Textures of Life by Hortense Calisher

mixed themselves, a stroller and playpen stuck anywhere, a general fuzz-and-welter of the flannelly, plasticky world babies brought with them, the cute things one had to buy for them—melting this pure, stark order down to the coy. When her own time came—there was no excuse for allowing the candid shape of one’s life to be so smeared. She walked the length of the place, tested the nursery partition with a knuckle, and passed on. Already she saw flaws in the way these people had managed the total space, and was annoyed at their possessions for still being in it, occupying what she yearned to be alone with, and already felt to be hers. On the far wall, bookshelves framed the window that took up almost all of it. A three-foot high, ebony reproduction of an African fertility goddess stood on one of them, the blind ellipse of her face pointed at a pile of Little Golden Books, her belly prolapsing toward the room. In the window, a central blue pulsed and changed like a flaw that would not be downed—the river. “Oh!” She stood there for quite a time.
    “Seen enough?” Maury said softly. “Okey-doke. Now come on down to our place.” At the door, he paused. “Funny. How all the way up the same layout, people did so different. But this is the one for me. We’d a had what to spend—this is the one.”
    “Do you all have the river?”
    “Only from here on up. We get mostly the viaduct, but still high enough to be sunny. Of course, ours isn’t so fancy—Kreisl gives only the stove. Less stairs to climb, cheaper. Otherwise substantially the same.”
    Going down the one spiral flight, she swung herself hand to hand along the ropes, with gusto.
    “See you caught on.”
    She nodded, already hearing “Ropes! Only Liz would discover—!” and her modest “Wacky, isn’t it. You’ll catch on.”
    He knocked at the door again. “It’s us, Few.”
    The opener of the door kept behind it. Urged past it by Maury, she was at first aware only of the room, the same indeed as above, but so bare that what it contained only niggled on its space, making it curiously smaller. When so little was owned as here, possessions could be left about in the true carelessness, in no hope of how they looked, what they were. Facing her was a small “center of activity” as the kitchen ads called it, containing a small stove (Kreisl gives it), a hodgepodge of tables, boxes, shelves that served variously and quite clearly for cooking, eating, dressing table (the one with a towel over it and a box of Kleenex). One could live here—there were probably all the necessities, a place to hang clothes in some corner, bed and bedding perhaps behind that screen; one was satisfied of this without interest to scan, render judgment as to just how clean it was or tangled, whether arrangements might be bettered. Once one got the hang of where things were, one could live here. That was all. In this small, decisive realm, there were no effects to abjure. This left the persons in it—its owners—pitilessly exposed, without possessions to speak for them. Although, in its way, of course, their realm spoke.
    When she looked up, its owners were standing as if they knew this, their hands joined against her. The girl in the arch of Maury’s arm stood revealed—that was her posture—as very short, reaching only to his armpit. This enlarged him.
    “Footie, meet Liz,” he said. “Liz Pagani, sculptor.”
    “Oh n-not really!” she said. The room extracted this from her, handing it back to her as if it were her own six-year-old shed tooth. “Not yet.”
    “Who’s yet ,” said Maury. “And this is Footie, Fyush, Few—actress!” The girl nodded, with a set smile for the height he had given her, one hand spread on the chest of her jumper, a “gray sleeveless” much the same as Liz had worn to her own wedding. Her hair was long too, but its scanty, natural carrot had been slicked back to a knot at the crown, slanting cheekbones already broad, further