The Dreamer

By

Joan Hall Hovey

Slamming the door behind me, I rushed downstairs to the basement toward the rhythmic sound of hammering. Even if I hadn’t heard the hammering, I would have known Daddy was off on some new invention. I could always feel it the way my stomach got all hollow and tight inside me. Yet I’d feel excited, too, but I couldn’t let Mamma know that.

I was halfway down the stairs when Mamma yelled down at me. I didn’t even need to see her thin, pinched face and her angry eyes to know. I had good news for mamma, but I forgot all about it now.

"Don’t leave your books on the chair, Carrie; take them into your room," she called down. "And hang up your coat." Mamma said it the way she did everyday when I got home from school.

I remembered my good news again, but I forgot about my books on the chair. "Mamma, I might be going to fly to New York next month. My painting was chosen from …"

"Pick up those books, I told you," she yelled, her face getting redder. "Going to New York indeed. A dreamer you are, Carrie Barton, just like your father." She threw up her hands. "Two of them I need." She turned away and went back into the kitchen.

I had a sinking feeling in my stomach. Kind of sad all over, like everything happy just drained out of me.

"And clean your room, will you?" she called over her shoulder. It looks like a pigsty. Just like that basement does. I was supposed to have a sewing room downstairs," she muttered loud enough for me to hear. "But it looks like some sort of set for a Frankenstein movie what with all that tangled mess of wires and lights and God knows what else."

Mamma had reason to complain, I guess. Daddy worked odd jobs, cleaning up, painting and things like that, but he took off time from work everytime he got a new idea for an invention. There wasn’t much money, but Daddy said we’d be rich someday – rich beyond our wildest dreams, and I knew we would.

"One day it will happen, Mary," he told Mamma all the time. "Then I can quit the kind of work I do and take care of your right and proper. We’ll take a trip around the world, and you’ll have a brand spankin’ new mink coat."

"I’d be mighty thankful to have meat on the table twice a week, Jim Barton. That’s all I ask. I don’t need no trip around the world, or no mink coat. Such foolishness. I need a grown man who’ll provide for his family without all the Tom-foolery you do."

Then Daddy would get all sad looking and try to make up to Mamma. But she wouldn’t speak. She’d just keep on stirring the pot on the stove, her body stiff. After awhile Daddy would go back down to the basement and start hammering, or grinding or making invention noises that would make Mamma stir the soup faster.