Boys and Girls Together

by William Saroyan

  The boy was angry at his sister but at the same time amused. They had had trouble, the same trouble they had had every morning when the girl woke up and plagued the boy to notice her, to let her get in his bed, to go with her up the hall and into the living-room as they were forbidden to do, to get going.

  The boy knew the man would know that he had hit the girl again and perhaps tell him not to do that, but the man was looking at Mama, he was looking at his wife, and he was smiling a little.

  The man and the boy were naked, exactly alike, but the man was huge and hairy and all his skin was pale, and the boy was little, like a little rock, his skin dark and smooth with the darkness and smoothness of a new thing, of the man started out all over again in his son. They were each up a little where they were men, and the man said, ‘When you get up in the morning go and pee.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Did you lift the seat?’

  ‘I always lift the seat.’

  ‘Somebody’s been peeing on the seat.’

  ‘It’s Rosey, and it’s not pee, it’s water. She fills the glass and pours it into the toilet bowl and she never lifts the seat. She says she’s peeing like me.’

  ‘O.K., let’s go.’

  They found the little girl sitting on the floor between her crib and the boy’s bed. She was naked except for the boy’s pants which she was trying to get over her head. She had been thoughtful, as she was when she was asleep, until she had seen him with her brother and then she had laughed and got up and run to him.

  ‘Hello, Papa.’

  He took her up and carried her to the bathroom where he went over her with a washcloth made warm but without soap. He rinsed the cloth and warmed it and wrung it out again and handed it to the boy, who finished using it in five seconds. The man then used it himself and took them back to their bedroom.

  ‘All right. Stand right there, Rosey. Don’t move.’

  ‘All right, Papa.’

  ‘You, too, Johnny. That’s right. Straight. You both look fine. Now don’t move. I’m going to put my clothes on and I’ll be right back. Don’t move, just stand straight that way and wait.’

  He was dressed in not much more than forty-five seconds. When he got back to the room the girl was sitting on the floor working with the pants again and the boy was looking for something under his bed. They both jumped up and stood somewhat as they had been standing when he had left.

  ‘O.K. Rosey first. Where’s your stuff, Rosey?’

  ‘This is all I got,’ the little girl said, holding out her brother’s pants.

  He found her stuff all around the room and in her crib but had trouble finding one sock and then found it in the pocket of the pants.

  ‘How did that get in there?’

  ‘Johnny put it in.’

  ‘I didn’t. She did.’

  ‘And he hit me.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘It wasn’t my fault.’

  The girl was dressed now.

  ‘All right, Rosey. You go over there and look out the window until I get Johnny dressed.’

  ‘He hit me, Papa.’

  ‘Did it hurt?’

  ‘Yes, Papa,’ the girl said softly.

  ‘I didn’t hit her hard,’ the boy said. ‘I just hit her a little one to stop her from putting her sock in my pocket.’

  ‘It hurt, Papa.’

  ‘Do you want me to spank him?’

  ‘Spank him and spank him and spank him.’

  He waited a moment, then she said, as she always did, ‘But not really, Papa.’

  Christ, the man thought, they’re crazy about each other.

  The boy bent over the man’s knee and the man began to let him have it, easy but not too easy because it was no fun for them at all if there wasn’t a little noise. They both laughed, laughing together while the man thought, If only this girl would never cry as her mother cries, if only she’d never need to, if only it could be so.

  The girl threw herself on the man and held the arm he was spanking the boy with.

  ‘Don’t spank him, Papa,’ she said. She wasn’t finished yet with the laughter of the game but she was never more in earnest. ‘Don’t spank him. He’s my brother,’ she said.

  She hugged the boy, who looked down at her indifferently, his whole face winking, and the girl said: ‘My little brother. My little baby. Don’t cry.’

  The boy turned and looked at his father. His lips moved a little because it was killing him, he liked it, he wasn’t above it, but she was so little and such a crook, provoking him into hitting her all the time, and then when he got in trouble about it, real trouble, not like this game, she came to him when it was all over and said, ‘I’m sorry, Johnny.’ And hugged him and told him not to cry, the way she was telling him now when he wasn’t crying.

