Terms of Endearment

by Larry McMurtry

  “You’re not going,” he said, though his eyes were still shut.

  “Why not?” she asked.

  “You’re just not,” he said, keeping a tight grip on her ankle. She had one foot off the bed and got tired of being spraddled, so she eased back in bed. Flap turned loose of her ankle and put his arm tightly around her waist. The phone rang ten or twelve times and stopped, and then after a pause rang ten or twelve more times and stopped again.

  “I wish you were a little less gutless,” he said. “You don’t have to pop up every morning at dawn, you know.”

  “Well, you’ve found out how to keep me from it,” Emma said. “I’d rather lie in bed and be criticized than to stand in the kitchen and be criticized.”

  “If you’d tell her to fuck off once or twice you could lie in bed and not be criticized,” he said.

  “Sure,” Emma said. “I haven’t heard you tell Cecil that when he wants you to do some little errand for him. If you’ll start doing it I’ll start doing it.”

  Flap ignored her retort, but he kept his arm around her. “If you’re not going to let me talk to Mother, then you ought to wake up and talk to me,” she said.

  Instead of commenting, Flap went back to sleep. It was a warm, still morning and she slipped back into drowsiness herself. She had sat up until two-thirty reading Adam Bede—a book she had begun because Flap said she had to read something by George Eliot and it had looked, at first glance, shorter than Middlemarch. It could not have been shorter by much, she decided, because even by reading until two-thirty two nights in a row she hadn’t been able to finish it.

  “I like it but I don’t know why I’m reading it right now,” she said at about the halfway point. “Why couldn’t I have saved George Eliot for my old age?”

  “Read her so we can talk about her,” Flap said. “We’re running out of things to talk about, after only two years. You have to read more so our marriage won’t flag.”

  Before the day got really hot she awakened from her drowse to find her husband on top of her. Emma was just as glad; the morning had seldom dawned when she wouldn’t have rather made love than cook breakfast.

  It was only some while after they had that Emma felt a little strange. Something had changed. Sex was happening a lot oftener, and she didn’t know why. She told herself she was a fool to question God’s plenty, now that she had it, but she couldn’t help wondering what was working on Flap to make him want her so often.

  It seemed to her to have started after he read Danny’s book. “I’m intimidated,” he said when he finished it. “Because it’s good?” she asked. “Even if it wasn’t good I’d be intimidated,” he said. “At least he did it.” Then he walked off to the library and didn’t say another word about Danny. She had told him Danny came by—she had to, since her mother knew—and he didn’t say much about that either, or ask much, which was strange. His and Danny’s friendship had always been rich in mutual curiosity. Perhaps it didn’t tie into sex—she didn’t know—but the part that was slightly worrisome was that oftener and longer didn’t seem to add up to happier, at least not for Flap. It didn’t leave him looking as pleased as it had, and she felt that their balance was tipping just a little. Life was getting different and she was not one to sit quietly and let it get different without her knowing why.

  “How come I’m suddenly getting all this nice attention?” she said, tapping on his back with her fingernails.

  Flap pretended to be in a deep post-coital slumber, but she knew better. He had never been a post-coital slumberer.

  “Come on,” she said. “No playing possum. Tell me.”

  Flap suddenly got up and walked off to the bathroom. “You always want to talk about everything,” he said, glancing back at her. “Can’t you ever let anything just happen?”

  Emma sighed and got up and divided what was left of her bedside glass of water between two flowerpots. Some mothers gave their daughters cast-off clothes, but her mother gave her cast-off flowers instead, though usually only petunias or begonias or flowers that didn’t require very complex attention. She had been promised a wonderful geranium that her mother had been coddling for years, but that promise, like the promise of the Klee, seemed to depend upon them living somewhere they couldn’t afford to live. When Flap came back in the bedroom she was feeling angry.

  “You didn’t need to put me down that hard,” she said. “We are married, aren’t we? I have a right to be curious about changes in our life.”

