The Barter by Siobhan Adcock Page A

for them at the farmhouse, too, dropped off by their country neighbors, including “enough pickle and pie to keep us until next summer, probably,” a bit of good news that Rebecca tried to absorb with equanimity.
Now begins my life in the kitchen,
she thought.
Now begins my life in the vegetable patch; now begins my life in the coop, in the barn, in the cold cellar. Now begins my life as a woman who has married a farmer instead of staying where she belonged, in a chair by the stove in the dark, with an old, grumpy man reading a newspaper under a light across the room, and a furtive, friendly spinster waiting for me to take her place.
    At four forty-five Rebecca began to hunt for her father in earnest. He couldn’t possibly mean to send her off to the farm without wishing her well or indulging in a few archly delivered parting words. She couldn’t find him. Upstairs, downstairs. Oh, their good house. She was looking for her father but she was finding evidence that a trap had sprung around her: It was going to happen, after all. She wasgoing to move from this good, comfortable house, with its kitchen and garden and yard from which came delicious and good-smelling things, on a leafy street in town, near stores where she could buy cakes of soap and bricks of butter, near the post office where mail and magazines came, near the seamstress, the laundress, the school, the sidewalks where she could meet and talk to neighbors. . . . From here she would step back in time. She would go to a place where she could no longer be careless about bread, or buttons, or jelly jars.
    She had been thinking about her future, knowing she was about to step back in time to meet it. She had come to some conclusions, but not enough of them for her own peace of mind. Unlike the world in which, say, Rebecca’s German grandmother had been raised—the Doctor’s mother, who had in fact been married to a forty-eighter—the world that Rebecca had inhabited here in a small town in the beginning of the new age was one in which a woman received both less and more training than her mother had had. She knew that until now, she had needed to be neither talented nor clever nor useful. Indeed she had needed to be very little to anyone, even to herself. And now, she thought, she would step backward into a place where a woman, her comfort, and everything she cared about could be destroyed in one bad season if she weren’t all three.
Am I talented and clever and useful? Dear God, please let me be. Don’t let me fail myself—it’s the only test I’ll ever get to take.
    Her mother, Florencia, by all accounts talented and clever, had not been especially useful, at least not in the traditional way. Rebecca had grown up listening to chapters in the saga of Florencia’s ineffectiveness at keeping house; it was one of Frau’s more hilarious subjects. Most of Frau’s stories about Florencia concerned some disaster brought on by an unwise choice or impulse, for reasons that perhapsseemed plain given the strange choice Florencia had made in marrying the Doctor to begin with, and given the fact that she died so young, so far from her family, and after only a few years of marriage.
    As Frau told them, the stories of Florencia’s adventures in housekeeping were never intended to help Rebecca absorb any of the useful knowledge that her mother might have lacked. The stories tended more toward fairy tales than
Practical Housekeeping
, and usually traced the same plot: Florencia has decided to do something she’s never done before—make a cake for a church social, get out a bloodstain in one of the Doctor’s shirts, sew a dress for a party—only to fail resoundingly, with consequences ranging from sorry to ridiculous to dangerous. In one story, Florencia almost burns the house down; in another, she almost kills one of the Doctor’s patients after ambitiously restocking the medicine vials in his