Philip Roth - Letting Go

“It loves you,” Martha said.

“You know, I think you’re a little dykey too.”

“Oh you’re a hard girl to fool, Sis.” She left the room wondering not how to dispossess Sissy, but simply how to get the Mexican rug back into the children’s bedroom.

In the kitchen, she slid the turkey from the refrigerator and found that it had only just begun to unfreeze; she had been so tired when she got home last night that she had gone directly to bed, forgetting to leave the turkey out. “Why do they let these birds get so hard? ” she said.

“Who?” Mark said.

“Markie, don’t you have anything to do? Do you have to walk directly under my feet?”

“Why does that thing have a big hole in it like that?” he demanded.

“Get your arm out of there. Come on, Markie, take your arm out of there, will you?”

“Why does that turkey have a big hole in it?”

She carried it to the sink and turned the cold water on. She rapped on the breast with her knuckle, asking herself why November couldn’t have sneaked by without causing a fuss. Holidays were even worse than work days. Couldn’t everything, birthdays, Fourth of July, be celebrated at Christmas?

“Why does that turkey have a big—”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s for the sexual organs,” Cynthia said.

“Drink your prune juice.”

“I don’t like prune juice,” Cynthia answered. “I like oranges.”

“Sissy drank the oranges this morning.”

“They weren’t hers anyway.”

“Yes they were,” Martha said.

“You said so yourself,” Cynthia replied.

“I made a mistake. I jumped to conclusions.” Since her daughter’s normal response to people seemed to be distrust, she saw no need to feed her inclinations; perhaps if everybody ignored the trait she would grow out of it. Martha told herself to be more motherly. “Cynthia, are you going to help me with dinner? You want to help stuff the turkey?”

“What’s stuff it?” Markie asked.

“Stuffing,” Cynthia said.

“How?” he pleaded.

“In the sexual organs.”

“Cynthia, what’s this sexual organs business?” Martha looked almost instinctively to Sissy’s door, which closed (when Martha could convince Sissy to keep it closed) onto the kitchen. Behind it Sissy was singing a duet with Sarah Vaughan and dressing; that is, heavy objects were bouncing off the floor, so if she was not dressing she was bowling.

“That,” Cynthia was saying, pointing toward the opening in the turkey.

“No it’s not, honey.”

“Yes it is, Mother.”

“It’s where they removed the insides of the turkey. This is a Tom, sweetie,” Martha began to explain.

“It’s the sexual organs,” Cynthia said.

Markie looked from one to the other, with intermittent glances at the bird’s posterior, and waited for the outcome; he seemed to be rooting for his mother.

“It was the sexual organs,” Martha said. “It’s where they remove the intestines—”

“Who?” Mark asked.

“Dears, it’s very involved and mysterious and not terribly crucial. It’s one of those things that one day is very complicated and the next day is very simple. Why don’t you wait?”

“Okay,” Mark said, but Cynthia complained again about her prune juice.

“Cynthia, why don’t you run down to Wilson’s and buy the paper for me?”

“Can I stop in the playground to see if Stephanie’s there?”

“Stephanie’s mother is sick.”

“—sexual organs,” Mark was saying.

“Markie, forget that, all right? Why don’t you go color? Go with Cynthia—”

“I don’t want him along!”

“Who cares!” Mark said, and left the kitchen.

“Please don’t fight, will you, Cynthia? It’s a holiday. Go get the Times. ”

“Can I stop at Hildreth’s?”

“For what? For candy, no.”

“To talk to Blair.”

“Blair isn’t there.”

“Blair’s always there,” said Cynthia, and Sissy laughed behind the door.

“Isn’t it enough, honey, to take a walk? Cyn, I’d love to take a walk. I’d just love to take a nice leisurely walk and get the newspaper and bring it home and sit down for about six hours and read it. Can’t you do that?”

“No!”

“Then go get the paper and keep quiet.”

“Christ!”

“And enough of that,” Martha said.

“ You say it.”

“I also work as a waitress — does that interest you?”

“I can’t do any thing.”

Martha took the dime for the paper out of her slacks pocket with wet hands. “Do you know what day this is?” she asked, wrapping her daughter’s fingers around the coin.

Cynthia made a bored admission. “It’s Thanksgiving.”

“Thanksgiving is a very terrific holiday. How about we have a pleasurable day, all right? We’re going to have a guest. Well, don’t you want to know who?”

“Who?”

She mustered up an air of excitement, a good deal more than she felt. “Sidney Jaffe!”

And all at once the child, thank God, became a child, a little seven-year-old girl. “Goodie! Terrific!” She skipped out of the house after the paper.

There was one wall of the kids’ room — before Sissy’s arrival it had been Cynthia’s alone — that Martha had given up on and come to consider the coloring wall. Now Mark was laying purple on it with considerable force and violence.

“Markie, what is it you want to do?”

“Yes,” the boy said, and continued hammering the crayons against the wall.

“What’s the trouble?”

He looked up. “Nothing.”

“Are you happy?”

“Uh-huh.”

She made Cynthia’s bed and changed Mark’s wet sheets. Crumpling them into a sour wad, she bit her tongue and said nothing. Finally, as though it was simple curiosity that moved her to ask, she said, “Did you have any bad dreams, my friend?”

He looked up at her again. “Who?”

Why did he always say who to everything? All the frustrations of the morning — the missing oranges, the frozen bird, Sarah Vaughan — nearly came out on poor defenseless Mark. Everything: Sissy’s stupidity and Cynthia’s indefatigable opposition and Markie’s bed-wetting and her own unconquerable tiredness … She was twenty-six and tired right down to the bone. And she was putting on weight. Twenty-six and becoming a cow! Somehow the whole general situation would improve, she thought hazily, if she could only get Sissy to pick up her underwear and put it in a drawer. Or move out. Or shut up. But the truth was that she had been dying for a little companionship. When she dragged in from the Hawaiian House at one in the morning, it gave her a small warm rush of pleasure to find Sissy in the kitchen, drinking hot milk — more than likely laced with Martha’s brandy — and listening to Gerry Mulligan. Sissy was silly and gossipy and she did not bother to vote, but it seemed better coming home to her than coming home to nothing. Still, why did she have to be a nut? Martha seemed always to be latching onto people just as they were going through some treacherous maturing period in their lives. Her next roomer, she told herself, would not be under eighty — better they should die in her spare room than grow up in it.

She planted a kiss on her son’s neck and he drew a purple line across the bridge of her nose. “Bang! Bang!” he shouted into her ear, and she left him to his drawing.

“What’s the matter with your nose?” Sissy asked. “You look like you’ve just been shat upon?”

“Could you control your language in my house?”

“What are you coming on so salty again for?”