“Sissy’s feet are wet,” Cynthia pointed out. “She’s leaving a mess again.”
“It’s only dew, baby,” said Martha. After Sissy had departed, she said, “She’s part girl, part stripper—” But Sid was wiping his mouth and saying, “Sometimes I don’t understand you, honey.”
Cynthia leaned over to whisper into Mark’s ear, “He called her honey again.”
“Who?”
Since Martha had to be at work by five, they had begun dinner early. Now it was not quite three, but with the meal finished and the dishes stacked, though not washed, it seemed to Martha as though it were time for dusk to settle in. In Oregon at this time — or later, at the real dusk — they would be coming back from their tramp in the woods. She would have pebbles in her girl scout shoes, and the dust from the red leaves would have caked around her ankles, to be discovered later when she took off her socks for sleep. Her grandfather would be whistling, her grandmother clearing her throat (forever clearing her throat), and her father would be pinching the behind of her mother — poor baffled beautiful woman — and tripping over every rock on the path. “It’s hot toddy time!” “Oh Floyd, you’ve had—” “For God’s sake, where’s your American spirit, Belle? Your old lady here is a matron of the DAR, and where is your American spirit residing, anyway?” “Why don’t you go in and nibble on some turkey; why don’t you—” “I’ll tell you what I want to nibble on, old sweetheart!” “Floyd, the child—” “Martha Lee, who wants a hot toddy, my baby-love? Who’s my baby-love? Who’s got a collection of women around him could make a sheik’s eyes pop? Is that right, Belle, isn’t a sheik one of those fellas with the harems? Baby-love, you’re in the sixth grade — haven’t they mentioned harems?” It was that Thanksgiving, some long, long-gone holiday, when for the first time she had become dreadfully and unexplainably nervous in his presence.
Mark was taking his nap, Sissy had glided out in flat Capezios and black tights, and Cynthia’s voice caroled up from the back yard, where she was jumping rope with Barbara, the janitor’s daughter.
Sid kissed her. Following the old saw, she leaned back and tried, at least, to enjoy it. His hands were a great comfort, a regular joy — there was a nice easy stirring in her breasts that moved inward through her, picking up speed and power, until it produced at last a kind of groan in her bones down in the lowest regions of her torso. Then she was off the sofa.
“No,” she said.
“Martha,” Sid said calmly, “this is getting ridiculous. I’m a grown man, you’re a grown woman—”
“It’s one of those things that’s ridiculous and is going to have to be, Sidney.”
Sid swam an hour a day at the Chicago Athletic Club; he had been a Marine Corps officer in two wars; at forty-one he wore the same size belt he had at twenty-one — and now he asked, with a nervous display of bravado, if perhaps it was simply that she found him physically repellent.
“I find you nothing of the sort,” she said, touched, but not of course impassioned, by the question. “A lot of traffic has moved across this sofa, Sid. I’ve been living here going on four years, and a lot of men have come through, you know, on their way home from work. I think there’s a bus stops in front of our steps, I don’t know. Anyway, if I let everybody’s hands go traveling down my blouse, what kind of mother would I be?”
“I’d appreciate it, Martha, if you could just be serious for a minute.”
He was dead serious, which caused her to feel all the strain of being a joker. She felt dumb and inconsequential and foolish. Here was a man with a hard-on (and all the seriousness that implied) and she wouldn’t give him a straight answer. But there she went again! She just couldn’t sneak out of things by turning phrases all the time. She addressed herself in a stern voice: Be serious … But if she were to become serious about old Sidney, she knew — why not face it — that she would marry him. Once they had stripped down together, and she had realized that aside from being a father to her children, he could also give her about as much bedroom excitement as any other girl she knew was getting — once she let him prove this, wouldn’t she be a goner? Wed once more for wrong and expedient reasons … No, there was only one bag to put your marbles in, one basket for your eggs, and that was love. Nobody was going to marry her again out of necessity; nobody was going to marry her for her breasts, her troubles, or her kids. Nor was she going to miss the mark herself. This time she would do it for love.
At bottom, her demands were no more complicated or original than any other girl’s.
Sid walked to where she stood running her hand over the bindings of her small and eclectic collection of paperbacks. He said, “I didn’t mean that, Martha,” whereupon she thought: What! What are you apologizing for now! “I understand,” he said. “You’re in a tricky position. I’m not trying to make things more difficult for you at all. I care for you so much, Martha. You’ve got a lot of guts, and you’ve been remarkable, really, in a very awkward situation. I do appreciate just how complicated it’s been for you. But, honey, there’s such a simple solution. It doesn’t have to go on like this at all. I’m going to get you down on the sofa, and you’re going to jump up, and there’s such a simple and obvious solution.”
“And what’s that?”
He took her hand, as was appropriate. “Marry me.”
Since her return to Chicago, two other proposals had come Martha’s way. One was from Andy Ratten, a Rush Street musician much admired by co-eds and their dates, who pretended to be Paul Hindemith to one set of friends and Dizzy Gillespie to another; when Martha turned him down, he had sent in the mail — the measure of his crew-cutted wit and marijuanaed charm — a Sammy Kaye LP. “Your fate, baby,” was all the enclosed card had said. The second proposal had come from Billy Parrino, who at the time was the husband of her best friend. On the playground, while soft-faced, bug-eyed exhausted Billy was watching his three kids — his wife was home cracking up, a phenomenon only recently completed — and Martha was watching her two, he had come right out with it. “Martha, let’s just take off.” “I think you have a wife named Beverley.” “She’s so wacked-up it’s driving me crazy.” “Well, I’d love to, Billy, but the kids—” “We’ll take them; we’ll take them all, and we’ll just go somewhere. Paris.” “It all sounds too glamorous — you, me, five kids, Paris.” “Oh,” wailed Billy, “how this life does stink,” and he went home.
So a full-hearted, unqualified, sensible proposal from a man as substantial as Sid Jaffe — which now that it was here melted the cartilage in her knees — was a considerable achievement. Sid made $15,000 a year, was neat and clean, and, God knew, his heart was in the right place. Just three weeks before, they had sat by her TV set, and while poor Adlai Stevenson had conceded defeat in measured eighteenth-century sentences, tears had rolled from Sid’s eyes. Sid Jaffe was for all the right things; he was decent and just and kind (she would always have her way; she would be in a marriage, imagine it, where she would always have her way) and he was good to children, if somewhat plodding. And even that was mostly eagerness, and would surely have disappeared by the time of their first anniversary — to be celebrated, no doubt, with ten days in the Bahamas …