Letting Go

by Philip Roth

  “Where’s the turkey?”

  “Honey, it’s too early. Go color, go back to bed—”

  “Sissy’s playing records.”

  “Go tell Sissy to turn them off.”

  “I don’t know how.”

  “Tell Cynthia to. Markie baby, Mother’s beat. Will you just give her five more minutes? Tell Cynthia to tell Sissy to turn down the volume.”

  “What?”

  “The volume. Tell her …” She caught sight of the whole family’s dirty laundry heaped up in a corner of the gray room, and she almost went under. “Tell her to turn down the phonograph.” A bleary eye fell on the electric clock. “It’s seven, honey—it’s a holiday. Tell Cynthia—”

  “Cynthia’s talking on the phone.”

  “What phone?”

  “She called the weather.”

  “Oh Christ, Mark, tell your sister to hang up! Tell Sissy to lower the phonograph. Oh baby, your pants are wet—”

  “It’s going to be clouds all day,” Mark said.

  “Markie—”

  You took my lips,

  You took my love,

  Soooooooo—

  “Sissy! Lower that thing!”

  “I can’t hear you,” Sissy shouted back; and a good forty minutes before it was supposed to, Mrs. Reganhart’s day began.

  Sissy was in her room, wearing a gossamer shorty nightgown and painting her toenails.

  “Sissy, where are the oranges? How do you expect my kids to have breakfast without orange juice?”

  “I thought they were my oranges.”

  “How could your oranges be on the top shelf, Sister? Where’s your head?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Sissy, yesterday I found a bunch of bananas in the refrigerator. My bananas. Ten million dollars’ worth of advertising, and it goes right over your head. I’m at the edge with you, Sissy, I really am. Can’t you keep that box off in the morning?”

  “Jesus, you just got up. What are you coming on so salty for?”

  “Please, do me a favor. Let’s make a rule. No Sarah Vaughan until ten. There are two kids here, plus me, right? Either let’s make this place a house, keep it a house, or else—I don’t know. Can’t you even close the door when you take a bath?”

  “What’s eating you, for God’s sake? What are you so prissy about all of a sudden? The kid’s four years old—”

  “Just do me a favor,” Martha Reganhart said, “and close the door.”

  “I’m claustrophobic.”

  “You’re a goddam exhibitionist.”

  “For four-year-olds?”

  “I’m not even talking about Mark. I’m talking about Cynthia. She’s a big girl.”

  “Christ, we’re all one sex.”

  “There’s something about the sight of you shaving your legs in the bathtub that I think has a deleterious effect on her. All right?”

  “You think she tends to be a little dykey?”

  “That’s a bad joke—” Martha Reganhart said. “Why don’t you take it back?”

  “I will. I’m sorry, Martha. I am.”

  Martha looked out past the window sill full of cigarette butts into the holiday sky: clouds all day. Oh God. In the room, Sissy’s underwear was hanging over chair backs, on doorknobs, and on the two end posts of the bed; one brassiere was hooked over an andiron in the unused fireplace. Sissy herself sat on Martha’s Mexican rug (the one she had moved into this back bedroom as a come-on for prospective roomers) painting her toenails. Martha decided not to express the whole new rush of irritation she felt toward the girl. The only roomer Martha could put up with anyway was no roomer at all; besides, Sissy’s forty a month helped pay the rent. So she smiled at Sissy—who had, after all, behind those pendulous boobs, a big pendulous heart—and slingshotted a brassiere off the bedstead into Sissy’s curly brown hair. It collapsed around her ears.

  “It loves you,” Martha said.

  “You know, I think you’re a little dykey too.”

  “Oh you’re a hard girl to fool, Sis.” She left the room wondering not how to dispossess Sissy, but simply how to get the Mexican rug back into the children’s bedroom.

  In the kitchen, she slid the turkey from the refrigerator and found that it had only just begun to unfreeze; she had been so tired when she got home last night that she had gone directly to bed, forgetting to leave the turkey out. “Why do they let these birds get so hard?” she said.

  “Who?” Mark said.

  “Markie, don’t you have anything to do? Do you have to walk directly under my feet?”

  “Why does that thing have a big hole in it like that?” he demanded.

  “Get your arm out of there. Come on, Markie, take your arm out of there, will you?”

  “Why does that turkey have a big hole in it?”

  She carried it to the sink and turned the cold water on. She rapped on the breast with her knuckle, asking herself why November couldn’t have sneaked by without causing a fuss. Holidays were even worse than work days. Couldn’t everything, birthdays, Fourth of July, be celebrated at Christmas?

  “Why does that turkey have a big—”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s for the sexual organs,” Cynthia said.

  “Drink your prune juice.”

  “I don’t like prune juice,” Cynthia answered. “I like oranges.”

  “Sissy drank the oranges this morning.”

  “They weren’t hers anyway.”

  “Yes they were,” Martha said.

  “You said so yourself,” Cynthia replied.

  “I made a mistake. I jumped to conclusions.” Since her daughter’s normal response to people seemed to be distrust, she saw no need to feed her inclinations; perhaps if everybody ignored the trait she would grow out of it. Martha told herself to be more motherly. “Cynthia, are you going to help me with dinner? You want to help stuff the turkey?”

