From the Relief Society Magazine, October 1966 –

The Complex

By Kathryn E. Franks

Beth Green removed the roast from the big oven and placed it upon the sinkboard. She looked out the kitchen window across the spacious green yard. Delighted, she caught the fragrance of the first blooming lilacs. The fragrance always alerted her to that little girl, summer-is-almost-here mood.

She carried the roast to the round table in the middle of the kitchen and set it down. Her husband, Tom, had just come in from mowing the large back lawn and looked absolutely famished.

Sara, her fourteen-year-old daughter, and Steve, her nine-year-old son, were at the table and on that subject again.

Finally, Beth tired of listening, broke it up.

“Children, just listen to yourselves. You are both getting a ‘complex.'”

“What’s that?” asked Steve, afraid his mother might be changing the subject.

“It is a bit hard to explain,” began Beth, “but mainly it is a feeling that someone else has something better than you, or can do something better than you can. In your case, you are both getting ‘complexes’ about these new houses going up near us, while we still live here in our old-fashioned, two-story white house.”

“It’s old, all right,” snapped Sara. “Your grandfather built it long before the first World War. We don’t even have a garage. We have to call that old barm, I mean carriage house, in the back, a garage. You said it yourself. It was built to house your grandfather’s horse and carriage. You call that a garage?’*

“Well it does a good job housing my station wagon and your father’s sedan.”

“And a list of things too long for mentioning,” Dad added, coming to Beth’s defense. The other things he had in mind were bikes, sleds, toboggans, Steve’s derby car.

“Maybe so,” chimed in Steve, “but it is pretty out-dated.”

Even as a child, Beth had loved her grandparents’ home here on the outskirts of town. She had played in the haymow, helped her grandfather hoe the garden, and during the hot summer days, she and her grandmother had picked fruit from the orchard.

Soon after her grandparents were gone she and Tom were married. Rather than sell the property, they decided to move into it and make it into a big, comfortable home. True, they had soon made some up-to-date changes, but mostly they liked the house best with its early-day charm.

While Tom served the plates, Beth looked through the kitchen window with a happy, contented expression.

“You know,” she said, “I sort of like the looks of the old barn back there next to the orchard. That big maple spreads its shade over the roof in the summer and shades most that part of the yard. My friend, who is an artist, called it ‘picturesque.’ ”

“Mother,” Sara moaned, “you just don’t understand.”

“Yes,” answered Beth seriously, “I do understand. We were happy and comfortable in this spacious old house with its big orchards and gardens. Now these subdivisions are going up with their well-designed homes, and suddenly you notice the difference. I admit there is a contrast, but that hardly gives us reason to pull up and move. Anyway, those new homes are expensive, and probably cramped for room.”

“Maybe so,” admitted Sara, “but I’ve seen two girls and one boy my age moving into the finished houses on old Hill Road. They’ll be our neighbors. They’ll go to our school. Now Steve and I will be known as the boy and girl from that old house on the comer . . . with the barn!”

So the complex grew through the spring into the first of June. Several of the homes were finished now and landscaped. More families were moving in, with new cars, too. Beth had to admit she began to feel the contrast. Each time she got such notions she went to the garden and picked string beans or went to the orchard and picked peaches from the trees. Feeling contented again, she thought about the new families with pint-size yards and only one broom closet to a house.

Beth was at the front window hanging freshly washed curtains at the open window the day one of the new girls bicycled up the street close to the fence where Sara, in her flowered cotton dress, trimmed the withered roses from Beth’s favorite rosebushes.

The pretty brown-haired girl circled twice on her bike, hoping, Beth felt sure, that Sara would look up and speak. Sara, still smoldering in her complex, did not stop her snipping.

Sara must have decided, Beth thought, that the girl looked lonesome because she took pity and spoke to her. In a second the new girl was off her bike and beside the fence. Soon they were chatting in that friendly fourteen-year-old tone.

Before Beth had the curtains hung, Sara came toward the house, bringing the girl around to the back.

As they walked by the windows she could hear their conversation. There are so many things, Beth thought, that she’ll want to learn from Sara, about the school, the neighborhood.

The girls were at the back of the house now, beside the back steps. “What an interesting house,” the girl remarked, looking as if she were taking notes on the house and the old barn. “I bet you’ve had some good slumber parties up in that hayloft. Have you?”

“No,” answered Sara, without enthusiasm. “I had only part of the empty loft cleared away for the playhouse. The neighborhood girls used it sometimes, but I’ve never had a party or slept up there.”

Sara wanted to change the subject, but the girl’s eyes stayed on the barn, gathering ideas.

“Your house is so big, I bet you have a room all to yourself.”

Her eyes had left the barn and now she covered the big, two-story house.

“Yes, there are four bedrooms upstairs, and one guest room down,” Sara informed her.

