Thomas Disch - 334

“Yes. yes, that’s certainly true,” brushing the idea from her lap like crumbs, “for you. But I should think that for someone like—” she gestured toward the machinery, the four slowly revolving mandates of “From Sea to Shining Sea” “—John Herbert MacDowell, for instance. For him it must be like being in love. Except that instead of loving one person, his love spreads out in every direction.”

Williken made a face. “I’ll agree that an is like love. But that doesn’t contradict what I said before. It’s all patchwork and patience, art and love both.”

“And passion? Doesn’t that come in at all?”

“Only for the very young.” Charitably he left it for her to decide if that shoe fit.

This went on, off, and on for the better part of a month, and in all that time he indulged in only one conscious cruelty. For all his personal grubbiness—the clothes that looked like dirty bandages, the skimpy beard the smells—Williken was a great fusspot, and it was his style of fuss (in housekeeping now as it had been in art) to efface the evidences of his own undesirable presence, to wipe away the fingerprints and baffle his pursuers. Thus each object that was allowed to be visible in the room came to possess a kind of heightened significance, like so many skulls in a monk’s cell: the pink telephone. Richard Jr.’s sagging bed the speakers, the long silvery swan-neck of the water faucet, the calendar with lovers rumbling in the heavy snows of “January 2024.” His cruelty was simply not changing the month.

She never said as she might have, “Willy, it’s the tenth of May, for Christ’s sake.” Possibly she found some grueling satisfaction in whatever hurt his reminder caused her. Certainly she gnawed on it. He had no first-hand knowledge of such feelings. The whole drama of her abandonment seemed ludicrous to him. Anguish for anguish’s sake.

It might have gone on like that till summer, but then one day the calendar was gone and one of his own photographs was in its place.

“Is it yours?” she asked.

His awkwardness was sincere. He nodded.

“I noticed it the minute I walked into the room.”

A photograph of a glass half full of water resting on a wet glass shelf. A second, empty glass outside the picture cast a shadow across the white tiles of the wall.

Shrimp walked up close to it. “It’s sad, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” Williken said. He felt confused, insulted, anguished. “Usually I don’t like having my own things hanging about. They go dead on you. But I thought—”

“I like it. I do.”

On her birthday, the 29th of May, she had realized that she hated her mother.

Her eleventh birthday. It was a horrible realization, but Geminis can’t deceive themselves. There was simply nothing about Mama you could admire and so much to loathe. She bullied herself and Mickey mercilessly, but what was worse were the times she’d miscalculate her stupid pills, slime off into a glorious depression and tell them sob-stories about her wasted life. It was, certainly, a wasted life but Amparo couldn’t see that she’d ever made any effort not to waste it. She didn’t know what work was. Even around the house she let poor old Grummy do everything. She just lay about, like some animal at the zoo, snuffling and scratching her smelly cunt. Amparo hated her.

Shrimp, in the way she sometimes had of seeming telepathic, said to her, before the dinner, that they had better have a talk, and she concocted a thin lie to get her out of the apartment. They went down to 15, where a Chinese lady had opened a new shop, and Shrimp bought the shampoo she was being so silly about.

Then to the roof for the inevitable lecture. The sunshine had brought half the building up on top but they found a spot almost their own. Shrimp slipped out of her blouse, and Amparo couldn’t help thinking what a difference there was between her and her mother, even though Shrimp was actually older. No sags, no wrinkles, and only a hint of graininess. Whereas Lottie, with every initial advantage on her side, had let herself become a monster of obesity. Or at least (“monster” was perhaps an exaggeration) she was heading down the road lickety-split.

“Is that all?” Amparo asked, once Shrimp had produced her last pious excuse for Lottie’s various awfulnesses. “Can we go downstairs now that I’m properly ashamed?”

“Unless you want to tell me your side of the story?”

“I didn’t think I was supposed to have a side.”

“That’s true when you’re ten years old. At eleven you’re allowed to have your own point of view.”

Amparo grinned a grin that said, Good old democratic Aunt Shrimp. Then she was serious. “Mama hates me, it’s as simple as that.” She gave examples.

Shrimp appeared unimpressed. “You’d rather bully her—is that your point?”

“No.” But giggling. “But it would be a change.”

“You do, you know. You bully her something dreadful. You’re a worse tyrant than Madame Who’s-It with the goiters.”

Amparo’s second grin was more tentative. “Me!”

“You. Even Mickey can see it, but he’s afraid to say anything or you’ll turn on him. We’re all afraid.”

“Don’t be a silly. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Because I say sarcastic things now and then?”

“And then and then. You’re as unpredictable as an airplane schedule. You wait till she’s down, completely at the bottom, and then you go for juggler. What was it you said this morning?”

“I don’t remember anything I said this morning.”

“About the hippopotamus in the mud?”

“I said that to Grummy. She didn’t hear. She was in bed, as usual.”

“She heard.”

“Then I’m sorry. What should I do, apologize?”

“You should stop making things worse for her.”

Amparo shrugged. “She should stop making things worse for me. I hate to always harp about it, but I do want to go to the Lowen School. And why shouldn’t I? It’s not as though I were asking permission to go to Mexico and cut off my breasts.”

“I agree. It’s probably a good school. But you’re at a good school.”

“But I want to go to the Lowen School. It would be a career, but of course Mama wouldn’t understand that.”

“She doesn’t want you living away from home. Is that so cruel?”

“Because if I left, then she’d only have Mickey to bully. Anyhow I’d be here officially, which is all she cares anyhow.”

Shrimp was silent for a while, in what seemed a considering way. But what was there to consider? It was all so obvious. Amparo writhed.

At last Shrimp said, “Let’s make a bargain. If you promise not to be Little Miss Bitch, I’ll do what I can to talk her round to signing you up.”

“Will you? Will you really?”

“Will you? That’s what I’m asking.”

“I’ll grovel at her feet. Anything.”

“If you don’t, Amparo, if you go on the way you’ve been going, believe me, I’ll tell her I think the Lowen School will destroy your character, what little there is.”

“I promise. I promise to be as nice as—as what?”

“As a birthday cake?”

“As nice as a birthday cake, absolutely!”

They shook hands on it and put on their clothes and went downstairs where a real, rather sad, rather squalid birthday cake was waiting for her. Try as she might, poor old Grummy just couldn’t cook. Juan had come by during the time they’d been on the roof, which was, more than any of her crumby presents, a nice surprise. The candles were lit, and everyone sang happy birthday: Juan, Grummy, Mama, Mickey, Shrimp.