You took my love,
Soooooooo—
“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 anything.”
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.