Issue #2, how do you do? “What Other People Think” by Sharon Ellis

Our house is made of red brick, but Mother calls it a brownstone. Mother says that Boston is filled with brownstones, but ours is the only one I have ever seen. Father says I am better off, and that Boston is full of snobs.

Brownstone houses are usually built next to other brownstones, with no space in between one house and the next. Because my father built our house in our town – where there is plenty of space – our brownstone stands alone in the middle of our yard. The front of our house is tall and narrow, and the sides are long and wide, so that the house resembles a book standing alone on a shelf.

Our red brick brownstone has five floors, if you count the basement and the attic, which I do. The living room, the dining room, the kitchen, the powder room, and the long front hall are on the first floor. The bedrooms are on the second floor. Father’s study and the maid’s room are on the third floor. We keep storage in the attic and canned goods in the basement, but I never go to either of those places, as I have no use for either storage or canned goods.

With five floors, ours is the tallest house in town. Most of the other houses are what Mother calls Cape Cod houses, with pitched roofs over the second floor. It is like the other houses look up to our house, because our brownstone is standing straight, thin, and tall, while the other houses are short, fat, and slouching.

This was how Mother convinced Father to build her a brownstone. She explained to Father that a brownstone would let everyone in town see how much higher we were living than everyone else.

Mother says that running a house is fifty percent persuasion, fifty percent creative thinking, and fifty percent keeping up with what other people think. Father says that this amounts to one hundred and fifty percent. He advises Mother to check her math, but Mother always says that math is for spinsters.

* * *

These are the things I tell Gary on our third date, except for the part about math and spinsters.

Gary is not from Massachusetts. He moved here a month ago from Hartford, after my father hired him to work as an accountant at the factory.

I tell Gary what Father says, that hiring new people is the best defense against the depression. Our state was built on the textile industry, and textiles are the future as well as the past.

When Father grew up, the factory was a third the size of what it is now. Father worked his way from mechanic, to foreman, to manager in the office, until he had enough money to buy the factory and make it his own. Father hired workers from places like Waltham and Lowell, where they had worked and lived in terrible conditions. In those other factory cities, the workers caught Typhoid and Tuberculosis, but in our town my father built nice dormitories and churches. On the side of town near the factory and the dormitories, Father built one church for the Irish workers and another for the French Canadians, because even though it might seem the same to us, the Catholics know the difference.

Gary tells me that he is grateful to my father and his factory, because jobs these days are few and far between, even in Boston, where Gary says people used to go for jobs.

I nod at Gary, and I act interested, because Mother says that this is what you are supposed to do when your date makes an intelligent remark.

Mother also says that Gary is probably as good as it gets as far as husbands go in this town.

Father says that women always do what they want, so he won’t waste his breath advising me whom I should marry.

I don’t tell Gary what Mother and Father think about husbands, because I read once in a magazine that men like mystery. When I am finished eating my ice cream, I sit across the table from Gary and try to look mysterious.

Gary asks me if I am okay, and he offers to walk me home.

Gary and I walk along Main Street, past the Coca Cola sign and the general store where the men smoke in the shade. We cross the square, through the grass and past the people enjoying the late sun of the summer evening. There is a woman on a bench, smiling at her open book. I point at the woman, and I whisper to Gary that Father has a library full of volumes, but I have never seen anything worth smiling at in a book. Gary tips his head back and laughs with me.

As we turn onto my street, I tell Gary about the work I do with the Ladies Library Club and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Gary calls my volunteer work admirable. He asks me what made me want to be a Woman of Christian Temperance.

I realize that no one has ever asked me why I did something. Before I can think of an answer, our date is over. The brownstone stares down at Gary and me, like a tall man with windows for eyes.

I say goodnight to Gary, I climb the stone steps, and I close the big front door behind me.

I stand in the vestibule, in the gap between the inner and outer doors. It is quiet here, like an empty box. On the other side of the inner door and the long front hall, I know I will find my mother in the living room, sitting in the wing chair by the fireplace. She will be embroidering a piece she has been working on, with the cloth clamped smooth between two wooden rings. Mother’s hands and fingers move fast, pushing and pulling the needle and thread. She wears a thimble to protect her finger, in case she slips, but she never does. Mother doesn’t make mistakes.

When Mother looks up and sees me, she will reach out one hand and pat the chair next to her, inviting me in. I will smooth my skirt, and I will slip into the glow of my mother’s brownstone living room.