We took the kids to several different beaches, a whaling museum, an aquarium, often stopping after lunch at an ice-cream parlor where we made our own sundaes. In the early afternoon I played with the kids in the pool while Kay read her book on a lounge chair in the grass, then I took them up and put them down for their naps. They never resisted the naps. After the morning activity and the hot sun and the swim, they were ready to crawl into their cool beds in the dim house and fall into a heavy sleep. While I read and sang to them, I imagined going to my room and sleeping, too, but when I got up to my third-floor turret I always had a new surge of energy. I continued the letter I’d started to Gina all about my life in the Pike mansion. I read Jane Eyre. I suddenly felt so much closer to Jane, now that I, too, lived in a huge house and had charge of two children. Soon my long letter took on the tone and vocabulary of Charlotte Brontë, which Gina mocked me mercilessly for later. But I was trying things out, life as That Girl, life as Jane Eyre, life as a writer alone in her own room, which eventually, after a lot of other things, is what I became.

When the children woke up from their naps, I played with them outside on the lawn until hunger made them cranky and we went and visited Margaret in the kitchen for a snack. Dinner wasn’t served until eight, when I’d wrestle Elsie into her highchair (she much preferred a lap, especially at that hour) then retreat to the kitchen where I was given my dinner at the oilcloth table. Sometimes Thomas or Margaret would sit with me for a minute or two, but they were always popping up to plate and serve a new course. Stevie and Elsie rarely made it to dessert. Kay often poked her head in the kitchen, signaling that I should evac them upstairs. Of course they put up a fight. Dessert had been held out to them as a reward for good behavior at dinner, but they had “fussed,” as Mrs. Pike called it, and their departure in my arms from the dining room was loud and trailed behind me like the tail of a kite all the way up the wide front staircase, across the landing with the two sofas beneath the windows, and up to their rooms on the second floor.