All the Time in the World by E. L. Doctorow

know but had heard of their books or seen their flicks calling us by our familiar names (for it doesn’t matter how you get there, you are all in the same club and share the same worldwide unlisted telephone number), and maybe it was the self-satisfied laughter, the inanity that exists at the top of the world, or maybe it was the color of the walls, but she suddenly said to me, Billy I’ve got to get home. I called a cab, but by home she meant all the way, so we flew to New York, but in New York she meant all the way, so I got us a car and drove through the night to Columbus, Ohio. Now I had never been in that town before but have since played it and it is a state capital where in the restaurants they serve a side dish of fruit salad on lettuce with a topping of mayonnaise. I stopped at seven thirty in the morning at a tract house with a small green lawn in front and a chrome sprinkler lying at rest in the dew. Carrie Mae was waiting in her apron at the open door and the moment she and I looked at each other began our life of enmity as the slim fair girl slipped past us both into thehouse. Carrie Momma, Missy said from inside, this is the Billy Bathgate—he drove me all the way home all night, what energy! Billy, this is Mrs. Carrie Mae Wilson who is like a momma to me. I think he’s hungry for breakfast, Carrie Momma. And inside was a small neat house with wall-to-wall bluegreen carpeting and shiny maple furniture, Van Gogh reproductions on the wall, the kind with the computer paint strokes, a gilt mirror with a gilt American eagle set over the fireplace, and on a shiny cobbler’s bench next to the Morris chair was a low stack of National Geographic magazines. Missy’s growing-up home, all you cats. I washed up in the guest bathroom and sat in the cozynook off the kitchen while Carrie Mae angrily whipped up the pancake batter. She kept looking at my lace-up boots, my buckskin jacket. Upstairs a shower ran. Carrie Mae knew I was listening so she began to talk to me and I learned that her anger was not worry, because she knew her baby and her baby could take care of herself, but simple personal displeasure at my appearance and the selfishness of its pretense. She was a wise old Negro lady, and my automatic enemy. She knew before Missy that it could never be. I learned there was a father, that he was a public works engineer who sank water lines and sewage pipes into the ground and was away weeks at a time, and that he was a fine man and good father who loved his daughter and was proud of her. And then Carrie Mae grew still. Because there was singing upstairs and I thought for a moment it was Missy and realized then it was her record player and one of those operatic sopranos was singing something wild, like Richard Strauss, something soaring, some fierce Kraut thing. And then I corrected myself for it was her after all, singing along, matching that chesty record note for note. With a little bit extra amplification of what I would call love for the music. This purely slim chick with breasts of small fruit and a rib cage you could crack with your two hands. She came down a few minutes later and the warm breakfast smellshad made me drowsy and my aspirin had worn off and she came in dressed for bed like a barefoot high school girl in her round-collared nightdress, and she sat down to her fresh orange juice and her pancakes and her glass of milk and smiled at me such a fair fine peaceful smile of recognition that I have never forgotten it and never will; it was the lovely smile of no tricks and no secrets, of the profound and gentle courtesy in her tough heart. You see when it was bad for Missy she had someplace she could go anytime, day or night, summer or winter, and she knew someone would be there to serve her a meal and turn back her bed. That was the difference between us right there. Then what happened was we cut a record she and I. The song is not unknown, “The Single-Bullet-Theory Blues,” and it was one of the few