  “Stop trying to put me on the defensive,” he said. “I hate to feel defensive on an empty stomach.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” she said. “I just asked a simple question.”

  “You know what I think?” Flap said, putting on his shirt.

  “What?”

  “I think you majored in the wrong thing,” he said. “I think you should have majored in psychology. I think you should be a psychiatrist, in fact. Then you’d have answers for everything. Whenever I changed some little habit you could get out your notebook and write down the Freudian explanation and the Jungian explanation and the Gestaltist explanation, and then you could take your pick, like a multiple-choice examination.”

  Emma’s fat paperback of Adam Bede was lying handy and she grabbed it and threw it at him. He wasn’t looking at her, hadn’t looked at her since he had come back in the room, and he didn’t see her throw the book. It was a perfect throw and hit him on the neck. Flap turned, his eyes full of hate, and jumped across the bed at her. He grabbed her arms and shoved her at the open window so hard that her bare behind split the screen almost out of its frame, all the way around. When she felt the frame give Emma thought she was going to be shoved right out the window. “Stop it. Have you gone mad?” she said, squirming out of the window desperately.

  While her mouth was open Flap punched her and she felt something jolt against her teeth. She fell backwards onto her couch, and before she could get her senses about her he grabbed her and started trying to drag her to the window again. She saw that he did mean to shove her out, and she wiggled free and fell back on the couch and began to sob, holding on to her end. One of Flap’s hands was red. He fell on top of her, apparently meaning to hit her again, but he didn’t. He just lay on top of her, his face a few inches from hers, and they stared at one another in surprise, panting and gasping for breath. Neither spoke, because neither had any breath to speak with.

  As they were panting, calming a little, Emma suddenly noticed that one of his hands was bleeding all over the couch. She began to try and squirm free. “Get off a minute; you can kill me later,” she said and went across the room and grabbed a handful of Kleenex. When she came back Flap was holding his hand up indecisively, apparently trying to decide whether to drip on the couch or drip on the floor. “Drip on the floor, dummy,” she said. “The floor can be mopped.”

  The hatred had gone out of his eyes and he looked friendly and fond of her again. “I got to respect you,” he said. “You’re hard to throw out a window.”

  Emma gave him some Kleenex and used the rest to soak up the worst of the blood on the couch. “Boy I’m really going to get fat now,” she said. “If I was my mother’s size nobody would ever be able to throw me out a window.”

  “Don’t you know you’re not supposed to talk in the middle of a fight?” Flap said. “It’s easier to get your jaw broken if you have your mouth open. If you hadn’t been talking I wouldn’t have cut my hand.”

  Before Emma could reply someone knocked on the door. They both jumped. Flap was dressed from the waist up and she wasn’t dressed at all.

  “It’s either Patsy or your mother,” Flap said. “One of them always arrives when we’re having a crisis.”

  “Who’s there?” Emma asked.

  “It’s Patsy,” a cheerful voice said. “Let’s go shopping.”

  “You see,” Flap said, though actually Patsy’s visits always pleased him.

  “Give us two minutes,” Emma said, springing up. “Flap’s not quite dressed.”<
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  In the time it took Flap to put on his undershorts and a pair of trousers she got herself decent, made the bed, and, with the expenditure of a good many washrags and paper towels got rid of most of the blood. Flap was barefooted and looked rather plaintive, probably because his hand was still bleeding.

  “You must file your front teeth,” he whispered. “I’m cut to the bone. What are we going to tell her?”

  “Why should I lie to my friend?” Emma whispered. “She may get married someday. Let’s give her a glimpse of what it’s like.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Flap said.

  “Go run some water on your hand,” Emma said. “She’s my friend and I’ll handle it.”

  He snuck into the bathroom, still plaintive, and Emma opened the front door. Her friend Patsy Clark stood on the landing in a beautiful brown and white dress reading the Hortons’ paper. She was a slim girl, with long black hair—beautiful anyway, and even more so in such a dress.

