Read Online The GI Bride by Iris Jones Simantel - Free Book Online Page B

broken glass. It still gives me
the shivers to think of it.
    At weekends, we made the obligatory visits
to the in-laws and, oh, how I dreaded those Sundays, especially since Grandma Neuhaus
had moved back in. It drove me crazy listening to her and my mother-in-law chattering
away in German. They seemed to forget that I was there, which made me feel even more
excluded. True, Grandma spoke little English, but my mother-in-law, Clara, could have
explained what they were discussing. I was always afraid they were talking about me. I
suppose Bob was used to it. He wasn’t much of a conversationalist himself, which
often left me with the old familiar sensation that I was invisible, as I had so often
felt during my childhood: my mother had been preoccupied with concerns about my father
and had little time or patience for her children.
    I still had to help wash all the dishes in
the hotter-than-hell kitchen, with my feet swelling until they looked likegreat water-filled balloons. All I wanted was a cool, quiet spot in
which to have a nap. The Irvines were not happy when we took some Sundays off to go
apartment hunting. I knew they thought it was my fault and that I was being selfish, but
Sunday was usually the only time we had together, since Bob worked on most Saturdays,
and we simply had to find different accommodation before the baby arrived.
    Soon after we had missed a Sunday at the
Irvines’, Bob received a phone call from his mother. In the course of the
conversation she told him that their dog had died. I had never paid much attention to it
because they always kept it tied up on their back porch. Once, on a particularly cold
day, I’d asked if I could bring the dog inside but the Irvines had informed me
that he was not a house dog. I never understood why people had a dog if they kept it
outside. Anyway, on our next visit, I expressed my sympathy at their loss and asked what
had happened.
    ‘Well, sometimes he just went
crazy,’ said my mother-in-law, ‘usually if he got overexcited, like if he
saw a squirrel or something. He’d go mad trying to get at it.’ It
didn’t sound crazy to me. That was what all dogs did. ‘Anyway,’ she
continued, ‘he tried to jump over the railing of the back porch and he hanged
himself on his leash. We found him there when we got home from shopping. We thought it
was strange that he didn’t bark when we came in.’
    ‘How awful for him,’ I said,
then added, ‘and for you, too, of course.’
    On our way home that evening, I
couldn’t hold back my laughter.
    ‘What’s so funny?’ Bob
asked.
    ‘Well, I know how miserable I was
living with your family. Maybe the dog was too. I was just wondering if maybe he
committed suicide,’ I replied, laughing so hard I could hardly get the words
out.
    ‘It’s not funny,’ he said,
looking very serious, but then he saw the funny side and joined in. ‘Yeah, if we
think those Sundays are painful for us, that poor dog didn’t even get to come in
for dinner.’
    ‘Yeah, but he didn’t have to
wash all those flippin’ dishes either,’ I said. Poor dog, I thought, but at
least he doesn’t have to put up with them any more. Bob was right, though: it
wasn’t funny, poor little guy, tied up on the porch no matter what the weather.
He’d earned his place in dog heaven.
    We finally found an apartment, still on
Chicago’s west side but in a far nicer neighbourhood: it was quieter and more
residential. After much deliberation, Bob decided we might just about be able to afford
to go from fifty-five dollars a month in rent to seventy-five, even though it would be
hard when I had to give up my job.
    The apartment was on the second floor, had
much larger rooms, a separate bedroom and a ‘sun-porch’. It also had laundry
facilities in the basement, which meant I would no longer have to go to the Laundromat.
It was more convenient to do the washing down there, but I still hated it. The basement
was dark, dirty and draped with enormous cobwebs.