pecial occasions, and then you watered the bottles, don’t tell me, ruining the liquor for me when I was finally able to have my one shot a month,” “While you’re at it why not bring up the refrigerator—,” “Just tell me first, did you water my Crown Royal?” “Yeah, I don’t know, I might have watered a bottle or two of something — it was late and I was probably exhausted but couldn’t sleep or just keyed up from having taken care of you and needed a drink — one of your big fecal spills, for instance, which I’m not blaming you for — and I’d run out of my own booze and Mom’s was empty too and I thought you might be checking the bottle level the next day, but if I took an inch of it it was a lot,” “Three or four inches, if I remember, and not because I measured and checked it but because of its taste, but what about the refrigerator you started mentioning before — how you used to stand in front of the open door all day?” “That too, but I was thinking about your complaints of how much I ate,” “You nearly ate us out of house and home, but you were fidgety from taking care of me maybe, which led to all your overeating, so like you I shouldn’t blame you there, but with the open door you acted as if we had lots of stock in Con Ed — you also acted as if the refrigerator bulb and the food spoiling inside were replaceable for free,” “Then you should have got a see-through refrigerator door, for how else could I have seen what was inside?” “You could have come to it the way I did, with an idea what you wanted to eat and what was inside,” “Mom was constantly buying different foods, so I didn’t know what was inside,” “And you were constantly eating but I don’t think buying it,” “You wanted me to set aside a special little section of the refrigerator for myself with just the food I bought?” “I wanted you, since you weren’t shelling out for your own upkeep outside, to contribute something to the house — food, alcohol or money — for no matter how little you earned with your sub work at school you always still could have given in a small cut,” “What about how much you were saving on nursing care with me and Mom?” “Listen, with my own mother — my father I couldn’t do it for because he just keeled over one day and died — but with her when she was sick I paid for round-the-clock nurses in the hospital and then a live-in one for her at home till she died,” “You were such a good son — that’s what you liked to stress — and what lousy sons we were, or just me,” “Not lousy, you just always thought you knew better than me so never did anything I asked, and you also never chipped in a dime to the house,” “You became a dentist early and made much more than I,” “I was paying half my parents’ living costs when I was working two jobs while going to dental school, but it could be I had more incentive than you kids, coming from a background where we had almost nothing,” “You went into everything else, why not my Gentile girlfriends next?” “I’ll go into them — which ones? — you had so many, one uglier and skinnier than the next, and you lived with some, you brought them to the house for dinner so we had to entertain them no less, one Kraut you even had stay a week and don’t let’s forget again that especially ugly stringbean one and her kid you lived with at the house for a few months,” “A couple of weeks — we were supposed to for a few months, while she went to some accelerated interior design school, but it was obviously upsetting you and in turn Mom and us, so we moved out, and I did ask your permission first — you forget that or just don’t want to remember — I called from California and wrote and in both the call and your letter back you said though you don’t entirely approve of the arrangement, you gave your permission,” “I never gave anything, your mother must have even though I told her not to,” “And that Kraut for a week was a Dane I met there whose parents put me up for a while, and she was a friend, that’s all — we had similar interests in art and literature and looking at cathedrals and so on — and we slept in different rooms in her home and ours,” “Oh, you were shtupping her, don’t tell me — you thought you had a shlong ten feet long that had to be used every night or it would become standard size — well then you should have used it in your own home — I hated all your Gentile girlfriends, there was never anything to them, no looks or brains, with probably tight anti-Semites for parents if they had any money — you were throwing yourself away on them just to get laid,” “You liked them well enough when they were around, and they were always pleasant to you, much more than you rated, seeing what you thought of them — Janine, for example — she made you laugh, held your hand when she talked to you sometimes, treated you with plenty of respect, and if you thought she was ugly and skinny then you have less of an eye for beauty than I ever thought, for weren’t you always boasting you married one? or maybe you only started keeping your glasses filthy when I met her,” “I forget this Janine, most of them looked like the next one, maybe there was an exception some place, but rich, beautiful and Jewish is what I’m saying I wanted for you and you should have too and could have got, for if they have everything a Gentile girl does but also’s Jewish, what’s so wrong with it? — fewer problems, for one thing, because you’re mostly from the same background so understand each other from the beginning, and Jewish girls are as sexy as any — more so most times — maybe it’s in the religion or what’s not in it or what they learn at home — to give a man who gives them a good life everything he wants — and you had the looks, height and brains to get one but you never took advantage of it — then you lost your hair like me — I told you you would — but not like me you didn’t have any money to make up for it, and you were drinking too much and not taking care of yourself in other ways — clothes, even though I said if you were interested in a Jewish girl I’d buy you an entire wardrobe to date her — your beard sometimes, other times a mustache — nobody even knew who you were because of these quick-change acts with your face — and your old sneakers, no socks with them sometimes, you were getting to look like a street rummy with all of this, so then why would they want you?” “I still had a youthful face — it’s genetic, from Mom’s side — and I didn’t shrink or lose as much hair as you at a comparable age or my brains, but I didn’t happen to meet a Jewish girl I liked then, maybe just circumstance,” “You didn’t meet them because you didn’t want to have anything to do with them — they were Jewish, so not as good as far as you were concerned — no small features, stick legs, no invisible nose or breasts — Jewish was trafe for some smart-aleck reason — you only wanted Gentile because they were different from what the rest of our families had and you could shove them into my face because you knew I hated it — consider yourself lucky one didn’t foul you up for good by getting a baby from you and making you pay through the nose for it,” “How do you know