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?”
He looked up at her again. “Who?”
Why did he always say who to everything? All the frustrations of the morning — the missing oranges, the frozen bird, Sarah Vaughan — nearly came out on poor defenseless Mark. Everything: Sissy’s stupidity and Cynthia’s indefatigable opposition and Markie’s bed-wetting and her own unconquerable tiredness … She was twenty-six and tired right down to the bone. And she was putting on weight. Twenty-six and becoming a cow! Somehow the whole general situation would improve, she thought hazily, if she could only get Sissy to pick up her underwear and put it in a drawer. Or move out. Or shut up. But the truth was that she had been dying for a little companionship. When she dragged in from the Hawaiian House at one in the morning, it gave her a small warm rush of pleasure to find Sissy in the kitchen, drinking hot milk — more than likely laced with Martha’s brandy — and listening to Gerry Mulligan. Sissy was silly and gossipy and she did not bother to vote, but it seemed better coming home to her than coming home to nothing. Still, why did she have to be a nut? Martha seemed always to be latching onto people just as they were going through some treacherous maturing period in their lives. Her next roomer, she told herself, would not be under eighty — better they should die in her spare room than grow up in it.
She planted a kiss on her son’s neck and he drew a purple line across the bridge of her nose. “Bang! Bang!” he shouted into her ear, and she left him to his drawing.
“What’s the matter with your nose?” Sissy asked. “You look like you’ve just been shat upon?”
“Could you control your language in my house?”
“What are you coming on so salty again for?”
“I don’t want my children saying shat, do you mind? And put on a bathrobe. My son’s earliest memory is going to be of your ass.”
“Now who’s filthy?”
“I happen to be their mother. I support them. Please, Sissy, don’t walk around here half-naked, will you?”
“Well, you don’t have to be so defensive about it.” Sissy went into her room, and came out again, robed, and dribbling ashes off her cigarette. Martha turned to the wall above the sink where the wallpaper was trying to crawl down; she gave it a swat, with the result that it unpeeled a little further. And for this, she thought, they raise the rent. During the last six months — since everybody had had the mumps — life had just been zipping along; then they raised the rent, she brought in Sissy, and things were down to normal again. She turned to her roomer and said, “Sissy, I want to ask you a question?”
“What?”
“Stop plucking your face and listen to me.”
Sissy lowered her mirror and tweezers. “All right, crab, what is it?”
“Do you smoke pot in there?”
The girl crossed her arms over her chest. “Never.”
“Because don’t. I don’t ever want Blair sleeping over here again, ever—and I don’t want any pot-smoking within ten feet of the kitchen table, where my children happen to eat their breakfast.”
“It was Blair, Martha. He won’t do it again.”
“You’re damn right he won’t do it again. Why did I rent that room to you, Sister? I keep forgetting.”
“I applied, you know, like everybody else. I answered the ad. Don’t start shifting blame on me.”
Martha returned to the turkey; she had popped a seam in the left side of her slacks, and when she bent over the sink it popped open further. “They’re going to put me in a circus,” she said. “Five nine and six hundred pounds.”
“You eat too much. You could knock people’s eyes out. You just eat too much.”
“I don’t eat too much,” she said, running scalding water over the leaden turkey, “I’m just turning into a cow. A horse.”
“You know what your trouble is?”
“What? What news do you bring from the far-out world? I’m dying to hear a capsule analysis of my character this morning.”
“You’re horny.”
“You sound about as far out as McCall’s, Sissy.”
“Well, when I’m horny I’m a bitch.”
“Your needs are more complicated than mine. I’m just tired.”
“When I was married to old Curtis, I was practically flippy. You say boo, and I was halfway out the window. He was the creepiest, gentlest guy, and I was snapping at him all the time.”
The tragedy in Sissy’s young life was that she had been married for eleven months to a man who was impotent; she had married him, she said, because he struck her right off as being different. Now — in her continuing search for the exotic — she was involved with Blair Stott, who was a Negro about one and a half neuroses away from heroin, but coming up strong; and if he wasn’t impotent, he was a flagellator or something in that general area.
“What about that Ivy League guy?” Sissy asked. “Joe Brummel.”
“Beau Brummel, Sissy — what about him?”
“Don’t you dig him or what?”
“He’s in New York,” Martha said.
“I thought he was coming for dinner.”
“Sid is.”
“Oh Jesus. That very buttoned-down guy, I mean he’s not bad. He could be turned on with a little work. But old Sidney, I mean like what he digs is law.”
“Sissy, how do you talk at the hospital? How do you address people when you’re not at home?”
“What?”
“Forget it.”
“I hate that God damn hospital. Blair says—” And she proceeded to repeat Blair’s words in Blair’s dialect, “I’m going to get desexized from the X-ray rays.”
“Blair’s a genius.”
“Martha—” Sissy said, leaning forward and setting down her mirror.
“What?”
“I almost did the most far out thing of my life last night. I was like close.”
“To what?”
“Turning tricks.”
Martha felt the homey familiar enamel of the sink under her hands, and took a good grip on it. “Here?” she demanded. “You were going to be a prostitute in my house? Are you crazy?”
“No! No — what do you think I am!”
With relief — though by no means total relief — Martha said, “At Suey’s.”
“At Suey’s,” Sissy admitted. “Isn’t that something? Suey was out getting her hair set, and this guy called to come over for a fast one. I told him Suey was out, and so he said what about you, sweetheart? And I said okay, come on over, you jerk. I told him to come over.”