Letting Go (33 page)

“I don’t think the guy’s going to put anything over on anybody. People,” Gruber said, “have got a lot of native sense.”

At that moment I couldn’t think of anybody I knew who had a drop, but I only nodded my head. I said, “Dr. Gruber, I hate to change the subject, but don’t you think she drinks a good deal?”

“Who?”

“Mrs. S.”

“Fay? She’s a good-time Charley! She’s a terrific gal!”

“But she drinks a lot. Is my father drunk?”

“He had the time of his life—he’s a new man. Christ, he was a melancholy specimen. Now he’s topnotch.”

“Do you think he’s going to be happy, Doc?”

“What’s the matter with you, boy? He
is
happy. Look at him now—he’s smiling, for God’s sake, in his sleep. We had the time of our
lives.
” He suddenly leaped up. “Here,” he said, “I want you to see some happy faces.”

He flipped on the machine. “Switzerland! Just before we left. Skating in November, can you imagine?”

Alas, we were on a lake, cupped between two white peaks. Dr. Gruber was holding up Mrs. Silberman under the arms; the two of them were laughing, their heads thrown back, their mouths open. Over at the left-hand edge of the picture, stood my father, wearing a feathered Alpine hat and his gray pin-striped suit. Like the others, he was on skates, but his attention didn’t seem to be on the sport.

“Look at her
ankles!
” Dr. Gruber said, but I was looking at
those two eyes that were the color of my own. They were directed toward the distant mountains, fastened forever on the impossible.

In the morning, of course, neither Millie nor I, nor either of the lovers, commented on the fact that once again at our breakfast table sat three.

Sarah Vaughan awakened Martha Reganhart. She twisted around until she had plugged “Tenderly” out of her ears with her sheet and pillow—but then Markie was in bed beside her.

“Where’s the turkey?”

“Honey, it’s too early. Go color, go back to bed—”

“Sissy’s playing records.”

“Go tell Sissy to turn them off.”

“I don’t know how.”

“Tell Cynthia to. Markie baby, Mother’s beat. Will you just give her five more minutes? Tell Cynthia to tell Sissy to turn down the volume.”

“What?”

“The volume. Tell her …” She caught sight of the whole family’s dirty laundry heaped up in a corner of the gray room, and she almost went under. “Tell her to turn down the phonograph.” A bleary eye fell on the electric clock. “It’s seven, honey—it’s a holiday. Tell Cynthia—”

“Cynthia’s talking on the phone.”

“What phone?”

“She called the weather.”

“Oh Christ, Mark, tell your sister to hang up! Tell Sissy to lower the phonograph. Oh baby, your pants are wet—”

“It’s going to be clouds all day,” Mark said.

“Markie—”

“Sissy! Lower that thing!”

“I can’t
hear
you,” Sissy shouted back; and a good forty minutes before it was supposed to, Mrs. Reganhart’s day began.

Sissy was in her room, wearing a gossamer shorty nightgown and painting her toenails.

“Sissy, where are the oranges? How do you expect my kids to have breakfast without orange juice?”

“I thought they were my oranges.”

“How could your oranges be on the top shelf, Sister? Where’s your head?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sissy, yesterday I found a bunch of bananas in the refrigerator. My bananas. Ten million dollars’ worth of advertising, and it goes right over your head. I’m at the edge with you, Sissy, I really am. Can’t you keep that box off in the morning?”

“Jesus, you just got up. What are you coming on so salty for?”

“Please, do me a favor. Let’s make a rule. No Sarah Vaughan until ten. There are two kids here, plus me, right? Either let’s make this place a house, keep it a house, or else—I don’t know. Can’t you even close the door when you take a bath?”

“What’s eating you, for God’s sake? What are you so prissy about all of a sudden? The kid’s four years old—”

“Just do me a favor,” Martha Reganhart said, “and close the door.”

“I’m claustrophobic.”

“You’re a goddam exhibitionist.”

“For four-year-olds?”

“I’m not even talking about Mark. I’m talking about Cynthia. She’s a big girl.”

“Christ, we’re all one sex.”

“There’s something about the sight of you shaving your legs in the bathtub that I think has a deleterious effect on her. All right?”

“You think she tends to be a little dykey?”

“That’s a bad joke—” Martha Reganhart said. “Why don’t you take it back?”

“I will. I’m sorry, Martha. I am.”

Martha looked out past the window sill full of cigarette butts into the holiday sky: clouds all day. Oh God. In the room, Sissy’s underwear was hanging over chair backs, on doorknobs, and on the two end posts of the bed; one brassiere was hooked over an andiron in the unused fireplace. Sissy herself sat on Martha’s Mexican rug (the one she had moved into this back bedroom as a come-on for prospective roomers) painting her toenails. Martha decided not to express the whole new rush of irritation she felt toward the girl. The only roomer Martha could put up with anyway was no roomer at all; besides, Sissy’s forty a month helped pay the rent. So she smiled at Sissy—who had, after all, behind those pendulous boobs, a big pendulous heart—and slingshotted a brassiere off the bedstead into Sissy’s curly brown hair. It collapsed around her ears.

“It loves you,” Martha said.

“You know, I think you’re a little dykey too.”

