Dolores Claiborne Read Online Free Page B

were fryin somethin, God help you.
    The garbage cans in the garage, that was another thing. There was six of em. Sonny Quist came once a week to pick up the swill, and either the housekeeper or one of the maids—whoever was most handy—was supposed to bring those cans back into the garage the minute, the very second, he was gone. And you couldn’t just drag em into the corner and leave em; they had to be lined up two and two and two along the garage’s east wall, with their covers turned upside-down on top of em. If you forgot to do it just that way, God help you.
    Then there was the welcome mats. There were three of em—one for the front door, one for the patio door, and one for the back door, which had one of those snooty TRADESMAN’S ENTRANCE signs on it right up until last year, when I got tired of looking at it and took it down. Once a week I had to take those welcome mats and lay em on a big rock at the end of the back yard, oh, I’m gonna say about forty yards down from the swimmin pool, and beat the dirt out of em with a broom. Really had to make the dust fly. And if you lagged off, she was apt to catch you. She didn’t watch every time you beat the welcome mats, but lots of times she would. She’d stand on the patio with a pair of her husband’s binoculars. And the thing was, when you brought the mats back to the house, you had to make sure WELCOME was pointin the right way. The right way was so people walkin up to whichever door it was could read it. Put a welcome mat back on the stoop upside-down and God help you.
    There must have been four dozen different things like that. In the old days, back when I started as a day-maid, you’d hear a lot of bitching about Vera Donovan down at the general store. The Donovans entertained a lot, all through the fifties they had a lot of house-help, and usually the one bitching loudest was some little girl who’d been hired for part-time and then got fired for forgetting one of the rules three times in a row. She’d be tellin anyone who wanted to listen that Vera Donovan was a mean, sharp-tongued old bat, and crazy as a loon in the bargain. Well, maybe she was crazy and maybe she wasn’t, but I can tell you one thing—if you remembered, she didn’t give you the heat. And my way of thinking is this: anyone who can remember who’s sleepin with who on all those soap opera stories they show in the afternoon should be able to remember to use Spic n Span in the tubs and put the welcome mats back down facin the right way.
    But the sheets, now. That was one thing you didn’t ever want to get wrong. They had to be hung perfectly even over the lines—so the hems matched, you know—and you had to use six clothespins on each one. Never four; always six. And if you dragged one in the mud, you didn’t have to worry about waitin to get something wrong three times. The lines have always been out in the side yard, which is right under her bedroom window. She’d go to that window, year in and year out, and yell at me: “Six pins, now, Dolores! You mind me, now! Six, not four! I’m counting, and my eyes are just as good now as they ever were!” She’d—
    What, honey?
    Oh bosh, Andy—let her alone. That’s a fair enough question, and it’s one no man would have brains enough to ask.
    I’ll tell you, Nancy Bannister from Kennebunk, Maine—yes, she did have a dryer, a nice big one, but we were forbidden to put the sheets in it unless there was five days’ rain in the forecast. “The only sheet worth having on a decent person’s bed is a sheet that’s been dried out-of-doors,” Vera’d say, “because they smell sweet. They catch a little bit of the wind that flapped them, and they hold it, and that smell sends you off to sweet dreams.”
    She was full of bull about a lot of things, but not about the smell of fresh air in the sheets; about that I thought she was dead right. Anyone can smell the difference between a sheet that was tumbled in a Maytag and one that was