Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

am I supposed to do with this stuff? What am I supposed to tell the woman the next time I see her?"
      "Tell her any God damn thing you like," he said. "Maybe you could tell her to mind her own God damn business for a change."
      "Don't shout, Daddy." Jennifer was bouncing up and down in her grass-stained sneakers, flapping her hands and starting to cry.
      "I'm not shouting," he told her, with all the indignation of the falsely accused. She held still then and put her thumb in her mouth, which seemed to make her eyes go out of focus, while Michael clutched at the fly of his pants and took two backward steps, solemn with embarrassment.
      April sighed and raked back a lock of hair. "All right," she said. "Take it down to the cellar, then. The least we can do is get it out of sight. Then you'd better get dressed. It's time for lunch."
      He carried the box down the cellar stairs, dropped it on the floor with a rustling thud and kicked it into a corner, sending a sharp pain through the tendon of his big toe.
      He spent the afternoon in an old pair of army pants and a torn shirt, working on his stone path. The idea was to lay a long, curving walk from the front door to the road, to divert visitors from coming in through the kitchen. It had seemed simple enough last weekend, when he'd started it, but now as the ground sloped off more sharply he found that flat stones wouldn't work. He had to make steps, of stones nearly as thick as they were wide, stones that had to be dislodged from the steep woods behind the house and carried on tottering legs around to the front lawn. And he had to dig a pit for each step, in ground so rocky that it took ten minutes to get a foot below the surface. It was turning into mindless, unrewarding work, the kind of work that makes you clumsy with fatigue and petulant with lack of progress, and it looked as if it would take all summer.
      Even so, once the first puffing and dizziness was over, he began to like the muscular pull and the sweat of it, and the smell of the earth. At least it was a man's work. At least, squatting to rest on the wooded slope, he could look down and see his house the way a house ought to look on a fine spring day, safe on its carpet of green, the frail white sanctuary of a man's love, a man's wife and children. Lowering his eyes with the solemnity of this thought, he could take pleasure in the sight of his own flexed thigh, lean and straining under the old O.D., and of the heavily veined forearm that lay across it and the dirty hand that hung there—not to be compared with his father's hand, maybe, but a serviceable, good-enough hand all the same—so that his temples ached in zeal and triumph as he heaved a rock up from the suck of its white-wormed socket and let it roll end over end down the shuddering leafmold, because he was a man. Following it down to the edge of the lawn, he squatted over it again, grunted, wrestled it up to his thighs and from there to his waist, cradling it in the tender flesh of his forearms; then he moved out, glassy-eyed and staggering on the soft grass, out around the white blur of the house and into the sun of the front lawn and all the way over to the path, where he dropped it and nearly fell in a heap on top of it.
      "We're helping you, aren't we, Daddy?" Jennifer said. Both children had come to sit near him on the grass. The sun made perfect circles of yellow on their two blond heads and gave their T-shirts a dazzling whiteness.
      "You sure are," he said.
      "Yes, because you like to have us keep you company, don't you?"
      "I sure do, baby. Don't get too close now, you'll kick dirt in the hole." And he fell to work with the long-handled shovel to deepen the hollow he had dug, enjoying the rhythmic rasp and grip of the blade against a loosening edge of buried rock.
      "Daddy?" Michael inquired. "Why does the shovel make sparks?"
      "Because it's hitting rock. When you hit rock with steel, you get a