The Unwelcomed Child Read Free Page A

myself pitying them, as much as or more than I pitied myself. In many ways, they were just as caged up as I was, except that they had crawled in of their own volition and then willingly locked the door behind themselves.
    Before my grandfather had retired, he at least had his successful mattress-manufacturing business in Lake Hurley. That gave him more contact with the world, with other people, and therefore, I thought, more pleasure. Any real socializing they had done came out of his business connections and associates. From what he told me, at the high point of his enterprise, he was employing fifty people, including salesmen who sold his product in three different upstate counties.
    Despite how well he did, he and my grandmother never lived more than modest lives. They still drove the same car they had bought ten years ago. They never went on any vacation, nor did they buy anything anyone would call luxurious for their home. My grandmother didn’t buy new clothing for herself until something had been washed so much it was close to falling apart in her hands. Whenever my grandfather mentioned that he might buy a new pair of shoes or some clothing, she told him he didn’t need it or simply asked, “What for?” Usually, that was enough to stomp his urge to death the way she would stomp on an ant that had begun a foray in our kitchen.
    After they were married, my grandmother had worked for the mattress company, overseeing all the finances. She had left teaching but was so good at math she had been hired as an assistant to the accountant my grandfather had been using. During one of the infrequent times he talked to me about their courting and marriage, he told me that the first time he met my grandmother, she made some very sensible financial suggestions to him.
    “I knew I had a blessing in disguise when I met her,” he told me.
    I wasn’t too young to think that he must have been blind. Was that really a reason to marry someone, her skill at seeing a wasteful expenditure? However, when I did get the opportunity to look at some old photographs, I was surprised to see how naturally pretty Grandmother Myra was. She was much thinner now, and her facial features were sharper, her skin spotted with age and her hair a dull gray with just a touch of her once dark brown shade in places. She kept it so tightly knotted behind her head it pulled her forehead and thin cheeks as firmly as a drum skin. She was about my grandfather’s height, with surprising strength in her long, thin arms.
    My grandfather still had a very handsome face, with a strong, straight mouth, bright blue eyes, and a full head of still thick light brown hair. Grandmother Myra was always after him to go to the barber, but he avoided it for as long as he could, until she would threaten to cut it herself while he was sleeping. I had no doubt she would, and neither did he. She always cut my auburn hair to the length she thought proper. It was years before I even knew what a beauty parlor was, and only then because she ranted on and on about how wasteful an expenditure that was, especially “women having their toenails cut and painted.”
    When I was twelve, my grandparents began to take me on occasional shopping trips. Many times, they made me stay in the car while they went into stores, and when they did bring me into a store to buy some clothes I needed, my grandmother hovered over me, forcing me to concentrate only on what I had to buy and not look around, never attract any boy’s attention, especially, and never, ever speak to anyone except the saleslady, and that was just to say, “Thank you.”
    “You never talk to strangers,” she warned, and since I knew practically no one, everyone was a stranger. How would I ever have a conversation with anyone?
    When we drove, my grandmother would periodically look back at me and say, “Don’t gape out the window. You look like a fool.”
    Of course, that was exactly how I felt, like a fool. There were things out