In a vague way, Suey O’Day was tied up with Martha’s own past, but that was not sufficient explanation for the emotions — shame, fear, vulnerability — that Martha felt while Sissy was speaking. Martha and Suey had been freshmen together at the University. Suey had run off one day with a jockey from Washington Park, and Martha had run off and married Dick, and they had gone to Mexico and then she had come back from Mexico with the kids, and Suey was twenty-four and back in town too — as a call girl. Now Suey’s future was said to be very bright; at one A.M., with background music by Gerry Mulligan, Sissy had informed Martha that there was a LaSalle Street broker whom Suey was tempted to marry for loot, and there was an instructor in math at the University who was crazy about her and whom she was tempted to marry for love. (The problem here was whether Suey should tell him The Truth About Herself, which the LaSalle Street broker already knew.) Of course Suey was worlds away from Martha, but Sissy wasn’t: Sissy was in her house, Sissy was sleeping on her muslin sheets, and it was Sissy’s dumb wildness, her endless temptations, that struck in Martha a painful remembered chord.
“What happened?” Martha said.
“I took off. I came home. I got in bed. That’s how I was up so early — I was in bed at nine-thirty.”
Martha sat down at the kitchen table and lit a cigarette; she caught sight of her hair in Sissy’s mirror — another mess to be cleaned up before one o’clock. “Sissy, you’re really going to screw up everything. Why don’t you wise up? Dump Blair and dump all this hipster crap and do something with yourself. Honey, you can still dig Gerry Mulligan, but you don’t have to kill yourself.”
“Look, I was just going to turn a lousy trick to see what it was like. I wasn’t going to jump off a bridge.”
“But, Sissy, you don’t want to be a call girl. Do you know what’s very square, Sis? To want to be a call girl. Honestly, it’s like wanting to be an airline stewardness or a nurse.”
“Do you think I love being a stinking X-ray technician? Is that a noble calling? Sixty-five bucks a week?”
“Ah-ha, it’s a matter of honor. I didn’t know. The culture’s crowding you in. We ought to set up an interview for you, Sissy, with Erich Fromm.”
“Don’t come on so motherly with me, Martha. You’re about two years older—”
“True—”
“—and your life isn’t exactly a model of order.”
“You’re going to get kicked in the teeth, Sister, so why don’t you shut up.” Martha pressed out her cigarette just as the janitor came up the back porch, waved at her, tried to catch a peek of some bare corner of Sissy’s anatomy, and emptied — very, very slowly — the garbage.
At the sink she held the turkey submerged in hot water. Behind her Sissy began to apologize. “I just thought about it, Martha—”
“Who cares what you thought or what you did! Maybe what you ought to think about is moving out.”
“I only just moved in.”
“That’ll make packing easier. Just roll up all your brassieres, scatter those cigarette butts to the wind, and move the hell out.”
“You going to throw me out on a morals charge? Because I don’t happen to be compulsively neat?”
“I don’t want my kids lifting up the phone when your clients start to call—” Yet even as she spoke the whole business tired her. Everything tired her — even thinking about what she would have to do now. Take another ad, answer phone calls, arrange appointments, show the place to dozens of girls and ladies … Just the knowledge that after Sissy left she would have to scrub the place again from top to bottom weakened her resolve. Why hadn’t she rented to some eager little physics major in the first place? What insanity it had been to think that this jerk was going to be sweet, fun, laughs! All she wanted now, really, was for Sissy to crawl back into her grubby room and close the door and ruin her life however she wanted. She said nothing, but there must have been some sagging in her posture that inspired Sissy to be nasty.
“Just because you have sex problems, Martha, don’t call somebody who doesn’t a nymphomaniac, all right? If you’re frigid, or whatever the hell is bugging you, I don’t say I’m not going to live in your house because of it. You, you’re a regular sexual Senator McCarthy, honest to God you are.”
“I’m trying to fix a traditional Thanksgiving Day turkey. Why don’t you go play records.”
“Actually, I think what it is that bugs you is that like Blair’s a dinge.”
“As far as I’m concerned, friend, you can go down for the whole Nigerian Army and the Belgian Congo Marines. Just leave me alone, all right?”
Sissy picked up her mirror and tweezers and left the room. And Martha Reganhart was sure that never before had she been so compromised and shat upon; never had she been so soft and expedient and unprincipled. Worst of all, never could it have bothered her less. If she had had the energy to be disgusted with herself, the object of her disgust would have been her inability to care any more. For nearly four years now she had been pretending to be two parents, and not half a set. Even the strict observance of national holidays had been a conscious noble decision, something she felt the divorced owed their offspring. Three and a half years ago she had made a whole potful of conscious noble decisions: if Cynthia had long legs, she would have ballet lessons; if she had a good head, she would go to the very best schools; Markie was going to learn to be as crazy over the White Sox as any Chicago kid with a full-time father … and so on and so on. Today, however, the whole fatuous lie, all that she had not done, screamed at her from every wall, door, and closet. With that granite turkey to roast and cranberries to boil and silverware to polish, she felt as though she had run her course. If she had been allowed one more hour of sleep she could doubtless have faced the next four years with an upper lip as stiff as ever. Now, everything foretold her doom — even the popped seam in her slacks, through which anyone who cared to look could see that Martha Reganhart was wearing no underwear.
But what was she supposed to have done? The dilemma she had had to face at seven A.M., before brushing her teeth or drinking her coffee, was whether or not she would be less of a slob, or more of a hundred-percent-American mother, with no pants under her slacks, or dirty ones — for it turned out there were none clean. She had made her choice in a stupor, and was now suffering dismal emotions as a result. Feeling bedraggled made her feel unworthy, and over her sink she closed her eyes to the near and distant future. She thought it might give ber some little solace if she could squeeze her hands around the neck of whoever it was who had raised her rent. But it wasn’t a person — it was an agency. There wasn’t even anybody to shout at really — they only worked here, lady — when you called up to complain.
Shortly thereafter, her daughter came racing through the front door, impervious to the scab on her right knee that was leaking blood down her shin.
“Mommy! Daddy’s picture!”
“Daddy’s what? Cynthia, look at your knee—”
“Daddy’s picture. A painting!”
“Cynthia, what happened to your knee?”
“Nothing. I slipped. Look!” Cynthia had the paper folded to the art column. She jerked it back and forth in front of Martha’s face, but did not relinquish it.
“Calm down,” Martha said. “I can’t see it if you keep moving it, can I? Go wash your knee. Please — do you want to get an infection and turn blue?”