attention to me than if I were a cigar store Indian. A man's got to wear grease in his hair and gray flannel trousers to get any attention in this house nowadays."

"I haven't got on makeup, Daddy."

"You haven't, eh? Don't think you can fool me. And don't think I'm fooling you when I tell you you've just about painted your way into that convent."

"The one with the twelve-foot wall, or the one with the ten-foot wall?" Ern asked.

"Don't be impudent." He pulled out a handkerchief and held a corner of it out to Ern. "Spit on that."

He took the wet part of the handkerchief, rubbed her cheeks, and examined it.

"Well, Ernestine," he said after a minute. "I see that it isn't rouge, and I apologize. But it might have been, and I won't have it, do you hear?"

Dad prided himself on being able to smell perfume as soon as he walked into a room, and on being able to pick the offender out of a crowd.

"Ernestine, are you the one we have to thank for that smell?" he asked. "Good Lord. It smells like a French... like a French garbage can."

"What smell, Daddy?"

"By jingo, don't tell me you're indulging in perfume now!"

"Why not, Daddy? Perfume isn't painting or makeup. And it smells so good!"

"Why not? Because it stinks up good fresh air, that's why not. Now, go up and wash that stuff off before I come up and wash it off for you. Don't you know what men think when they smell perfume on a woman?"

"All I know is what one man thinks," Ernestine complained. "And he thinks I should wash it off."

"Thinks, nothing," said Dad. "He knows. And he's telling you. Now, get moving."

Clothes remained a subject of considerable friction, but the matter that threatened to affect Dad's stability was jazz. Radios were innocuous, being still in the cat-whisker and headphone stage, and featuring such stimulating programs as the Arlington Time Signals. But five- and six-piece dance bands were turning out huge piles of graphophone records, and we tried to buy them all.

We already had an ample supply of graphophones, because of the ones Dad had acquired for the language records. And we still weren't allowed to neglect our language lessons. But once we had played the required quota of French, German, and Italian records, we switched to "Stumbling," "Limehouse Blues," "Last Night on the Back Porch," "Charlie, My Boy," "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles," and "You've Got to See Mama Every Night or You Can't See Mama at All." Not only did we listen to them, we sang with them, imitated them, and rolled back the rugs and danced to them.

Dad didn't particularly object to jazz music. He thought some of it was downright catchy. But he felt that we devoted far too much time to it, that the words were something more than suggestive, and that the kind of dancing that went with it might lead to serious consequences. As he walked from room to room in the house, jazz assailed him from phonograph after phonograph, and he sometimes threw up his hands in disgust.

"Da-da, de-da-da-da," he bellowed sarcastically. "If you spent half as much time improving your minds as you do memorizing those stupid songs, you could recite
The Koran
forwards and backwards. Wind up the Victrola and let's have some more jazz. Da-da, de-da-da-da. Let's have that record about 'I love my sweetie a hundred times a night.' "

"You made that song up," we told him. "That's not a record, Daddy."

"Maybe it's not a record," he said. "But take it from me, it's well above average. Da-da, de-da-da-da."