  “What’s stuff it?” Markie asked.

  “Stuffing,” Cynthia said.

  “How?” he pleaded.

  “In the sexual organs.”

  “Cynthia, what’s this sexual organs business?” Martha looked almost instinctively to Sissy’s door, which closed (when Martha could convince Sissy to keep it closed) onto the kitchen. Behind it Sissy was singing a duet with Sarah Vaughan and dressing; that is, heavy objects were bouncing off the floor, so if she was not dressing she was bowling.

  “That,” Cynthia was saying, pointing toward the opening in the turkey.

  “No it’s not, honey.”

  “Yes it is, Mother.”

  “It’s where they removed the insides of the turkey. This is a Tom, sweetie,” Martha began to explain.

  “It’s the sexual organs,” Cynthia said.

  Markie looked from one to the other, with intermittent glances at the bird’s posterior, and waited for the outcome; he seemed to be rooting for his mother.

  “It was the sexual organs,” Martha said. “It’s where they remove the intestines—”

  “Who?” Mark asked.

  “Dears, it’s very involved and mysterious and not terribly crucial. It’s one of those things that one day is very complicated and the next day is very simple. Why don’t you wait?”

  “Okay,” Mark said, but Cynthia complained again about her prune juice.

  “Cynthia, why don’t you run down to Wilson’s and buy the paper for me?”

  “Can I stop in the playground to see if Stephanie’s there?”

  “Stephanie’s mother is sick.”

  “—sexual organs,” Mark was saying.

  “Markie, forget that, all right? Why don’t you go color? Go with Cynthia—”

  “I don’t want him along!”

  “Who cares!” Mark said, and left the kitchen.

  “Please don’t fight, will you, Cynthia? It’s a holiday. Go get the Times.”

  “Can I stop at Hildreth’s?”

  “For what? For candy, no.”

  “To talk to Blair.”
<
br />   “Blair isn’t there.”

  “Blair’s always there,” said Cynthia, and Sissy laughed behind the door.

  “Isn’t it enough, honey, to take a walk? Cyn, I’d love to take a walk. I’d just love to take a nice leisurely walk and get the newspaper and bring it home and sit down for about six hours and read it. Can’t you do that?”

  “No!”

  “Then go get the paper and keep quiet.”

  “Christ!”

  “And enough of that,” Martha said.

  “You say it.”

  “I also work as a waitress—does that interest you?”

  “I can’t do anything.”

  Martha took the dime for the paper out of her slacks pocket with wet hands. “Do you know what day this is?” she asked, wrapping her daughter’s fingers around the coin.

  Cynthia made a bored admission. “It’s Thanksgiving.”

  “Thanksgiving is a very terrific holiday. How about we have a pleasurable day, all right? We’re going to have a guest. Well, don’t you want to know who?”

  “Who?”

  She mustered up an air of excitement, a good deal more than she felt. “Sidney Jaffe!”

  And all at once the child, thank God, became a child, a little seven-year-old girl. “Goodie! Terrific!” She skipped out of the house after the paper.

  There was one wall of the kids’ room—before Sissy’s arrival it had been Cynthia’s alone—that Martha had given up on and come to consider the coloring wall. Now Mark was laying purple on it with considerable force and violence.

  “Markie, what is it you want to do?”

  “Yes,” the boy said, and continued hammering the crayons against the wall.

  “What’s the trouble?”

  He looked up. “Nothing.”

  “Are you happy?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She made Cynthia’s bed and changed Mark’s wet sheets. Crumpling them into a sour wad, she bit her tongue and said nothing. Finally, as though it was simple curiosity that moved her to ask, she said, “Did you have any bad dreams, my friend?”

  He looked up at her again. “Who?”

  Why did he always say who to everything? All the frustrations of the morning—the missing oranges, the frozen bird, Sarah Vaughan—nearly came out on poor defenseless Mark. Everything: Sissy’s stupidity and Cynthia’s indefatigable opposition and Markie’s bed-wetting and her own unconquerable tiredness … She was twenty-six and tired right down to the bone. And she was putting on weight. Twenty-six and becoming a cow! Somehow the whole general situation would improve, she thought hazily, if she could only get Sissy to pick up her underwear and put it in a drawer. Or move out. Or shut up. But the truth was that she had been dying for a little companionship. When she dragged in from the Hawaiian House at one in the morning, it gave her a small warm rush of pleasure to find Sissy in the kitchen, drinking hot milk—more than likely laced with Martha’s brandy—and listening to Gerry Mulligan. Sissy was silly and gossipy and she did not bother to vote, but it seemed better coming home to her than coming home to nothing. Still, why did she have to be a nut? Martha seemed always to be latching onto people just as they were going through some treacherous maturing period in their lives. Her next roomer, she told herself, would not be under eighty—better they should die in her spare room than grow up in it.

  She planted a kiss on her son’s neck and he drew a purple line across the bridge of her nose. “Bang! Bang!” he shouted into her ear, and she left him to his drawing.

  “What’s the matter with your nose?” Sissy asked. “You look like you’ve just been shat upon?”

  “Could you control your language in my house?”

  “What are you coming on so salty again for?”

  “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 famil
iar 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.”