Baker Towers A Novel by Jennifer Haigh

Author:Jennifer Haigh
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

LUCY WAITED in the kitchen. She was twelve and would have preferred to make her own breakfast—bacon and eggs, fried toast with syrup—but there were rules about what she could eat. Each morning she made the best of it, doctoring her oatmeal with butter and brown sugar. Still it went down slowly, the flavors bland and gray.

The pot of oatmeal simmered on the stove. Joyce had told her to wait for Dorothy, but there was no telling when she would get out of bed. Lucy would have been perfectly happy if she stayed there all day. Dorothy made her nervous. Once, at night, she’d come downstairs for a drink of water and found Dorothy sitting on the porch swing, humming softly to herself. She looked up, but didn’t speak, when Lucy said hello.

She glanced at the clock. Space Patrol would begin at nine, followed by Captain Midnight and Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. She carried the Saturday-morning schedule in her head; it was the best television of the week. Having Joyce gone on a Saturday morning was a rare gift. She disapproved of television watching during the day. If she caught Lucy at it, she’d come up with a list of chores that needed doing immediately: sweeping, dusting, ironing a stack of pillowcases; though why a pillowcase had to be ironed, Lucy couldn’t imagine. Her mother was more tolerant, although she sometimes told Lucy to go out and play. Lucy didn’t know how to explain that girls of twelve did not play, that even if she’d wanted to, there was nobody to play with. The boys spent Saturday mornings at baseball practice; they’d all joined the town league that spring. What the girls did Saturday mornings, Lucy didn’t know. The nicer ones simply ignored her. The mean ones called her Jumbo—almost, but not quite, behind her back.

She rose and scooped her own oatmeal from the pot. The last bite was the sweetest, caramel-flavored and slick with butter. In the parlor she turned on the television. The set was a gift from her brother Georgie; each Christmas he sent a wonderful present from Philadelphia. The television had arrived two years ago. It hadn’t worked at first, until Sandy fiddled with the antenna and wrapped its branches in tinfoil. Then they watched television every evening, Lucy and Joyce and even Sandy, when he had nothing better to do. Her mother stayed in the kitchen, where the old radio now sat. She preferred it to television. Lucy suspected that for her there wasn’t much difference.

She waited for the set to warm up, then adjusted the antenna. Her mother’s eyesight was something they never talked about; it was hard to know what she could see and what she couldn’t. She could still bake bread—every Friday she made four loaves. She moved from room to room with relative ease, but she seldom left the house. A few times Lucy had used this to her advantage, claiming the weather was bad when her mother sent her outside to play.

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