1While Moses was eating these golden apples, Coverly and Betsey had settled in a rocket-launching station called Remsen Park. Coverly had only spent one day at the farm. Leander had urged him to return to his wife—and had gone to work himself at the table-silver factory a few days later. Coverly had joined Betsey in New York and, after a delay of only a few days, was transferred to this new station. This time they traveled together. Remsen Park was a community of four thousand identical houses, bounded on the west by an old army camp. The place could not be criticized as a town or city. Expedience, convenience and haste had produced it when the rocket program was accelerated; but the houses were dry in the rain and warm in the winter; they had well-equipped kitchens and fireplaces for domestic bliss and the healthy need for national self-preservation could more than excuse the fact that they were all alike. At the heart of the community there was a large shopping center with anything you might want—all of it housed in glass-walled buildings. This was Betsey’s joy. She and Coverly rented a house, furnished even to the pictures on the walls, and set up housekeeping with the blue china and the painted chairs that Sarah sent them from St. Botolphs.

2They had been in Remsen Park for only a little while when Betsey decided that she was pregnant. She felt sick in the morning and stayed in bed late. When she got up, Coverly had gone to work. He had left coffee for her in the kitchen and had washed his own dishes. She ate a late breakfast, sitting at the kitchen window so that she could see the houses of Remsen Park stretching away to the horizon like the pattern on a cloth. The woman in the house next door came out to empty her garbage. She was an Italian, the wife of an Italian scientist. Betsey called good morning to her and asked her to come in and have a cup of coffee but the Italian woman only gave her a sullen smile and returned to her own kitchen. Remsen Park was not a very friendly place.

3Betsey hoped that she would not be disappointed in her pregnancy. Her mind seemed to strike an attitude of prayer, as involuntary as the impulse with which she swore when she slammed her finger in a window. Dear God, she thought briefly, make me a mother. She wanted children. She wanted five or six. She smiled suddenly, as if her wish had filled the kitchen with the love, disorder and vitality of a family. She was braiding the hair of her daughter, Sandra, a beautiful girl. The other four or five were in the room. They were happy and dirty and one of them, a little boy with Coverly’s long neck, was holding in his hands the halves of a broken dish, but Betsey had not scolded him, Betsey had not even frowned when he broke the dish, for the secret of his clear, resilient personality was that his growth had never been impeded by niggardly considerations. Betsy felt that she had a latent talent for raising children. She would put the development of personality above everything. The phantom children that played around her knees had never received from their parents anything but love and trust.

4When the housework was done it was time for Betsey to take the iron out and have the cord repaired. She walked out of Circle K and down 325th Street to the shopping center and went into the super market, not because she needed anything but because the atmosphere of the place pleased her. It was vast and brightly lighted and music came down from the high blue walls. She bought a giant jar of peanut butter to the strains of the “Blue Danube” and then a pecan pie. The cashier seemed to be a pleasant young man. “I’m a stranger here,” Betsey said. “We’ve just moved from New York. My husband’s been out in the Pacific. We have one of those houses in Circle K and I just wondered if you could give me some advice. My ironing cord is frayed, it just gave out the day before yesterday when I was doing my husband’s shirts, and I just wondered if you happened to know of an electrical-appliance or repair store in the vicinity that might fix it for me so that I could have it tomorrow because tomorrow’s the day when I do my big shopping and I thought I could come in here and buy my groceries and then pick up the iron on my way home.”

5“Well, there’s a store four, no five doors down the street,” the young man said, “and I guess they can fix it for you. They fixed my radio for me once and they’re not highway robbers like some of the people’s come in here.” Betsey thanked him kindly and went out into the street and wandered along to the electrical store. “Good morning,” Betsey said cheerfully, putting her iron on the counter. “I’m a stranger here and when my ironing cord went yesterday while I was doing my husband’s shirts I said to myself that I just didn’t know where to take it and have it repaired but this morning I stopped in at the Grand Food Mart and that cashier, the nice one with the pretty, wavy hair and those dark eyes, told me that he recommended your store and so I came right over here. Now what I’d like to do is to come downtown and do my shopping tomorrow afternoon and pick up my iron on my way home because I have to get some shirts ironed for my husband by tomorrow night and I wondered if you could have it ready for me by then. It’s a good iron and I gave a lot of money for it in New York where we’ve been living although my husband was out in the Pacific. My husband’s a Taper. Of course I don’t understand why the cord on such an expensive iron should wear out in such a short time and I wondered if you could put on an extra-special cord for me because I get a great deal of use out of my iron. I do all my husband’s shirts, you know, and he’s high up in the Taping Department and has to wear a clean shirt every day and then I do my own personal things as well.” The man promised to give Betsey a durable cord and then she wandered back to Circle K.

