Philip Roth - Letting Go

“I don’t want my children saying shat, do you mind? And put on a bathrobe. My son’s earliest memory is going to be of your ass.”

“Now who’s filthy?”

“I happen to be their mother. I support them. Please, Sissy, don’t walk around here half-naked, will you?”

“Well, you don’t have to be so defensive about it.” Sissy went into her room, and came out again, robed, and dribbling ashes off her cigarette. Martha turned to the wall above the sink where the wallpaper was trying to crawl down; she gave it a swat, with the result that it unpeeled a little further. And for this, she thought, they raise the rent. During the last six months — since everybody had had the mumps — life had just been zipping along; then they raised the rent, she brought in Sissy, and things were down to normal again. She turned to her roomer and said, “Sissy, I want to ask you a question?”

“What?”

“Stop plucking your face and listen to me.”

Sissy lowered her mirror and tweezers. “All right, crab, what is it?”

“Do you smoke pot in there?”

The girl crossed her arms over her chest. “Never.”

“Because don’t. I don’t ever want Blair sleeping over here again, ever —and I don’t want any pot-smoking within ten feet of the kitchen table, where my children happen to eat their breakfast.”

“It was Blair, Martha. He won’t do it again.”

“You’re damn right he won’t do it again. Why did I rent that room to you, Sister? I keep forgetting.”

“I applied , you know, like everybody else. I answered the ad. Don’t start shifting blame on me.”

Martha returned to the turkey; she had popped a seam in the left side of her slacks, and when she bent over the sink it popped open further. “They’re going to put me in a circus,” she said. “Five nine and six hundred pounds.”

“You eat too much. You could knock people’s eyes out. You just eat too much.”

“I don’t eat too much,” she said, running scalding water over the leaden turkey, “I’m just turning into a cow. A horse.”

“You know what your trouble is?”

“What? What news do you bring from the far-out world? I’m dying to hear a capsule analysis of my character this morning.”

“You’re horny.”

“You sound about as far out as McCall’s , Sissy.”

“Well, when I’m horny I’m a bitch.”

“Your needs are more complicated than mine. I’m just tired.”

“When I was married to old Curtis, I was practically flippy. You say boo , and I was halfway out the window. He was the creepiest, gentlest guy, and I was snapping at him all the time.”

The tragedy in Sissy’s young life was that she had been married for eleven months to a man who was impotent; she had married him, she said, because he struck her right off as being different. Now — in her continuing search for the exotic — she was involved with Blair Stott, who was a Negro about one and a half neuroses away from heroin, but coming up strong; and if he wasn’t impotent, he was a flagellator or something in that general area.

“What about that Ivy League guy?” Sissy asked. “Joe Brummel.”

“ Beau Brummel, Sissy — what about him?”

“Don’t you dig him or what?”

“He’s in New York,” Martha said.

“I thought he was coming for dinner.”

“Sid is.”

“Oh Jesus. That very buttoned-down guy, I mean he’s not bad. He could be turned on with a little work. But old Sidney, I mean like what he digs is law. ”

“Sissy, how do you talk at the hospital? How do you address people when you’re not at home?”

“What?”

“Forget it.”

“I hate that God damn hospital. Blair says—” And she proceeded to repeat Blair’s words in Blair’s dialect, “I’m going to get desexized from the X-ray rays.”

“Blair’s a genius.”

“Martha—” Sissy said, leaning forward and setting down her mirror.

“What?”

“I almost did the most far out thing of my life last night. I was like close. ”

“To what?”

“Turning tricks.”

Martha felt the homey familiar enamel of the sink under her hands, and took a good grip on it. “Here?” she demanded. “You were going to be a prostitute in my house? Are you crazy? ”

“No! No — what do you think I am!”

With relief — though by no means total relief — Martha said, “At Suey’s.”

“At Suey’s,” Sissy admitted. “Isn’t that something? Suey was out getting her hair set, and this guy called to come over for a fast one. I told him Suey was out, and so he said what about you, sweetheart? And I said okay, come on over, you jerk. I told him to come over.”

In a vague way, Suey O’Day was tied up with Martha’s own past, but that was not sufficient explanation for the emotions — shame, fear, vulnerability — that Martha felt while Sissy was speaking. Martha and Suey had been freshmen together at the University. Suey had run off one day with a jockey from Washington Park, and Martha had run off and married Dick, and they had gone to Mexico and then she had come back from Mexico with the kids, and Suey was twenty-four and back in town too — as a call girl. Now Suey’s future was said to be very bright; at one A.M., with background music by Gerry Mulligan, Sissy had informed Martha that there was a LaSalle Street broker whom Suey was tempted to marry for loot, and there was an instructor in math at the University who was crazy about her and whom she was tempted to marry for love. (The problem here was whether Suey should tell him The Truth About Herself, which the LaSalle Street broker already knew.) Of course Suey was worlds away from Martha, but Sissy wasn’t: Sissy was in her house, Sissy was sleeping on her muslin sheets, and it was Sissy’s dumb wildness, her endless temptations, that struck in Martha a painful remembered chord.

“What happened?” Martha said.

“I took off. I came home. I got in bed. That’s how I was up so early — I was in bed at nine-thirty.”

Martha sat down at the kitchen table and lit a cigarette; she caught sight of her hair in Sissy’s mirror — another mess to be cleaned up before one o’clock. “Sissy, you’re really going to screw up everything. Why don’t you wise up? Dump Blair and dump all this hipster crap and do something with yourself. Honey, you can still dig Gerry Mulligan, but you don’t have to kill yourself.”

“Look, I was just going to turn a lousy trick to see what it was like. I wasn’t going to jump off a bridge.”

“But, Sissy, you don’t want to be a call girl. Do you know what’s very square, Sis? To want to be a call girl. Honestly, it’s like wanting to be an airline stewardness or a nurse.”

“Do you think I love being a stinking X-ray technician? Is that a noble calling? Sixty-five bucks a week?”

“Ah-ha, it’s a matter of honor. I didn’t know. The culture’s crowding you in. We ought to set up an interview for you, Sissy, with Erich Fromm.”

“Don’t come on so motherly with me, Martha. You’re about two years older—”

“True—”

“—and your life isn’t exactly a model of order.”

“You’re going to get kicked in the teeth, Sister, so why don’t you shut up.” Martha pressed out her cigarette just as the janitor came up the back porch, waved at her, tried to catch a peek of some bare corner of Sissy’s anatomy, and emptied — very, very slowly — the garbage.

At the sink she held the turkey submerged in hot water. Behind her Sissy began to apologize. “I just thought about it, Martha—”

“Who cares what you thought or what you did! Maybe what you ought to think about is moving out.”