Textures of Life by Hortense Calisher Page A

widened by the way she had outlined her eyelids. She had the blunt muzzle of the plain redhead, the tiny, membraned, pink nose. When her lids were lowered, as now, two Japanese fish swam there, their tails curled at her temples. One was slightly smeared. Her free hand crept to it, then rested again on her chest. This thrust her hip out. “Pleased.”
    “I’m awfully sorry to bother you,” said Liz.
    “You nut buthering. We gut to show it.” She spoke from pursed lips, in the voice of a person accustomed to comments on its lowness. Glancing at Maury, she gave a quick, gulping shrug. “We gut.”
    “Oy, good, you made coffee.” Maury patted her shoulder. Her head went way back, to look up at him. Walking past her to the coffeepot, he strode.
    Left behind, the girls nibbled glances at one another. Last year, sitting opposite in the subway, their eyes might have sistered each other. Footie wore the regulation sandal, thonged between second toe and long. Liz’s feet squirmed in her shoes. Under those feather-fish eyes, more female prescient than Ivan’s, she saw her fitted coat, bought in at a sale by a mother who carried her daughter’s size in her head everywhere, put on her with a moaning “Not a copy of a Heim—a Heim. You could go anywhere.” Anywhere but here.
    Footie half-touched the smeared eye. Under it, above the cheekbone—yes, Hungarian—there was a puff of swollen pink. “We having coffee, miss. Wunt you sit down?”
    “I shouldn’t, really.” She caught sight of the crate that served as larder. A protocol, thrust swiftly from nowhere, told her she must. It was all they had. Because it was what they had, she must. She felt proud of knowing how to act when confronted with the rock bottom, the true bareness. “All right— thanks !”
    But as she walked behind the girl, an old-woman-of-the-sea sat on her own shoulders, making her see with her mother’s eye, hear with her mother’s ear. From Footie’s topknot, one long lock dangled, Ondine. Hand to it as she swung her wide hips, despite her size she was not a dainty girl. She was walking as if she had heels on, and following the hard-apple curve of her calf, Liz saw her in high ones or in the skittishly run-down French boudoir ones the tarty little bits from the public high schools wore, her hair not as now, in the style that meant “art,” but in the huge air-bubble fringe, skewed over the forehead, that meant “films”—stunted little girls who thought of themselves as heart-faced, built for diminutives—Footie, Fyush, Few—who could be seen any day in the year along the Fordham Road bazaars, as perhaps last year she had been, prancing along on their slum-bowed legs, in twos or threes or alone, but always in self-drama, dime-a-dozen, any day in the year. Then, she would have met Maury. Who had been “offered to work” by Ivan.
    She wondered whether they were married. Then blushed—for her mother.
    “I take it black,” she said holding up the mug they had given her.
    “So do we, so do we,” they said politely. They had to.
    They sat close together now, like two birds in the nest, on one box, and they had seated her opposite, on the one chair. Now they fell silent, leaving it to her, after all, the seeker. Their eyes frozen, unable to leave hers, they sat close, while she felt herself grow altogether out of scale looking in at them, at their nest.
    “I could’ve filled the place, easy,” said Maury softly. “Sanitation Day, uptown the good neighborhoods, what they put out you wouldn’t believe. Sofas, even. But—”
    “I din want.” It seemed the first time the girl had really spoken. Her mouth hung open. She spoke to her navel, some intense tattoo she saw there. “I din want.”
    “Start once wrong, she says, you don’t go back on it.” If it was her maxim, his staunch arm was faithful to it.
    “Nut you culnt, but you woont.” Fyush spoke as softly. “Like Helga’s it would be. Like your mother’s.”
    “I get a