6But her steps slowed as she approached the house. Her family of phantom children was scattered and she could not call them back again. Her period was only seven days late and her pregnancy might not be a fact. She ate a peanut-butter sandwich and a wedge of pecan pie. She missed New York and thought again that Remsen Park was an unfriendly place. Late in the day the doorbell rang and a vacuum-cleaner salesman stood in the door. “Well now, come right in,” Betsey said cheerfully. “You come right in. I don’t have a vacuum cleaner now and I don’t have the money to buy one at the moment. We only just moved from New York but I’m going to buy one as soon as I have the money and perhaps if you’ve got some new attachments I might buy one of those because I’m determined to buy a new vacuum cleaner sooner or later and I’ll need the attachments anyhow. I’m pregnant now and a young mother can’t do all that housework without the proper equipment; all that stooping and bending. Would you like a cup of coffee? I imagine you must get tired and footsore going around with that heavy bag all day long. My husband’s in the Taping Department and they work him hard but it’s a different kind of tiredness, it’s just in the brain, but I know what it is to have tired feet.”

7The salesman opened his sample case in the kitchen before he drank his coffee and sold Betsey two attachments and a gallon of floor wax. Then, because he was tired, and this was his last call, he sat down. “I was living alone in New York all the time my husband was in the Pacific,” Betsey said, “and we just moved out here and of course I was happy to make the move but I don’t find it a very friendly place. I mean I don’t think it’s friendly like New York. In New York I had lots of friends. Of course I was mistaken, once. I was mistaken in my friends. You know what I mean? There were these people named Hansen who lived right down the hall from me. I thought they were my real friends. I thought at last I’d found some lifelong friends. I used to see them every day and every night and she wouldn’t buy a dress without asking me about it and I loaned them money and they were always telling me how much they loved me, but I was deceived. Sad was the day of reckoning!” The light in the kitchen was dim and Betsey’s face was drawn with feeling. “They were hypocrites,” she said. “They were liars and hypocrites.”

8The salesman packed his things and went away. Coverly came home at six. “Hello, sugar,” he said. “Why sit in the dark?”

9“Well, I think I’m pregnant,” Betsey said. “I guess I’m pregnant. I’m seven days late and this morning I felt sort of funny, dizzy and sick.” She sat on Coverly’s lap and put her head against his. “I think it’s going to be a boy. That’s what it feels like to me. Of course there’s no point in counting your chickens before your eggs are hatched but if we do have a baby one of the things I want to buy is a nice chair because I’m going to breast feed this baby and I’d like to have a nice chair to sit in when I nurse him.”

10“You can buy a chair,” Coverly said.

11“Well, I saw a nice chair in the furniture center a couple of days ago,” Betsey said, “and after supper why don’t we walk around the corner and look at it? I haven’t been out of the house all day and a little walk would be good for you, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it be good for you to stretch your legs?”

12After supper they took their walk. A fresh wind was blowing out of the north—straight from St. Botolphs—and it made Betsey feel vigorous and gay. She took Coverly’s arm and at the corner, under the fluorescent street lamp, he bent down and gave her a French kiss. Once they got to the shopping center Betsey wasn’t able to concentrate on her chair. Every suit, dress, fur coat and piece of furniture in the store windows had to be judged, its price and way of life guessed at and some judgment passed as to whether or not it should enter Betsey’s vision of happiness. Yes, she said to a plant stand, yes, yes to a grand piano, no to a breakfront, yes to a dining-room table and six chairs, as thoughtfully as St. Peter sifting out the hearts of men. At ten o’clock they walked home. Coverly undressed her tenderly and they took a bath together and went to bed for she was his potchke, his fleutchke, his notchke, his motchke, his everything that the speech of St. Botolphs left unexpressed. She was his little, little squirrel.