“But don’t you need licenses, or special examinations to do that, Edna?” Mrs. Richards asked from the kitchen. “I mean, I know it’s your profession, but isn’t fiddling with people’s minds dangerous? If you don’t know what you’re doing?” She came in with two long-stemmed dessert dishes, gave one to Madame Brown, and one to Mr. Richards. “I read an article—” She paused with her hands on the back of her chair—“about those encounter group things, I think they call them? Julia Harrington was going to one of those, two years ago. And the minute I read that article, I cut it out and sent it to her—it was just terrifying! About all those unskilled people leading them and how they were driving everybody crazy! Touching each other all over, and picking each other up in the air, and telling each other about everything! Well, some people just couldn’t take it and got very seriously ill!”
“Well I—” Madame Brown began some polite protest.
“I think it’s all poppycock,” Mr. Richards said. “Sure, people have problems. And they should be put away where they can get help. But if you’re just indulging yourself, somebody telling you to straighten up and fly right may be what you need. A few hard knocks never hurt anybody, and who’s in a better position to give out a few than your own parents, I say—though I’ve never lifted a hand to my own.” Mr. Richards lifted his hand, palm out, to his shoulder. “Have I, Mary? At least not since they were big.”
“You’re a very good father, Arthur.” Mrs. Richards came back from the kitchen with three more dessert glasses clutched together before her. “No one would ever deny that.”
“You kids just be glad your parents are as sane as they are.” Mr. Richards nodded once toward Bobby’s (empty) chair and once toward June’s; she was just sitting down in it after taking the plates into the kitchen. She put a cut glass bowl, filled with white, on the white cloth.
“Here you are,” Mrs. Richards said, passing Kidd his fruit.
In its long-stemmed dessert dish, the yellow hemisphere just cleared the syrup.
Kidd looked at it, his face slack, realized his lips were hanging a little open, so closed them.
Beneath the table, he clutched the table-leg so tight a band of pain finally snapped along his forearm. He let go, let out his breath, and said: “Thank you…”
“It’s not terribly exciting,” Mrs. Richards said. “But fruit has lots of vitamins and things. I made some whipped cream—dessert topping, actually. I do like real cream, but this was all we could get. I wanted to flavor it almond. I thought that would be nice. With peaches. But I was out of almond extract. Or vanilla. So I used maple. Arthur, would you like some? Edna?”
“Lord, no!” Madame Brown waved the proffered bowl away. “I’m heavy enough as it is.”
“Kidd, will you?”
The bowl came toward him between the candles, facets glittering. He blinked, worked his jaw slowly inside the mask of skin, intent on constructing a smile.
He spooned up a white mound—with the flame behind it, its edges were pale green.
Madame Brown was watching him; he blinked. Her expression shifted. To a smile? He wondered what his own was. It was supposed to be a smile too; it didn’t feel like one…
He buried his peach.
White spiraled into the syrup.
“You know what I think would be lovely?” Mrs. Richards said. “If Kidd read us one of his poems.”
He put half his peach in his mouth and said, “No,” swallowed it, and added, “thanks. I don’t really feel like it.” He was tired.
June said, “Kidd, you’re eating with the whipped cream spoon.”
He said: “Oh…”
Mrs. Richards said, “Oh, that’s all right. Everybody’s had some who wants some.”
“I haven’t,” Mr. Richards said.
Kidd looked at his dish (a half a peach, splayed open in syrup and cream), looked at his spoon (the damasking went up the spoon itself, streaked with cream), at the bowl (above the faceted edges, gouges had been cut into the heaped white).
“No, that’s all right,” Mr. Richards said. Glittering, the bowl moved off beyond the candle flames. “I’ll just use my spoon here. Everybody makes mistakes. Bobby does that all the time.”
Kidd went back to his peach. He’d gotten whipped cream on his knuckles. And two fingers were sticky with syrup. His skin was still wrinkled from the bath. The gnawed and sucked callous looked like he imagined leprosy might.
Arthur Richards said something.
Madame Brown answered something back.
Bobby ran through the room; Mrs. Richards yelled at him.
Arthur Richards said something else.
Cream, spreading through the puddle in the bottom of his dish, finally met glass all the way around. “I think I’m going to have to go soon.” He looked up.
The gold knot of Mr. Richard’s tie was three inches lower on his shirt.
Had he loosened it when Kidd was not looking? Or did he just not remember? “I have to meet somebody before it gets too late. And then…” He shrugged: “I want to get back here to work early tomorrow morning.”
“Is it that late?” Mrs. Richards looked disappointed. “Well, I guess you need a good night’s sleep after all that furniture-moving.”
Madame Brown put her linen napkin on the table. (Kidd realized he had never put his in his lap; it lay neatly, by the side of his stained and spotted place, a single drop of purple near the monogrammed R.) “I’m feeling a little tired myself. Kidd, if you could wait a minute, I wish you’d walk with me and Muriel. Is there coffee, Mary?”
“Oh, dear…I didn’t put any up.”
“Then we might as well go now. Kidd is anxious. And I certainly don’t want to be out on the streets any later than I have to.”
Downstairs, somebody laughed; the laughter of others joined it, till suddenly there was a series of thumps, like large furniture toppling, bureau, after bedstead, after chiffonier.
Kidd got up from the table—held the cloth in place this time. His arm still hurt. “Mr. Richards, were you going to pay me now, or when I finished the whole job?” Getting that out, he was suddenly exhausted.
Mr. Richards leaned back in his chair. His fists were in his suit coat pockets; the front chair legs lifted. “I imagine you could use a little right now.” One hand came out and up. A bill was folded in it; he’d been anticipating the request. “Here you go.”
“I worked about three and a half hours, I guess. Maybe four. But you can call it three if you want, since I was just getting started.” He took the dark rectangle; it was a single five-dollar bill, folded in four.
Kidd looked at Mr. Richards questioningly, then at Madame Brown, who was leaning over her chair, snapping her fingers for Muriel.
Mr. Richards, both hands back in his pockets, smiled and rocked.
Kidd felt there was something else to say, but it was too difficult to think of what. “Um…thank you.” He put the money in his pants pocket, looked around the table for June; but she had left the room. “Good night, Mrs. Richards.” He wandered across green carpet to the door.
Behind him, as he clicked over lock after lock—there were so many—Madame Brown was saying: “Good night, Arthur. Mary, thanks for the dinner. June…? June…?” she called now—“I’m on my way, dear. See you soon. Good night, Bobby—Oh, he’s back in his room. With that book I bet, if I know Bobby. Muriel, come along, sweetheart. Right with you, Kidd. Good night again.”
The smoke was so thick he wondered if the glass were opaque and he only misremembered it as clear—
“Well—” Madame Brown pushed open the cracked door—”what do you think of the Richards after your first day on the job?”
“I don’t think anything.” Kidd stretched in the over-thick night. “I’m just an observer.”
“I take that to mean you’ve thought a great deal but find it difficult, or unnecessary, to articulate.” Muriel clicked away down the cement walk. “They are perplexing.”