  The man dressed the boy quickly and turned them loose in the backyard to fool around with the junk out there until he had breakfast ready. The fierce passion of the two of them together began the minute they were alone, the loving and bothering of one another, of dominating one another, each trying new methods or using tried and tested ones. But in the end the boy hit the girl, the girl burst into tears, and the boy stood around feeling sick with guilt because of the awful noise she always made.

  He got the oranges out of the bowl above the kitchen sink and went to work getting their juice. Then he got the cold cereal into the bowls and poured sugar and milk into each bowl, called them, and they came climbing up the steps.

  He began to get his coffee going in the percolator while they drank their orange juice and fooled around with the cold cereal, not eating it but playing games with it. Then he got the fat bacon going because he knew they never could resist that, at least, and he put a couple of eggs into some water to boil because sometimes they would go to work and actually eat a whole egg, or maybe even two of them, as if they were really hungry, but mainly they were poor eaters, and he and his wife had made a mess of their eating, his wife using the one-for-Papa, one-for-Mama, one-for-Jesus technique, and the man telling them how the kids in Europe didn’t have hardly anything to eat, ever. But the boy always said, ‘Give them my food, Papa.’

  Well, he wasn’t going to fight them about their eating any more. He himself, when he thought of it, as he always did when the boy wouldn’t eat, had never been able to get enough, but he had always tried to be polite and had often refused a second helping of something he wanted badly, but this was only when there were strangers around. The rest of the time he ate all he could get, and it wasn’t that way with his son. It wasn’t that way with his daughter, either. Kids just don’t like to eat very much these days, he thought. It was true of everybody’s kids. Everybody was having trouble with their kids about eating.

  Maybe the kids know what they’re doing, he thought.

  Right now, though, his own kids were playing games of leverage, and pouring with their spoons the milk and the cereal that was mushy now, but to hell with it, he thought, maybe the games mean more to them than eating the lousy food. Maybe if somebody fixed them a bowl of hot oatmeal or something, they’d eat, but that was nonsense, too, because he had tried it and they had both insisted on cold cereal. Why? Because they could have more fun pouring the cold cereal, that’s why. He saw the girl lift her bowl and pour half of it on to the linoleum, but he decided to let that go, too. She liked to do that.

  ‘O.K.,’ he said. ‘Bacon. This for you, Rosey. This for you, Johnny. And that’s all.’

  ‘There’s more,’ Johnny said.

  ‘That’s for me.’

  He saw them quickly at the crisp bacon he had given them, and then the boy said, ‘I want some more.’

  ‘That’s for Papa,’ the girl said.

  ‘He can make some more. This isn’t Europe.’ He gave the boy some more.

  ‘You want some more, Rosey?’

  ‘No, Papa. It’s yours. Johnny’s a bad boy.’

  ‘O.K. You can have an egg.’

  He broke open an egg and worked the stuff
out with a teaspoon into a dish with a little butter in it and set the dish in front of the girl, lifting away her bowl of cereal and eating what was in it, and then eating what was left in the boy’s bowl, too.

  ‘You’re a garbage can,’ the boy said. He’d gotten that from his mother and he knew the man didn’t mind hearing it whenever he gobbled up their leftovers.

  ‘It’s good food. Why waste it?’

  He got an egg to the boy, too, and sure enough the going was a little better than it had been for several days. They ate all the bacon and all the egg, but hell, there was no use pretending, they weren’t eaters, they just fooled around at it a little three times a day. They didn’t run to it. They looked at it out of the corners of their eyes and never seemed to think much of it.

  The day was a pretty good one, too. It was foggy, of course, as it almost always is in San Francisco, especially out where they were, so near the ocean, but the sun was sending light and heat through the mist, and they could have themselves a time in the yard.