  “I don’t think I want to let you in,” Emma said, holding the screen shut. “You look too good. I wish you’d stop dressing up when you come over here. You’re worse than my mother. Both of you make me feel more squalid than I am.”

  “If she’d just turn loose of a little of her money you could buy yourself some clothes,” Patsy said. “I’ve always thought it was awful of her to criticize the way you dress when she won’t give you money to buy clothes with.”

  “Let’s call her and tell her that,” Emma said. “Maybe she’ll give me some today. Otherwise I can’t go shopping with you.”

  She held the door open and Patsy swept in, smelling nice and looking wonderful, cheerful and happy. Their bedroom was also their living room, and the minute Patsy stepped into it she said, “I smell blood.” The next minute she noticed the smashed-out window screen and she immediately looked keenly at Emma and narrowed her black eyes.

  “Did someone try to throw someone out a window?” she asked, slightly puckishly.

  Emma opened her mouth and pointed at her own front teeth. “Yes, and someone cut his hand on my front teeth too,” she said. Patsy had the same genius her mother had for seeming to perceive the truth of the matter instantly. Emma’s secret opinion was that the reason Patsy and her mother couldn’t stand one another was because they were exactly alike. No one but her mother could be as totally self-absorbed as Patsy was, and yet, like her mother, she was usually interesting to have around. She was quick-minded, active, and incessantly curious about every aspect of Emma’s life. The only difference between the two women that Emma could see was that her mother had had a great deal more practice at being who she was. She was better at everything than Patsy, and she never ceased to press her advantage when the two of them were together.

  Patsy looked with a certain fascination at Emma’s tooth. “I always knew they were all brutes,” she said. “Why didn’t it crack it? None of them better ever hit me, boy.” She went over and peered through the damaged window screen. “It’s not too far down,” she said. “I guess you would have lived.”

  Emma felt better about life than she had in several days. Her husband seemed to have gotten something out of his system, and her friend was there to help her make her day. She yawned and flopped down on the couch to read the paper Patsy had brought in.

  “You can read that later,” Patsy said, walking restlessly around the room and inspecting things. “Call your mother and see if you can get some money.”

  “No, we have to wait until Flap leaves,” Emma said. “Don’t be so restless. We haven’t even eaten breakfast yet.”

  At that moment Flap emerged, a washrag wrapped around his hand. He looked his most most sheepish, which was also his most appealing. Emma was completely won by the way he looked and forgave him everything, but Patsy was not about to be so softhearted.

  “I used to think you were nice,” she said, giving him a genuinely cold look.

  It only made Flap look doubly sheepish, because Flap adored Patsy and would have given almost anything to seduce her. Her attraction for him was so obvious that Emma took it as one of the givens of life, and yet Patsy had never been an awkwardness in her marriage, like Danny was. Whatever she and Danny felt for one another was mutual, whereas Patsy obviously didn’t feel the slightest attraction to Flap and was more or less in agreement with her mother that she had been a fool to marry him. Emma sometimes picked at him about Patsy, when she had nothing else to pick at him about, but Patsy’s disinterest was so emphatic, in its way, that instead of feeling jealous she felt smugly amused. All Flap would get for his desire was a lot of torment, and that, she felt, was punishment enough.

  “These things have two sides,” Flap said.

  “Not in my book they don’t,” Patsy said.

  “Well, you single people don’t understand the provocations,” he said.

  “I don’t understand them either,” Emma said, turning to the want ads. “I think I will call Momma.”

  “Why, for God’s sake?” Flap asked.

  “I don’t know. I thought maybe we could all go over there for breakfast,” Emma said. “I don’t feel very inspired. Maybe she’s having a beau in and would like us to come and help entertain him.”

  Once or twice a week her mother had one of her suitors in for breakfast, and the breakfasts that sometimes resulted were among her most wonderful and certainly most baroque productions—omelettes with various herbs and cheeses, special spicy sausages that she bought from a strange old woman who lived in the Heights and did nothing but make sausages, pineapples covered in brown sugar and brandy, a porridge she ordered from Scotland and ate with three kinds of honey, and sometimes a crispy kind of potato pancake that nobody but her could make. All her mother’s most closely guarded recipes emerged and were called into play for her suitors’ breakfasts, which often ran on until the middle of the afternoon, at least.

