Philip Roth - Letting Go

Martha Reganhart was sure you could tell something about a man’s character from the way he carved a turkey. If he twittered and made excuses and finally hacked the bird to bits, he was Oedipal, wilted under responsibility, and considered himself a kind of aristocrat in the first place— voilà , Dick Reganhart. If he made a big production out of it, clanging armor and sharpening knives, performing the ritual and commenting on it at the same time, he was either egomaniacal or alcoholic, or in certain spectacular cases — her father’s, for instance — both. Of course if the man just answered the need, if he stood up, executed his historical function, and then sat down and ate, chances were he was dutiful, steady, and boring. That was her grandfather, who had had to carve through many bleak Oregon Thanksgivings, after her father had packed his valise, looted the liquor cabinet, and left that eloquent, fateful note: “I am going to California or some God damned place where they make the stuff and you can at least sit in the sun and drink it with nobody looking out for your health.” He had bequeathed his office and utensils to his father-in-law, a hard-working railroad engineer, and he had left forever.

Grandpa had filled the gap all right — and so too did Sid Jaffe, who freed both drumsticks from their sockets and laid them, one each, on the children’s plates. Martha tried not to take any notice of the sinking in her stomach, which she knew to be a sure signal that self-deception is rampant in the body. She tried to ignore the fact that she had not her grandmother’s taste: she tried with all her heart to look over at Sid Jaffe, carving away so efficiently there, and melt with love for him. She imagined all the good it would do them if she could only fall for him. She considered the $54 owed these many months to Marshall Fields, and the $300 loan from the co-op; she thought of the $36 bled from her by that thief, Dr. Slimmer. (Those she hated in this world and would never forgive were Dick Reganhart, her father, and Dr. Slimmer, the last for knowing nothing and charging double.) She thought of Sissy and the messy room — she heard Sissy, in fact, singing in the bathtub — and she knew that the only sensible thing was to close her eyes, tip forward, and dive down into an easy love. So she went under three times, but each time came bobbing back up to the surface.

“But what’s a lawyer do? ” Markie was asking. “I don’t want to be a lawyer.”

“There are laws,” Sid was explaining, “like not crossing the street when the light is red. That’s a law, right?”

“Of course,” Cynthia said.

Mark nodded in agreement. He was hoisting a candied sweet potato to his mouth, not with his fork, but wrapped in the center of his fist. Martha waited for the inevitable to happen: sure as hell he would stick it in his eye. But through luck, or instinct, he managed to locate his lips; he had, however, borne down too heavily on the frail potato, and just as it was to slide safely within, most of it made an appearance along the edges of his fingers. Totally absorbed, and confused, by Sid’s explanation—“and the lawyer is the person, Markie, who explains to the judge why he thinks the other person, the person who crossed against the light, say”—floundering in the labyrinths of jurisprudence, Markie cleaned his hand on the front of his white shirt.

“ Mark !”

Sid stopped short with his lecture; Markie looked up. “Who?”

“Don’t you have a napkin?” Martha asked.

He showed her that he did. Sid said, “Markie, when you want to wipe your hands off, use your napkin.”

“It’s no use. I think he’s part Eskimo,” Martha said. “I think he’s going to grow up and just head north and find a nice Eskimo girl and the two of them are going to sit around for the rest of their lives asking each other Who? and ripping blubber apart with their hands. Markie, my baby-love, pay attention to your food, all right?”

After speaking her last words she saw how she had hurt the feelings of her guest. He was being educational — his way of being fatherly — and she had directed the pupil away from his lessons and back to his plate and napkin. She tried to add some joke, but it was limp, and suddenly she felt unable to bear up much longer under Sid Jaffe’s good intentions. Why must he feel obliged to try so hard with her children? It made her angry that, as much as he wanted to visit with her, he seemed to want to visit with Cynthia and Mark.

Sissy now traipsed through in her sheer robe. “Excuse me,” she said, leaving water prints across the fringe of the floor. “What do you say, counselor? Comment ça va? ”

Sid, who still could not understand Sissy’s presence in the house, mumbled a greeting. Martha had not told him that her rent had gone up for fear he would volunteer to take the case to the Rent Control Board. She felt pre-defeated in the face of administrative bodies, which seemed to her to work in mad ways of their own; and besides, she owed Sid too much that was not money already. She wanted really to work herself free of this lawyer and of those legal maneuverings which she had once believed might get her more just treatment in the world. At a very early point in her misery she had believed in a kind of parliamentarian approach to confusion; now she understood things better.

“Sissy’s feet are wet,” Cynthia pointed out. “She’s leaving a mess again.”

“It’s only dew, baby,” said Martha. After Sissy had departed, she said, “She’s part girl, part stripper—” But Sid was wiping his mouth and saying, “Sometimes I don’t understand you, honey.”

Cynthia leaned over to whisper into Mark’s ear, “He called her honey again.”

“Who?”

Since Martha had to be at work by five, they had begun dinner early. Now it was not quite three, but with the meal finished and the dishes stacked, though not washed, it seemed to Martha as though it were time for dusk to settle in. In Oregon at this time — or later, at the real dusk — they would be coming back from their tramp in the woods. She would have pebbles in her girl scout shoes, and the dust from the red leaves would have caked around her ankles, to be discovered later when she took off her socks for sleep. Her grandfather would be whistling, her grandmother clearing her throat (forever clearing her throat), and her father would be pinching the behind of her mother — poor baffled beautiful woman — and tripping over every rock on the path. “It’s hot toddy time!” “Oh Floyd, you’ve had—” “For God’s sake, where’s your American spirit, Belle? Your old lady here is a matron of the DAR, and where is your American spirit residing, anyway?” “Why don’t you go in and nibble on some turkey; why don’t you—” “I’ll tell you what I want to nibble on, old sweetheart!” “Floyd, the child—” “Martha Lee, who wants a hot toddy, my baby-love? Who’s my baby-love? Who’s got a collection of women around him could make a sheik’s eyes pop? Is that right, Belle, isn’t a sheik one of those fellas with the harems? Baby-love, you’re in the sixth grade — haven’t they mentioned harems?” It was that Thanksgiving, some long, long-gone holiday, when for the first time she had become dreadfully and unexplainably nervous in his presence.

Mark was taking his nap, Sissy had glided out in flat Capezios and black tights, and Cynthia’s voice caroled up from the back yard, where she was jumping rope with Barbara, the janitor’s daughter.

Sid kissed her. Following the old saw, she leaned back and tried, at least, to enjoy it. His hands were a great comfort, a regular joy — there was a nice easy stirring in her breasts that moved inward through her, picking up speed and power, until it produced at last a kind of groan in her bones down in the lowest regions of her torso. Then she was off the sofa.