  They went down again and he fetched the morning paper from just inside the metal gate on the sidewalk that locked in the exposed stairway, and then he poured himself a cup of coffee and began to look at the day’s news.

  The boy was the first to come up.

  ‘Number two,’ he said.

  The man didn’t say anything and the boy went along, singing, Just a love mess, which was his version of Love Nest.

  The girl was up before the boy had finished.

  ‘Is it Rosey?’ the boy called out from the bathroom.

  ‘Yes, Johnny,’ the girl said.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Number one or number two?’ the man said to the girl.

  ‘Three.’

  ‘O.K. Wait till Johnny gets out of there.’

  Of course the girl didn’t wait, because all she wanted was to be in there, too, to be near him, to make him angry by getting the glass and filling it with water.

  They were back in the yard again after ten minutes of quiet fighting in the bathroom, and then it was the girl again.

  ‘When is Mama getting up?’

  ‘Pretty soon. Go downstairs and play.’

  ‘All right, Papa,’ but she didn’t go, she sat down in her small chair at the small table and put part of the morning paper that had fallen to the floor on the table in front of her and looked at it.

  Around ten his wife ran naked to the bathroom. On her way back when she saw him in the living-room, standing beside the small piano looking at a book, she waited until he looked up from the book. Then, she lifted her arms, half stretching and half teasing.

  ‘Get dressed, will you? I’ve got to go upstairs and get to work.’

  ‘O.K. I’ll only be a minute. You were sweet last night. I mean, the second time when I felt so bad. Do you love me?’

  ‘If I don’t, we’d better try to find out what it is that’s knocking the hell out of me. I can’t write any more. I don’t even like the idea of writing. I can’t read, either. I think all writing stinks.’

  The woman went to the man and wrapped her arms around him, but the man went right on reading.

  ‘You know what?’ she whispered in his ear. ‘The first one was the best, though. It was the best ever.’

  ‘Sure it was. Now, will you get dressed? I’ve got to get going.’

  The woman clutched him to confirm what didn’t need to be confirmed, laughed, and ran to get dressed. The man went from the lower flat where they lived to the upper flat where he worked, and where he and the woman lived when there was a nanny for the kids.

  Chapter 10

  The upper flat was a shambles, but it always was. It smelled of stale cigarette smoke because he smoked so much whenever he worked or tried to. It smelled of not being lived in, too, and of fog and books. Books he hadn’t had a chance to look into yet, some of them on hand for months, not even unwrapped yet, piled on the floor and on the furniture. There were stacks of magazines mixed in with the books, mail, and manuscripts, pebbles and twigs and roots and branches of trees washed smooth and clean by the sea that he kept bringing home all the time. The pebbles were in small piles on the floor and furniture of every room in that flat, or in water in glass bowls because their colour came out in water, and the twigs and roots and branches were leaning wherever he had found a place for them when he had first brought them home. There were rocks, too, chalk-white ones, brown, black, green and blue, most of them more or less egg-shaped, but a few of them flat or round, and these were strewn about all over, too, excepting those that were serving as paper-weights.

  He lifted the porous brown one that he was so fond of, that he had found at low tide in a cove somewhere south of Big Sur on Highway One, a cove he had driven back over Highway One expressly to find again because he had wanted to see if he could find out what was so wonderful about it, to make him remember it so much, to think about it so much, but he hadn’t found it, the sea had come up and hidden it and he had driven on, saying to the woman, ‘I can’t tell you how bad it makes me feel that I couldn’t find that cove.’

  The cove was hundreds of millions of pebbles just a little smaller than jelly beans all gathered together on a downward-slanting beach just beneath red clay cliffs three and four feet high with larger pebbles in smaller groups here and there, and now and then extraordinarily handsome rocks, all of them bright in the light, all of them a little wet yet, with seaweed strewn about over and among them, and little forms of life dead or dying or hurrying off to live some more among them, jelly things, leaf things, grass things, shell things, but nothing anywhere of man’s, no tin cans, no bottles, no broken glass, no paper, just the cove loaded with treasures which nearly maddened him to see, the air smelling of clay, wet rock, water and fish.

