kitchen!”
“I don’t think you’re a tea drinker. Don’t be. It stains the teeth. You have beautiful teeth. You should smile more often.”
Back in the kitchen, past the bags of Milorganite and buckwheat hulls, Kathryn says, seeking something smiling to say, “It’s warmer in here.”
“The studio cools down; it’s on a separate system, electric heat, terribly expensive, and I turn it down to fifty-five when I’m done for the day.”
“I’m taking too much of your day. Kick me out whenever you have to.”
“But we’ve only gotten up to 1946!”
“That’s true.” The girl sees, dartingly, with a bit of fright in her eyes, that the older woman is game for more. “I think I
will
accept your offer of a bathroom, before we—”
“Go back to work,” Hope finishes for her. “Out into the hall, turn right, under the stairs, a narrow door on your left. We had to squeeze it in.”
Momentarily alone, Hope empties the mugs—her own, nearly empty; Kathryn’s, nearly full—in the sink. Then she swishes hot faucet water around in them and puts them mouth-down on the drainer to dry. The pets she and Jerry had have all died, but even these mugs, with their painted parrots and red-and-green stripes, have that quality pets do, of sharing your innermost domestic existence, so that youcome gratefully home to them from a venture into human society. They give you back your self after others have dirtied and addled it. She stands at the double door leading to the side yard, for the thousandth time annoyed that the panes don’t quite line up, and feels that this swaying feeder on its wire, this gray birch and the woods beyond, with its tinge of red and smoky gaps of pallor, are friends whose silent trust she is betraying with all her excessively eager talk to an intruder. She longs for solitude as if for Paradise. What did Freud say happiness was? Release from tension, of which sexual release was the model. How bizarre and unconscionable, really, her own sexual activity looks from the altitude of years. Bug-behavior, the repulsive intricacy of insect genitals and strategies, strategies in which the death of the individual is quite casually folded. Poking, biting, squirting, dying. Bernie, who relished Nietzsche’s thought that truth is ugly, used to talk about such things; his parents had once given him a microscope, and he would draw for Hope insect genitalia, to see if it turned her off. It did not. What a chemical daze it must have been that allowed her ever to see male genitals, especially when erect and inflamed—the blue vein, the lavender head, the painfully stretched translucent skin—as beautiful, so beautiful she wanted the thing within herself, incorporated, possessed. What is the irritation female bugs feel, that they submit?
The toilet down the hall flushes: Kathryn rising from the seat, having patted her oily dark cleft with a pad of tissue. This downstairs water closet sometimes keeps running, the stopper balancing upright on its hinge and failing to fall, so that water runs without filling the porcelain box and making the ball cock rise and shut off the flow. Hope listens for the telltale change of pitch in the toilet’s murmur that signals a fallen stopper and a seal. She imagines she hears it,through the rush of an open faucet: Kathryn washing her hands. Had Hope set out a clean hand towel? The other woman emerges with that curious stalking gait of hers, as if walking in her boots on uneven stepping-stones, a praying-mantis gait. Hope wonders if she should follow the younger woman’s example but foresees that the seat will be warm, an uncanny undesired intimacy, and decides she can wait. The tea will want out in an hour or less.
Mustering an uncertain half-smile—Hope regrets having said anything about smiling more often, her tongue runs away with her, all from trying too hard to please—Kathryn stalks back into the front parlor, to Grandfather Ouderkirk’s plaid chair. Irritably the
“I don’t think you’re a tea drinker. Don’t be. It stains the teeth. You have beautiful teeth. You should smile more often.”
Back in the kitchen, past the bags of Milorganite and buckwheat hulls, Kathryn says, seeking something smiling to say, “It’s warmer in here.”
“The studio cools down; it’s on a separate system, electric heat, terribly expensive, and I turn it down to fifty-five when I’m done for the day.”
“I’m taking too much of your day. Kick me out whenever you have to.”
“But we’ve only gotten up to 1946!”
“That’s true.” The girl sees, dartingly, with a bit of fright in her eyes, that the older woman is game for more. “I think I
will
accept your offer of a bathroom, before we—”
“Go back to work,” Hope finishes for her. “Out into the hall, turn right, under the stairs, a narrow door on your left. We had to squeeze it in.”
Momentarily alone, Hope empties the mugs—her own, nearly empty; Kathryn’s, nearly full—in the sink. Then she swishes hot faucet water around in them and puts them mouth-down on the drainer to dry. The pets she and Jerry had have all died, but even these mugs, with their painted parrots and red-and-green stripes, have that quality pets do, of sharing your innermost domestic existence, so that youcome gratefully home to them from a venture into human society. They give you back your self after others have dirtied and addled it. She stands at the double door leading to the side yard, for the thousandth time annoyed that the panes don’t quite line up, and feels that this swaying feeder on its wire, this gray birch and the woods beyond, with its tinge of red and smoky gaps of pallor, are friends whose silent trust she is betraying with all her excessively eager talk to an intruder. She longs for solitude as if for Paradise. What did Freud say happiness was? Release from tension, of which sexual release was the model. How bizarre and unconscionable, really, her own sexual activity looks from the altitude of years. Bug-behavior, the repulsive intricacy of insect genitals and strategies, strategies in which the death of the individual is quite casually folded. Poking, biting, squirting, dying. Bernie, who relished Nietzsche’s thought that truth is ugly, used to talk about such things; his parents had once given him a microscope, and he would draw for Hope insect genitalia, to see if it turned her off. It did not. What a chemical daze it must have been that allowed her ever to see male genitals, especially when erect and inflamed—the blue vein, the lavender head, the painfully stretched translucent skin—as beautiful, so beautiful she wanted the thing within herself, incorporated, possessed. What is the irritation female bugs feel, that they submit?
The toilet down the hall flushes: Kathryn rising from the seat, having patted her oily dark cleft with a pad of tissue. This downstairs water closet sometimes keeps running, the stopper balancing upright on its hinge and failing to fall, so that water runs without filling the porcelain box and making the ball cock rise and shut off the flow. Hope listens for the telltale change of pitch in the toilet’s murmur that signals a fallen stopper and a seal. She imagines she hears it,through the rush of an open faucet: Kathryn washing her hands. Had Hope set out a clean hand towel? The other woman emerges with that curious stalking gait of hers, as if walking in her boots on uneven stepping-stones, a praying-mantis gait. Hope wonders if she should follow the younger woman’s example but foresees that the seat will be warm, an uncanny undesired intimacy, and decides she can wait. The tea will want out in an hour or less.
Mustering an uncertain half-smile—Hope regrets having said anything about smiling more often, her tongue runs away with her, all from trying too hard to please—Kathryn stalks back into the front parlor, to Grandfather Ouderkirk’s plaid chair. Irritably the
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