“You’re lucky. We have only three bedrooms in our house. My brother has a room, but my sister and I have to share a room. I better get going,” the new girl said, turning. “It is time for my piano lesson. See you.”

“Why didn’t you ask her in?” Beth asked Sara when she came inside for a cold drink.

“I suppose I should have,” Sara said, “she seemed anxious to get acquainted. Her name is Pat. But I don’t want her going all over the new neighborhood advertising about our house, inside and out.”

Now here we go again, Beth thought to herself, as she went back to the curtains.

Steve came in at lunchtime and announced that he had met one of the new boys. “Dick’s a nice kid, Mom. He’d play, but he has to stay around home and help plant shrubs and water the new lawn. His place is going to be real pretty, though. Sure makes our place look awful countryish.”

“Oh,” cried Beth as she struck her finger with the hammer she was using to drive a nail through the curtain rod. “I wish,” she groaned to herself, “that I’d never seen a bulldozer go by this house on its way to clear those lots.”

In a matter of days word got around about the house and barn but not the way that Sara imagined.

The girls had started to come around the house now in twos and threes. There appeared to be five now, including Sara, who had formed a clique.

“It has a real hayloft,” she heard one of the girls explain as they brought each new girl around to look.

Enthusiastically, the girls hurried inside the barn and climbed the old ladder with such suggestions as: “Oh, this is neat. Why don’t we clean it up and bring our record player up here?” Or, “Maybe my mother will let me bring our old braided rug, and we’ll have a lovely place to sit around.” Soon the dust flew out of the back haymow door, being swept by five, inspired girls. Afterwards, things by the armfuls were carted up the steep ladder.

“This is more fun than anything,” exclaimed Bea, the small blonde girl, as she came into the kitchen with Sara to help carry cold punch to the barn.

Beth had been so busy just keeping ice cubes in the refrigerator and snacks ready for the hungry girls that she had trouble remembering the girls’ names.

“If you’ll help me,” Beth heard Sara say a few days later, “I’ll ask mother if we can clear away the south side of the barn that was used as the stable and make it into a stage.”

The girls nearly burst with joy over the idea. “We can have our own little theater,” they shouted.

Possibilities grew by the day.

By the end of the week, the stage progressed as the boys hammered away on a tree house. “Boy,” Steve told Beth, as he rushed into the house for an entire half of an apple pie, “I feel sorry for those boys. They don’t have much of anywhere to play. You can’t even play catch in their back yards.”

“There’s room here,” Beth said. “If you overflow the tree house you always have the orchard.”

The first time Beth visited Bea’s mother she felt uneasy the minute she walked into the house. The inside was so freshly painted and beautifully carpeted that Beth felt afraid she’d touch something or walk on something she shouldn’t. The children had to use the back door for fear they would track in mud from the lawns.

Beth mentioned it to Sara that evening while they washed dishes. “No wonder,” Sara said, “that the girls like to come here.”

“Girls your age prefer comfort to luxury,” Beth said, careful not to use that I-told-you-so tone.

The next few days the heat drove the girls inside to the cooler rooms of the big house. Pat, sitting cross-legged on the floor confessed, “I’m sure glad we moved here, Sara. I have always lived in an apartment. You don’t know how much fun this is.”

“Too bad,” Bea said, “that it wasn’t your house for sale instead of all those new lots where we bought.”

“I think your homes are beautiful,” Sara answered.

Beth wondered from the tone of her voice if she hadn’t really got over her complex.

The sound of Sara’s voice still bothered Beth as she went to the kitchen to prepare cold ham and potato salad for supper. She walked through the hot sunshine and brought in tomatoes from her garden. She moved a lemon pie to the back shelf of the refrigerator so the children would not see it until after dinner. Beth had dinner arranged attractively on her yellow and white checkered cloth, with a large bowl of shasta daisies and marigolds in the center when Tom came in from sprinkling the lawn.

“You know,” he said, as the family seated themselves at the table, “you children are right. These new homes are making our house look shabby and outdated. I’m going to talk to Mr. Rogers, the real estate broker, tomorrow. I’ll have him come out and give us an estimate on our property. We could get a smaller house over I the tract area by the lake. Be near the lake and the new high school.”

Sara And Steve’s protests went up like white flags. “No, Dad,” Steve insisted quickly. “We’re over our complex. We like it here.”

Sara couldn’t speak right away because tears had suddenly filled her eyes. She managed enough voice to say, “I wouldn’t want to move, Daddy. Not ever. We’ll stay here,” she suggested, “and Steve and I will save our allowances and buy some paint, maybe some more roses for around the front fence.”

“I could help paint,” Steve offered, with all the confidence of a man. “Come on, agree, or mother will start doctoring you for what it is she called it, a complex.”

Beth smiled back, and suddenly confident that the “complex” was a thing of the past, she started passing the food.