  It was ten or eleven in the morning, or at any rate sometime before noon, and he had been driving through thick fog since two in the morning, they hadn’t gone to bed at all that night although they had planned to, they’d had a nanny then, and they had planned to go to bed at midnight and get up at five for an early start, but the woman had said, ‘Let’s start now, let’s not sleep at all, let’s just get in the car and go.’ He was on his way that instant, going down the stairs from the top flat with the suitcases. They had had breakfast at the only place open in Monterey, ham and eggs and a lot of coffee, but it had only made them sleepy, so that after Big Sur the woman has asked him to please stop soon so she could go to sleep in the car.

  ‘O.K.,’ he said, ‘just let me find a place to get the car off the highway.’

  An hour or so later he found the cove. He was there more than an hour while his wife slept, and then she got up and took off her shoes and stockings and went to him where he was gathering pebbles and rocks.

  ‘The back of the car is full of them,’ he said.

  ‘What do you want with them?’

  ‘You know I keep pebbles and rocks to look at,’ he said. ‘Look at this one.’

  He handed her the brown one he was now holding.

  The woman held the rock and said, ‘Do you love me?’

  ‘I stopped so you could sleep, didn’t I? Of course I love you. But don’t you love anything else?’

  ‘Than what?’

  ‘Than me or you or whatever it is that you keep asking all the time?’

  ‘I love you and that’s all.’

  ‘If you love somebody, you love other things, too, don’t you? You love everything, don’t you?’

  ‘Not me. Just you, just me, just Johnny, just Rosey, but mainly you, or mainly me, or you and me. Isn’t that what it comes to?’

  ‘Yes, I guess it is, at that. Even so, I never saw a place like this before. A man could look for a place like this his whole life and never find it.’

  ‘It is nice, but I’m hungry.’

  ‘We’ll eat at the next town. But don’t rush me. I want to stay here a while. I like it here. I don’t suppose I could buy this cove.’

  ‘Would you like to buy the ocean, too?’
/>
  ‘Yes, I would.’

  ‘And the sun. Would you like to buy that, too?’

  ‘Yes, the sun, too.’

  ‘Well, when you get to Hollywood, just go out and meet the clever agents who are always talking so big and sit down with them and let them be clever for you, so you can get a lot of money and buy anything you want.’

  ‘If money could do anything like that for anybody, I’d go after it harder.’

  ‘Are you trying to tell me to be satisfied with the ocean and the sun? I’ll bet that’s what you’re trying to do, and I thought I was kidding you.’

  ‘I’m not kidding. I’d like to buy this cove, that’s all.’

  ‘It doesn’t belong to anybody anyway. You can have as much of it as you like any time you like.’

  ‘It’s the nicest place I’ve ever been. I wish I could stay here.’

  ‘Well, you can’t.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I’ll gather some, too.’

  She gathered a couple of dozen small ones, but they weren’t very good because she hadn’t had any experience with pebbles and didn’t know what to look for. The ones that were immortal were the ones to look for, the ones colour and shape said were immortal. The ones that were art, that were sculpture, that were whole.

  She was a good girl, though, she just didn’t know about pebbles. She wanted him to like the ones she’d gathered, so he did, he liked them, he told her they were great; she hadn’t gone back to the car and turned on the radio, she had put up with it, she had tried, she was great sometimes, sometimes she could be something made out of light and time and water, like one of the pebbles, sometimes she could shut up and go along, tag along with him even when her common sense told her he was going nowhere, sometimes she thought about things and decided there might be something to them at that, nothing much but something, a little something, and she looked fine, she looked younger than her few years, sleepy and grave and troubled and thoughtful, the way the little girl always looked when she went to sleep.

  ‘Are they really good ones?’

  ‘They are.’

  ‘What makes the good ones?’

  ‘Picking them up. Noticing them and picking them up and keeping them, that’s what does it.’