“Oh you’re a hard girl to fool, Sis.” She left the room wondering not how to dispossess Sissy, but simply how to get the Mexican rug back into the children’s bedroom.

In the kitchen, she slid the turkey from the refrigerator and found that it had only just begun to unfreeze; she had been so tired when she got home last night that she had gone directly to bed, forgetting to leave the turkey out. “Why do they let these birds get so
hard?
” she said.

“Who?” Mark said.

“Markie, don’t you have anything to do? Do you have to walk directly under my feet?”

“Why does that thing have a big hole in it like that?” he demanded.

“Get your arm out of there. Come on, Markie, take your arm out of there, will you?”

“Why does that turkey have a big hole in it?”

She carried it to the sink and turned the cold water on. She rapped on the breast with her knuckle, asking herself why November couldn’t have sneaked by without causing a fuss. Holidays were even worse than work days. Couldn’t everything, birthdays, Fourth of July, be celebrated at Christmas?

“Why does that turkey have a big—”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s for the sexual organs,” Cynthia said.

“Drink your prune juice.”

“I don’t like prune juice,” Cynthia answered. “I like oranges.”

“Sissy drank the oranges this morning.”

“They weren’t hers anyway.”

“Yes they were,” Martha said.

“You said so yourself,” Cynthia replied.

“I made a mistake. I jumped to conclusions.” Since her daughter’s normal response to people seemed to be distrust, she saw no need to feed her inclinations; perhaps if everybody ignored the trait she would grow out of it. Martha told herself to be more motherly. “Cynthia, are you going to help me with dinner? You want to help stuff the turkey?”

“What’s stuff it?” Markie asked.

“Stuffing,” Cynthia said.

“How?”
he pleaded.

“In the sexual organs.”

“Cynthia, what’s this sexual organs business?” Martha looked almost instinctively to Sissy’s door, which closed (when Martha could convince Sissy to keep it closed) onto the kitchen. Behind it Sissy was singing a duet with Sarah Vaughan and dressing; that is, heavy objects were bouncing off the floor, so if she was not dressing she was bowling.

“That,” Cynthia was saying, pointing toward the opening in the turkey.

“No it’s not, honey.”

“Yes it is, Mother.”

“It’s where they removed the insides of the turkey. This is a Tom, sweetie,” Martha began to explain.

“It’s the sexual organs,” Cynthia said.

Markie looked from one to the other, with intermittent glances at the bird’s posterior, and waited for the outcome; he seemed to be rooting for his mother.

“It
was
the sexual organs,” Martha said. “It’s where they remove the intestines—”

“Who?” Mark asked.

“Dears, it’s very involved and mysterious and not terribly crucial. It’s one of those things that one day is very complicated and the next day is very simple. Why don’t you wait?”

“Okay,” Mark said, but Cynthia complained again about her prune juice.

“Cynthia, why don’t you run down to Wilson’s and buy the paper for me?”

“Can I stop in the playground to see if Stephanie’s there?”

“Stephanie’s mother is sick.”

“—sexual organs,” Mark was saying.

“Markie, forget that, all right? Why don’t you go color? Go with Cynthia—”

“I don’t want him along!”

“Who cares!” Mark said, and left the kitchen.

“Please don’t fight, will you, Cynthia? It’s a holiday. Go get the
Times.
”

“Can I stop at Hildreth’s?”

“For what? For candy, no.”

“To talk to Blair.”

“Blair isn’t there.”

“Blair’s always there,” said Cynthia, and Sissy laughed behind the door.

“Isn’t it enough, honey, to take a walk? Cyn, I’d love to take a walk. I’d just love to take a nice leisurely walk and get the newspaper and bring it home and sit down for about six hours and read it. Can’t you do that?”

“No!”

“Then go get the paper and keep quiet.”

“Christ!”

“And enough of that,” Martha said.

“
You
say it.”

“I also work as a waitress—does that interest you?”

“I can’t do
any
thing.”

Martha took the dime for the paper out of her slacks pocket with wet hands. “Do you know what day this is?” she asked, wrapping her daughter’s fingers around the coin.

Cynthia made a bored admission. “It’s Thanksgiving.”

“Thanksgiving is a very terrific holiday. How about we have a pleasurable day, all right? We’re going to have a guest. Well, don’t you want to know who?”

“Who?”

She mustered up an air of excitement, a good deal more than she felt. “Sidney Jaffe!”

And all at once the child, thank God, became a child, a little seven-year-old girl. “Goodie! Terrific!” She skipped out of the house after the paper.

There was one wall of the kids’ room—before Sissy’s arrival it had been Cynthia’s alone—that Martha had given up on and come to consider the coloring wall. Now Mark was laying purple on it with considerable force and violence.

“Markie, what is it you want to do?”

“Yes,” the boy said, and continued hammering the crayons against the wall.

“What’s the trouble?”

He looked up. “Nothing.”

“Are you happy?”

“Uh-huh.”

She made Cynthia’s bed and changed Mark’s wet sheets. Crumpling them into a sour wad, she bit her tongue and said nothing. Finally, as though it was simple curiosity that moved her to ask, she said, “Did you have any bad dreams, my friend?”