“I can tell you one thing. I was surprised that somebody remembered my birthday,” he said. “You know what I was just thinking apropos of your story about your mother and father dancing to the television? I was thinking that sometimes you go along in the same way so long that you forget how one little interlude of something different can change everything.” He was grinning at Billy. “She’s too young to remember those radio shows,” he said. “
Billy thought this was nice weather? It was March in New York, and there hadn’t been any sun for three days. The wind was blowing so hard that an end of my scarf flew up over my face. Billy put his arm around my waist and we watched the limousine make it through a yellow light and swerve to avoid a car that had suddenly stopped to back into a parking space.
“Billy,” I said, “why did you keep kissing me all through lunch?”
“We’ve known each other quite a while,” he said, “and I realized today that I’d fallen in love with you.”
This surprised me so much that as well as moving away from him I also went back in my mind to the safety and security of childhood. “You make a trade,” my mother had said to me once. “You give up to get. I want a TV? Why, then, I let him make me dance every time I come into the room. I’ll bet you think women are always fine dancers and men always try to avoid dancing? Your father would go out dancing every night of the week if he could.” As Billy and I walked down the street, I suddenly thought how strange it was that we’d never gone dancing.
My mother had said all that to me in the living room, when Ricky was at his wit’s end with Lucy on television and my father was at work. I sympathized with her at once. I liked being with my mother and thinking about something serious that I hadn’t thought about before. But when I was alone—or maybe this only happened as I got older—puzzling things out held no fascination for me. The rug in the room where my mother and I talked was patterned with pink cabbage-size roses. Years later, I’d have nightmares that a huge trellis had collapsed and disappeared and I’d suddenly found the roses, two-dimensional, on the ground.
Lofty
Kate could think of nothing but how she had cheated when she and Philip lived in this house. She had put little daubs of glue on the back of peeling wallpaper and pushed it back into place; she had stuffed the big aqua urns at the back door with rags—they were deep enough to hold twenty pounds of earth—and then poured a foot of soil on top. The pansies, pounded deep into the urns by summer rain, had shot up and cascaded over the rims anyway.
The house belonged to Philip’s Great-Aunt Beatrice, and she had come in person every month for the rent check, but all Kate’s worrying about their tenancy had been for nothing. The woman rarely looked closely at anything; in fact, in winter she often kept her car running in the driveway while she made the call, and wouldn’t even come inside for coffee. In the summer she stayed a few minutes to cut roses or peonies to take back to the city. She was a tall old lady, who wore flowered dresses, and by the time she headed for her ancient Cadillac she herself often looked like a gigantic flower in motion, refracted through a kaleidoscope.
In retrospect, Kate realized that the house must have looked perfectly presentable. When she and Philip first moved in and were in love with each other, they were in love with the place, and when they were no longer in love the house seemed to sink in sympathy. The sagging front step made her sad; a shutter fell from the second story one night, frightening them into each other’s arms.
