Philip Roth - Letting Go

“Well,” she said, “what do you think?”

“I don’t know. It may make her the most popular kid in school.”

“Does it strike you as too hot?”

I handed her the book. “Look.”

“What are they?”

“Testicles.”

“Hey, look, don’t you think it’s okay? Six different medical groups recommended it, thousands of psychiatrists — why can’t you think it’s okay? A few weeks ago she was walking around here talking about sexual organs. Yesterday in the co-op she began referring to these in a loud voice as my mammaries. Nice? She’s obviously getting information from somewhere.”

“Here. Look.”

She looked. “Oh Gabe, I don’t know. What should I do, store it away for five years? It’s recommended for kids from eight to eleven. Oh the hell with it.” She began wrapping it up again. “Even after she reads it she’ll get it all backwards anyway.”

“Actually, if you want to hear my personal preference—”

“Go ahead. What is it actually?”

“Actually I prefer kids referring to their po-pos rather than their outer labias. Maybe I’m just old-fashioned.”

“You wouldn’t be so casual, jerk, if it was your little girl.”

“I wouldn’t be so nervous either.”

“I can’t help it.”

“You shouldn’t worry so much about her.”

“She’s so nutty about men—”

“She hasn’t shown herself to be particularly nutty over me.”

“She’s interested in you, don’t worry about that.”

“Martha, she’ll have a normal sex life, or abnormal, or subnormal, and this book and you—”

“I must be doing some thing to her. What does she think? Truly. Honestly.”

“She loves you.”

“You’re being evasive, please don’t.”

“Martha, she has a will like iron. You know that. And she’s intelligent and bright and pretty.”

“The combination sounds like death to me.”

“Well, if that’s so, what’s there to be done?”

“You really believe that, or are you being a polite lover?”

“You’re a good mother, Martha.”

“I’m a rotten crab. I lose my temper and I make them worry about money and, oh forget it — I don’t know. You think I’m all right, do you?”

“Fine.”

“I’ll be all right, all right, as soon as that Sissy gets out of here.”

I waited, and then I said, “And me.”

“I don’t want you to get out of here, Gabe, I really don’t.”

“I have to admit it, Martha — I don’t think I want to go.” I tried to say it playfully, but when she asked, “No?” I answered seriously, “No, I don’t think so.”

“Then stay sick, sweetheart. Run around the block and work up your fever. The thought of you lying here in bed, and me out shopping, it’s a real pleasure. I put the key in the door of your car and I felt like a big shot. I think to myself, if the phone rings, he’ll answer it. You know,” she said, “we crawled into bed too quickly, though. You know that, don’t you?”

“You do a lot of thinking while you shop.”

“You know it though?”

“I know it.”

“Okay,” she said. “I don’t know exactly what that establishes … but something. Look, I’m going to make Mark a grilled cheese sandwich. You too?”

“What are you going to do with this book?”

She turned at the door, and shrugged.

“It’s an imperfect world, Martha, but you didn’t make it.”

“But neither did Cynthia,” she said.

After lunch my temperature shot up, and Dr. Slimmer came to give me another shot of penicillin. We pushed him for a diagnosis of my case, but he took another twelve dollars, whispered some words about an X virus, and drove off in his Thunderbird.

“If he’d only say he didn’t know! Just once. Honest to God, I’m going to start packing for England.”

“Why don’t you get another doctor?”

“I can’t. I love that bastard. He makes me feel so right. You better go to sleep.”

“You too,” I said. “You look tired.”

“I’m tired, but I’m happy. I love feeding you, do you know that? I’d like really to fatten you up. You don’t happen to be losing your hair, do you?”

“Sorry.”

“Because that’s what I really go for, you know — nice bald old fat fellows with big sweet paunches and thick greasy beards.”

“It sounds to me,” I said, “as though you want to settle down.”

She gave me some fruit juice and I went to sleep; but just before I slipped off I had a vision of Markie napping in his crayoned bedroom, and Martha sleeping on the sofa beside the Christmas tree, and me in my own warm bed. What peace, under one roof.

Later in the afternoon Cynthia came home from school, drank her milk, and went off with Markie to the playground to build a snowman. I lay in bed, listening to the radio, and choosing from amongst those offered me only the most ancient of programs. I tuned in to the old ladies selling lumber yards, and to the young girls searching, with perfect enunciation, for the love of English lords, or, later in the day, brain surgeons with baritone voices and tweed coats. “Oh put on a smile, Mary — here comes that young Dr. Baxter in his tweed coat. Hi there, Doctor …” Yes, there harassing the air waves were those same luckless couples who had struggled through my childhood — for then too a radio had glowed beside my convalescent’s bed — and who turned out to be struggling still. And recovering from a minor ailment, I discovered — being waited upon with orange juice and aspirin, starting books and feeling no cultural obligation to finish them, reading in today’s newspaper what the temperature had been the day before in all the major cities of the world, pouring over the woman’s page and racing results with little foothold in either world — it was all as cocoonish and heartwarming on the south side of Chicago as it had been fifteen years before on the west side of New York.

At dusk, I smelled dinner being prepared in the kitchen. Martha stuck her head in to ask if I was all right, and she must have understood precisely the kind of pleasure I was lolling in. I heard the back door open and close and after five minutes had passed, I heard it swing open again. When she came into my room, she dumped a stack of glossy magazines at the foot of the bed.

“Go ahead,” she told me, “stuff yourself. Mrs. Fletcher says she’s through, I can keep them.”

“What is it?”

“ Golden Screen, Movieland, Star World , everything.”

“God bless you, Mrs. Fletcher. How did she know?”

“I managed to convey the expression on your face. How is it up there in Pig Heaven?”

“I love it. Come here.”

“I’m making dinner.”

“Come here. Just for a minute.”

Recuperation! Convalescence! Long live minor ailments! Long live Pig Heaven!

When it was nearly dark outside, the children returned from the playground. My dinner was brought to me on a tray, and in the kitchen I could hear the others eating.

“Mother, he’s swallowing without chewing.”

“Chew first, Markie. You’ll get a pain.”

“I have a pain.”

“No he doesn’t, Mother.”

“Eat slowly, Cynthia. Where’s the fire?”

“What fire?”

“Markie, don’t talk. Eat.”

“When’s Santa Claus?”

“On Wednesday, honey.”

“Boy!” Markie exclaimed.

“There is no such person as Santa Claus.”

Markie sent up a howl.

“Cynthia, that’s silly. For Markie there is.”