  “You mean it might be breakfast day?” Patsy said. She forgot about Flap and her eyes lit up with the special eager light that always came into them when she thought she might be about to get something especially good to eat. She couldn’t stand Emma’s mother and lost no chance to ridicule her, but nobody was all bad, and cooking was the one area where she was willing to give Mrs. Greenway her due. Patsy was particularly fond of breakfast, and Mrs. Greenway’s were the best she had ever eaten. Also, going there to breakfast gave her a good chance to snoop. Mrs. Greenway was always too busy cooking and flirting with her suitor of the day to bother about her, and Patsy could wander around the house and admire all the wonderful objects Mrs. Greenway had somehow accumulated. The paintings, the carpets, the furniture, and the objects were all more or less exactly what she wanted for her own house, if she ever had one, and she loved to sneak away and examine them and dream.

  Emma noted the look in her friend’s eye and got up to go to the telephone.

  “Well, you two can go over there if you want to,” Flap said. “I’m not. Do you think I want to face your mother after I just tried to throw you out a window? What do you think she’d have to say about the fact that my finger’s half bitten off?”

  “I don’t know, but I’d love to hear,” Patsy said. “I think she’s got the right idea about you after all.”

  Emma stopped on the way to the phone and hugged her husband to show him that she at least was still a fan.

  “Quick, quick, call,” Patsy said. “Now that you mentioned food I’m starving.”

  Emma called and Rosie answered. In the background Emma heard her mother’s voice singing an aria. “What’s going on over there?” she asked.

  “Cookin’,” Rosie said, but at once the phone was snatched from her hand.

  “Well,” Aurora said, abruptly breaking off the aria. “Calling to make your apologies, I hope. And where were you this morning when I needed to consult you?”

  “I was very sleepy,” Emma said. “I sat up late reading a serious novel. I’m trying to improve my mind.”

  “I suppose that’s admirable,” Auror
a said. “What do you want now?”

  “I wondered if you were cooking breakfast, and if so, who for?”

  “For whom,” Aurora said. “Why don’t you let your mind go and just try improving your grammar. I don’t like it that you deliberately ignored my call. I might have been in dire straits.”

  “I apologize,” Emma said cheerfully.

  “Don’t apologize!” Flap and Patsy said in unison.

  “Hum,” Aurora said. “Do you have a Greek chorus living with you at the moment? Ask it why you shouldn’t apologize to your own mother.”

  “I don’t know why everyone in the world but me is so difficult,” Emma said. “Actually Patsy and I wondered if we could come over for breakfast.”

  “Oh, that little snippet,” Aurora said. “Miss Clark. Yes, by all means bring her. It always pleases me to see a young lady of such high principles stuffing herself with my food. Wouldn’t Thomas like to come too?”

  “No, he cut his hand,” Emma said, making a face at him. “He has to go get a stitch.”

  “He hasn’t exposed himself to me in some time, you know,” Aurora said. “He can’t hide forever. Vernon’s brought me a goat, by the way. Unfortunately I don’t think I can keep him, since he eats flowers, but it was a nice thought anyway. You two hurry. I’m just putting my sausages in.”

  2.

  EMMA SPRUCED herself up a little and she and Patsy zipped off in Patsy’s blue Mustang.

  “You haven’t told me about your fight,” Patsy reminded her. “I want to know all you can tell me about marriage, so I can weigh the odds.”

  “It’s a waste of time telling you about marriage,” Emma said. “No two sets of odds are the same. Look, there’s the General.”

  They had just pulled into her mother’s street, and General Scott, in a charcoal gray pullover and immaculate slacks, was standing in his driveway looking irritable. He had his binoculars around his neck, and F.V. stood behind him in his undershirt, a spade in one hand. The General was flanked by his Dalmatians, both of them as erect as he was.