Dance of the Happy Shades Read Online Free PDF Page B

door to a barnyard.”
    “Across the street is worse than next door. It makes me wonder why we ever bothered with a picture window, whenever anybody comes to see us I want to draw the drapes so they won’t see what’s across from us.”
    “Okay, okay,” Steve said, cutting heavily through these female voices. “What Carl and I started out to tell you was that, if we can work this lane deal, she has got to go. It’s simple and it’s legal. That’s the beauty of it.”
    “What lane deal?”
    “We are getting to that. Carl and I been cooking this for a couple of weeks, but we didn’t like to say anything in case it didn’t work out. Take it, Carl.”
    “Well she’s on the lane allowance, that’s all,” Carl said. He was a real estate salesman, stocky, earnest, successful. “I had an idea it might be that way, so I went down to the Municipal Hall and looked it up.”
    “What does that mean, dear?” said Janie, casual, wifely.
    “This is it,” Carl said. “There’s an allowance for a lane, there always has been, the idea being if the area ever got built up they would put a lane through. But they never thought that would happen, people just built where they liked. She’s got part of her house and half a dozen shacks sitting right wherethe lane has to go through. So what we do now, we get the municipality to put through a lane. We need a lane anyway. Then she has to get out. It’s the law.”
    “It’s the law,” said Steve, radiating admiration. “What a smart boy. These real estate operators are smart boys.”
    “Does she get anything?” said Mary Lou. “I’m sick of looking at it and all but I don’t want to see anybody in the poorhouse.”
    “Oh, she’ll get paid. More than it’s worth. Look, it’s to her advantage. She’ll get paid for it, and she couldn’t sell it, she couldn’t give it away.”
    Mary set her coffee cup down before she spoke and hoped her voice would sound all right, not emotional or scared. “But remember she’s been here a long time,” she said. “She was here before most of us were born,” She was trying desperately to think of other words, words more sound and reasonable than these; she could not expose to this positive tide any notion that they might think flimsy and romantic, or she would destroy her argument. But she had no argument. She could try all night and never find any words to stand up to their words, which came at her now invincibly from all sides:
shack, eyesore, filthy, property, value
.
    “Do you honestly think that people who let their property get so rundown have that much claim to our consideration?” Janie said, feeling her husband’s plan was being attacked.
    “She’s been here forty years, now we’re here,” Carl said. “So it goes. And whether you realize it or not, just standing there that house is bringing down the resale value of every house on this street. I’m in the business, I know.”
    And these were joined by other voices; it did not matter much what they said as long as they were full of self-assertion and anger. That was their strength, proof of their adulthood, of themselves and their seriousness. The spirit of anger rose among them, bearing up their young voices, sweeping them together as on a flood of intoxication, and they admired eachother in this new behaviour as property-owners as people admire each other for being drunk.
    “We might as well get everybody now,” Steve said. “Save going around to so many places.”
    It was supper time, getting dark out. Everybody was preparing to go home, mothers buttoning their children’s coats, children clutching, without much delight, their balloons and whistles and paper baskets full of jelly beans. They had stopped fighting, almost stopped noticing each other; the party had disintegrated. The adults too had grown calmer and felt tired.
    “Edith! Edith, have you got a pen?”
    Edith brought a pen and they spread the petition for the lane, which Carl had drawn up, on the