Philip Roth - Letting Go

Her watch showed twenty-five minutes of holiday remaining; she tried to think of what they could do until five. The kids were moving — had moved — into their late-afternoon crabbiness, and Sid, she knew, was still waiting for her reply to his proposal. Patient, ever-ready, faithful, waiting. Only ten minutes had elapsed since he had thrown his most solid punch of the day. Do you? Do you appreciate me, Martha, your situation — do you see what I can do for you …? And yes, she saw — she had reached out for his hand, and he had been there to give it to her, even if he did not understand for a moment the panic she had found herself enclosed in.

“I didn’t swing! I always push!” Mark was crying. “I want something!”

“You’ll swing next time, Markie—”

“I want a Coca-Cola! I want to go to Hildreth’s! I want—”

For reasons of her own Martha did not want to go to Hildreth’s; but she could not go back to the playground either, to confront Mrs. Baker’s stiff inhuman smile and consider further Beverly Parrino’s condition. So she stood in the middle of Fifty-seventh Street, while Markie screamed and Cynthia joined in with him, and she might have stood there for the full twenty-five minutes she had coming to her had not Sid taken her hand once again and led the three of them to Hildreth’s for a Coke. And fortunately the place was empty; all the students had gone home for the holiday, and the hangers-on — the strays, the outcasts, all the purposeless people she had come to know during the last few years, who could only have put the final depressing touch to her afternoon — were either sleeping or hiding, or, in private and questionable ways, paying homage somewhere to the day.

The four of them sat at one of the booths along the window, Martha and Sid drinking coffee, and the children over their Cokes, stifling and giving in to gaseous burpings. Behind the lunch counter the Negro girl who ladled out the food was preparing an elaborate turkey sandwich for herself; inside the store dreamy dance music came from a radio, and outside a pleasant, gray, Sunday deadness hung over the street. Everything combined to lull Martha backwards — the music, the coffee, the plasticized smell of the booth itself, and of course the street. Aside from Pacific Avenue in Salem, where she had been born and raised, Chicago’s Fifty-seventh Street, was the thoroughfare of her life. Looking at it, blowy and deserted, touched now by dusk, was like seeing the set of a familiar play without seeing the performers or hearing the lines. But in the dark theater of memory all the old scenes could easily be recollected, all the old heroes and heroines. She could remember this one long store-lined, tree-lined, University-lined street, and so very many Marthas. There, plain as day, was Martha Lee Kraft, buying her Modern Library books in Woodworth’s. And there was Martha Kraft taking the I.C. train to the Loop, and having absolutely the most perfect and adult day in Carson’s — a solid hour trying on dark cloche hats, and narrowing her eyes at herself in the mirror when the saleslady wasn’t around. And there was Martha Kraft, saying to herself Why can’t I do anything? and taking her first lover. And Martha Kraft carrying a placard: VOTE FOR HENRY WALLACE. It weaved above her head as she marched clear from Cottage to the Lake, and beside her, carrying his own sign — who was that anyway? Who was that sweet boy with the social consciousness and practically no hips at all? What was his name, the one into whose basement room she moved her guitar and her Greek sandals and her brilliant full skirts and her uncombed extravagant hair? And there was Martha being wooed and won, right in Hildreth’s. Richard M. Reganhart of Cleveland, blue-eyed, dark-haired, fierce, wild, a painter, an ex-G.I. — he had not even to cajole her … And there was one morning when Martha was sitting in a booth opposite him, the two of them eating that skimpy, sufficient lover’s breakfast of juice and coffee and jelly doughnuts, one morning when at the tip of Martha’s uterus, Cynthia Reganhart was the size of a pinhead, when Cynthia (who is presently dredging at the bottom of her glass through a straw) was hardly bigger than nothing at all.

But — all those prayers and tears to the contrary — she was not nothing at all, and everything that had then to begin, began, and everything that had to end, ended. For five months Fifty-seventh Street was hardly seen, it was only walked upon, blindly; and then there was sunny Mexico, and Dick Reganhart was ripping the shirt off his own back — his fried eggs, lately heaved against the white stucco wall, sliding relentlessly toward the floor.

“I didn’t marry you, you gutless bitch— you married me! ”

“I thought you loved me—”

“You thought! You were hot, baby, and you itched for it and you got it! And you made me marry you , don’t you forget that, ever! Four years in the Army, four years — and now this! I’m in prison! I can’t paint! I have nightmares—”

“Then why can’t you just love me—”

“You are a sly bitch, Martha Lee. You don’t love me — you know you don’t! Oh someday I’ll find your ass down in Our Holy Mother of Guadalupe and you’ll be crying out to Jesus for help — why did you get such a sonofabitching husband, why-yyy are you afflicted with such a sinful man! Well, you tell Our Holy Mother, the only sin, you conniving bitch, is this fucking prison of a marriage! Why don’t you listen to me! Leave that God damn egg alone! ”

“You miserable coward — don’t tell me what to do! Everybody in the world loves each other! Every rotten secretary loves her boss! Guys fell off our front porch just from loving me, you bastard— what’s the matter with you! ”

“Let’s keep it straight, America’s Sweetheart — you used my cock! That’s the why and wherefore, Martha—”

“Shut up! We have a baby, you filthy beast!”

“I told you, didn’t I? I said get a God damn abortion—”

“I’d like to cut your tongue out, you mean pricky bastard! I’ll ruin your life like you’ve ruined—”

“You hooked me is what happened, Martha — you hooked me and now you ought to be happy, you selfish, stupid—”

The train moved north, taking almost two whole days to get through Texas, five impossible meals in the State of Texas and innumerable voyages down the car to the toilet; tiny Mark cried and little Cynthia gloomed out at the never-ending brush, and then there was Oklahoma City, there was St. Louis and then Peoria, and now we are back in Chicago, we are back on Fifty-seventh Street, we are in Hildreth’s once again, perhaps in that same historic booth. Dick Reganhart is destined to make a fortune painting rectangles, for he is a child of our times, but for Martha Reganhart life is a circle. And if it ends where it begins, where is that? What’s next? Where was she going? This was not what she had envisioned for herself while she tweeked her brand new little nipples and stared up at the ceiling on those rainy, windy, winter nights in Salem, Oregon.

“Blair!” Cynthia screamed. “Hi!”

“My ofay baby! Honey chile! Cynthiapia!”

Cynthia dissolved, not entirely spontaneously, into laughter, and Mark, always a willing victim, doubled up in ecstasy, and hit his head on the table top.

Blair reached into the booth and plucked Markie out of his seat. “Hey, Daddy,” he said, jiggling Markie in the air, “you will have dehydration of the ductual glands which corroborate the factation of the tears. Is this the reactionary reaction cogetary to the stimuli, or is you pulling our leg?”

Mark squelched his tears instantly and stared into the mysterious continent of Blair’s skin; the man was brown and rangy and undernourished, with Caucasian lips and nose, dark glasses, and a manic potential that could turn Martha’s mouth dry. Cynthia went flying out of her seat toward the visitor, and her Coke wobbled across the table; her mother, years of practice behind her, caught it just before it tipped over into Sid’s lap. She looked at her companion and found him trying to throw a smile into this big pot of merriment. But then she heard him groan when Blair slid into the seat opposite them, a child in each of his arms.