“Ooh. Oh.”
“Then get in the water. Get in or I’ll splash you.”
“It’s cold.”
“It’s lovely once you’re in.”
“It’s too cold.”
“Once you get used to it.”
“Well,” Mills said uncertainly.
“I’ll count to ten.”
“I’ll take my shoes and socks off.”
And George Mills, on a patio chair, crossed his legs, the gesture broad, difficult. He tugged at his unlaced shoes. He rolled his socks down his legs. Spreading his thighs, he leaned over and stuffed his socks into the front of his shoes. He felt a flap of testicle against his thigh and looked up. Mary was watching him.
“I’ve seen balls before,” she said.
“Have you?”
“Sure, lots of times. My daddy’s and uncle’s. I’m on the swim team. I’ve seen my coach’s. I think they’re ridiculous. Big old hairy prunes. Anyway, I go steady. Don’t they hurt when you sit on them?”
“That doesn’t happen.”
“No?”
“Mother Nature keeps them out of the way, Miss.”
“Boobs don’t hurt either. Well sometimes they do. Before my period they can get pretty sore.”
“Hmn,” George Mills said.
“Are you coming in or aren’t you? What did you mean you don’t know if you can swim in a pool?”
“The poor don’t know much about swimming pools. The schools didn’t have them when I was a boy.”
“Where did you swim?”
“Off piers. In ponds. In bodies of water where bait shops are found.”
“Didn’t you ever go to the beach?”
“We went there on Sundays, on Fourths of July. We sat on a blanket, we drank beer from a keg. We swam always in waters that were bad for our strokes.”
“Come in,” she said, “we don’t have to race.”
“I’ve a stroke like a nigger. I flounder, I thrash.”
“That’s mean, Mills. That’s wicked to say.”
“Black people are afraid of the water,” George Mills said. “Poor people are.”
“Wait,” she said, “I’ll come out.” She swam to the side of the pool where George Mills was sitting and placed her hands on the coping. Using only her arms, she hoisted herself out of the water easily. “Brr,” she said, “it is chilly. The air’s cooler than the water. Where’s my towel? Oh, there it is. Dry me off, Mills.”
“Here,” George said, “I’ll hand it to you.”
“You dry me,” the girl said. She laughed. “A hundred strokes.”
“I think you’d better do it yourself, Miss,” Mills said.
“I’ll let you call me Mary.”
“I don’t mind calling you Miss.” It was true. He didn’t.
“You’re just scared Uncle Harry will see.”
“See what, Miss?”
“Go in, get wet. I’ll dry you off.”
“I’m in a state of grace, Miss,” George Mills said so gently that the girl might have thought she was being scolded. But Mills felt no anger. Even the mild, queer authority of maleness he’d felt, the odd thrust of his exhibitionist swagger, had somehow resolved itself, declined, his horsepower manhood gone off. I’m her servant, thought Mills. It’s proper she should tease me. There was a compact between them, the ancient, below-stairs displacements and goings on of history’s and the world’s only two real classes. She was there for his character as, in a way, he was there for hers. And her mother didn’t want to die until this child was ready. He knew that if he didn’t do something with his loyalty he was lost. So he told her.
“Because,” he said, “women always fooled me. Because whatever I thought about women was never what I should have thought.
“I mean their natures. I had this idea about their natures, that there was such a thing as a virgin heart. To this day I’m astonished young ladies let fellows. I’m not talking the sense of the thing. I mean if it makes sense, or even if it’s right or wrong. I mean it seemed to me it couldn’t happen, not shouldn’t, couldn’t. That the body itself wouldn’t let it. That that’s what a body was, being’s buffer, a place to hide. Lord, Miss, the things I thought. That marriage wasn’t so much a way of two people finding each other as something they did to keep others from finding them, from ever having to do again with anyone else what their bodies weren’t strong enough to keep them from doing with each other. To give back sovereignty, you see, even if it was devalued now, like bad dollars or a fixed income. That courtship was impossible, that a fellow’s lies and urgencies had to get past the hymen first, that they listen in their cherry, see Miss?”
The child, wrapped in towels now from head to toe, watched from where she lay in the deck furniture. Mills had a vagrant image of her mother in her sheets in the hospital bed.
He tells about the Delgado Ballroom. He tells about bringing Louise and her friends back to his apartment.
“This is swell,” Louise says. “Isn’t this swell?”
“Have you got television?” Bernadette asks.
“What’s in the fridge?”
“I don’t know. Just some eggs. Some stuff for breakfast.”
“Who wants cocoa? Raise your hand.”
“I don’t think there’s cocoa,” George says. “There may be some chocolate syrup in the cabinet where I keep the soap powder.”
“Where’s your phone?” Charles says. “Never mind, I see it. This directory looks like it’s never been used.”
“If you had the fixings I could make chocolate chip cookies. If you had the chocolate chips.”
“There’s Saltines,” George says.
“At least there’s a radio,” Herb says. “I’ll get some music.”
“Somebody get the lights.”
“Man, are you corny!”
“Who’s horny?”
“Sometimes Ray acts very immature,” Bernadette says.
“Got a church key?”
“In the drawer with my tableware.”
“Okay, I’ve got it. Look at this, he’s got service for one.”
“Maybe he isn’t registered.”
“Hey you guys, be still a minute.…Is this Mr. Stuart Melbart of 2706 North Grand Boulevard?…It is? Congratulations, Mr. Melbart, this is Hy Nichols of KSD radio. If you can answer the following question you and Mrs. Melbart will be the lucky winners of an all-expense-paid vacation in Hot Sulphur Springs, Arkansas, as KSD’s guests at the luxurious Park Palace Hotel. Are you ready for your question?…Good. All right, sir, name two members in President Eisenhower’s cabinet.…Sherman Adams is correct. You’re halfway there.…I can’t hear you. John Foster who? Speak up, please.…Yes, yes, John Foster. We have to have that last name, sir. Can you speak up?…No sir, I can’t.…Yes sir, I can now. Go ahead, sir, take one more try.…John, yes.…Foster, yes.…What’s that?…It must be a bad connection, yes.”
“Charles, that’s cruel. The poor guy must be fit to bust.”
“Did you hear him? Did you hear him shouting? What a goon!”
“Beer, everybody. Have a beer, George?”
“That sounds funny. Can’t you get a different station?”
“This is the only one that works. George must be some Browns fan. They left town two years ago.”
“Haven’t you even got a phonograph?”
“No.”
“How big are your breasts?…I said how big are your breasts?…No, ma’am, I’m not being fresh. Isn’t this the take-out chicken place?”
“I’m expecting a call,” George says.
“Bern?”
“What?”
“Want to take a shower?”
“Oh, Ray. You’re the limit.”
“What the hell, Bern. We’re married.”
“I don’t have clean towels.”
“Why don’t you sit by me?”