Stimuli: photo- 4 children for sale, inquire within. Chicago 1948
For Eleanor Mae Hansen the world ended on August 4, 1936. She sits on the floor in the sitting room of the tiny house she inhabits with her five children, tears threatening to escape from her eyes and a paintbrush in hand.
The air is heavy with dust and a thin layer of grime covers every surface despite her efforts to keep the house clean. Dead cockroaches lay in corners and the walls are littered with holes from the family of mice that resides in the house. Half-melted candles are scattered about the room, poised, ready to be lit after sundown as she can no longer afford to pay the electricity bill to light the house.
However, the overall decrepitude does not overshadow the cozy and loving feel that is present. Rag babies lie on the worn sofa and toy trains that have long lost their paint rest by the door. Photos of chubby, smiling infants line the walls, their smiles brightening the room.
Eleanor wipes the tears from her eyes and once again focuses on the sign she was painting. Studying the red block lettering she decides it is done and closes the paint can with a definitive bang of her fist. She remembers when Theodore, her good-for-nothing, dead-beat husband has bought it. One night, about two years ago, shortly after she had given birth to Ginny, her fourth child Theo had come home in an intoxicating state of happiness, carrying a jar of red paint.
"I'm going to paint the shed," he had said, placing the jar on the kitchen table for her to see.
"Paint the shed?" she replied. "Why?"
He laughed his big belly laugh, one that came up right from the center of his soul and smiled at her. "Because I feel like it."
It was his laugh that Eleanor married him for; whenever Theo laughed, he put the world to right. She could be having the worst day, the sort of day when nothing goes right, and Theo would come home from work, his fingers stained with paint and sawdust in his hair, and he would laugh and everything would be okay.
They spent the rest of the evening dancing to the radio and laughing about what their four mischievous children had managed to do today. He never got around to painting the shed, to many things got in the way, like work and drinking and his horrible gambling habit. A year and a half later he was gone, leaving her with four young children under the age of seven and another on the way.
She tucks the paintbrush into the waist of her apron and opens the back door to see her children happily playing in the yard, oblivious to the dramatic turn their lives are about to take. The midday August sun beats down heavy upon the yard; what little grass covers the yard is yellow and dry.
Eleanor is so caught up in her own thoughts she doesn't notice her youngest child approaching her until the child has latched onto her left leg. Her daughter beams up at her with a smile that is entirely Theo and Eleanor feels her heart melt.
"Damn him," she thinks, internally cursing her husband. She hates herself for it as well, because after all he put her and their children through, she still loves him.
"Hey Ginny-Bean, what's up?" she asks the young girl. The nickname came about out of her daughter's affinity for jelly beans, something Eleanor herself shared with her daughter.
"Up, mommy," the girl demands.
As Eleanor picks Ginny up she can easily feel each of her daughter's ribs through the pinafore she wears, the effects of several months without adequate nutrition. As of yet, nobody has noticed her slowly shrinking children, but September is fast approaching and by when school starts the teachers will surely notice that the Hansen children came back to school several pounds lighter than when they left in June.
"Millie, Bonnie, Henry," she calls out to her three older children, of whom are currently terrorising the pigeons that have taken place in the large oak tree in the yard. "Come inside, quickly now."
Her four children file inside the house and once again Eleanor feels tears forming. She can see the confusion in their eyes at their mother's strange behavior, but after living with Theo, who was rarely sober in his last months at home her children know not to question authority.
"Millie, where is my hammer?"
"Over by 'dere," she answer, pointing to the hammer discarded on the kitchen table. Eleanor feels an overwhelming sense of accomplishment at listening to her eldest speak, despite Theo's horror, all of her children have picked up her Chicago accent.
"Because really," she thinks, "they are her children. Her husband relinquished any claim her had when he walked out the door for the last time." Eleanor picks up the hammer from the table and the sign she painter earlier and walks out the front door and onto the landing. She is nearly down the steps to the sidewalk when a thought hits her and she stops dead in her tracks.
"But they aren't your's," she realises, "not anymore." The thought hits her like a train, knocking the wind out of her so effectively she can barely breathe. She realises that everyday when she comes home from her job as a maid, she will have to face the empty house that will remind her of what she has done.
"This is it. The ultimate betrayal a mother can commit."
Her children sit on the steps, watching here with a mixture of wonder and confusion; they have never seen their mother act like this before. The mask she has worn since Theo started drinking shattering more every time she hits the sign into the yard.
And then it is done, and finally, she weeps; her hand cover her face, turned away from the disgusted looks strangers give her as they pass by the yard and read the sign: 4 children for sale, inquire within.
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