one didn’t?” “First of all you had no money for payments to her if she did,” “I’m only talking about the baby part,” “That’s just what they’d do — out of marriage, even when living with their own husbands but from someone else, and right after she screwed with you she’d screw with him and then with both of them smoking a cigarette after she’d tell him she’s pregnant by you and he’d come with a gun after your head, but don’t even insinuate to me you and one woman did, I don’t want to hear it not even as a joke, because if it’s true then you’re finished in my eyes and because of your cavalier attitude to it, in the world’s,” “No, I’m sorry, it never happened, probably I was lucky, and now I’m married and have two wonderful girls and my wife couldn’t be nicer, and she’s Jewish, what do you know? though it had nothing to do with it — I just, well, met her, and she turned out to be that — in fact when I first saw her I thought she wasn’t,” “And it made you more attracted to her,” “No, I was just attracted to her, Jewish or not — the smile, the face and hair, from across the room without her even saying or even looking at me, and her body,” “A full body, what I’ve been talking about, one you can grab and that fills out a dress,” “Some women I knew had full bodies,” “You’ve had them all, I know — big, skinny, one with all legs, another with all neck, you said like a swan’s, I said like a beer bottle — long hair another one had down to the floor and what a mess, one with hair like a marine recruit,” “That’s because it was burned in a fire and had to be cut short,” “Blacks, whites, mostly WASP but a few Chinese thrown in,” “She was Philippine,” “Short and squat, like a baseball catcher, not to mention that greasy thick hair, though if I had my choice I’d take them over the blacks — you made me sick with what you did, but you at least showed the common sense for once not to bring the black to our house,” “I didn’t want to humiliate her,” “And us?” “I didn’t want to tamper with your sensibilities either, though I doubt Mom would have minded — the woman was a very well respected modern dancer, had advanced degrees in other fields and came from a fine professional home,” “So why didn’t you marry her if she was that good?” “She was too rigid sometimes, maybe we were both too self-conscious about our being together and the remarks and stares we got, I found her dull a lot and didn’t love her though she said she did me, so that was why we broke up — I don’t know for sure but I’m glad we did because of what I eventually got,” “A sick woman,” “When I married her she wasn’t, but you’d leave her because she got a disease? — that’s not what Mom did with you,” “We were already thirty-five years married — with yours I would have found out better before I married that she was sick,” “There weren’t any signs,” “Did you look hard enough, did you notice? — you just saw the great body and face and pretty blond hair and wanted to stick what you thought was your big prick in and she’d be impressed, and then you got hooked like all schnooks do with simply having a chunk of pussy always around for them and said ‘May I?’ or ‘Would she?’ and of course she does for by then she’s over thirty and maybe knows she’s got a little illness and getting worse and will probably need lots of taking care of later and her folks can’t live forever and besides all that you finally landed a decent job and dressing better and so forth,” “I was dressing just as badly, maybe better footwear because I discovered sneakers made my feet ache when I walked in them a lot and also now underpants and socks — I could afford them,” “Anyone could afford them, you were just too much of a slob to wear them — pissing the last few drops into your trousers, you didn’t notice but I did, the stains — anyway, I’m saying she was no dope, she knew that no matter how sick she was to become you were the kind of guy — you probably even bragged about it — to stick with her for life, which is all to the good but bad for you,” “How so if I’m helping her? and let me tell you that sometimes I’m not such a nice guy about it too,” “Maybe because you sensed something wasn’t to Hoyle, because to throw away the rest of your life on someone who might have fooled you into thinking she was well when you met her or popped the question?” “That’s not it at all, but you left out dentistry — just want to remind you,” “What about it — I loved the field, yanking out stubborn teeth, fixing the ones that stayed, measuring and then finishing off the plates to perfection and people walking around with them in and complimenting me on how good they fit, besides all the money and the kibitzers who were always dropping in,” “I’m referring to my not going into it,” “You’re proud of it, so you bring it up, but you broke my heart when you stopped taking the sciences in college — you had the personality like me for dentistry — outgoing, unassuming, a boy from the boys — you could have shared my office half time and done what you wanted the other half — write, painted, taken the piano — or we could have had two offices between us and once I retired and you bought me out you would have owned them both — one in the Chrysler building which I always wanted — imagine, that tall a place and so important in architecture, which you must have liked, and up till the last time I checked not a single dentist in it,” “I was terrible in the sciences,” “You could have ignored that you knew I wanted it so much and tried harder and passed and then forgotten them when you got into dental school because you don’t need them there, once in it’s all practical stuff — in fact you can still go back to college, get all the predental subjects out of the way in a year and then go to dental school, people have done it this late in their lives — that famous peaceful man who studied medicine in his forties, then went to Africa with his degree and I think his organ but unlike that guy, since he only wanted to be away from the world, you could make lots of money, take that tiny house of yours and triple it in size, or buy a new one, a ranch house so your wife doesn’t have to walk up the steps and fall down them like in the one now, or a city and country one both, two cars instead of one, garages in the house for when it snows and to keep them from being swiped off the street, drive to your office and garage your car there too, and your girls could have their own ponies, not just dolls of ones, and go to the best of private schools, and you want to go on vacation you get another dentist to cover your practice, like you do for him, and off you go for a month with your wife and a special nurse for her if you want and a nanny to stay with the kids at home, and round-the-clock nurses all the time for her at home if it ever gets that bad, for who else is going to do it and now you haven’t the means,” “Me, I will, I teach college so I’ve time, also because I don’t want nurses around and no nannies for the kids, I want us to bring them up ourselves, I don’t even like a housekeeper in the house for more than a few hours a week — just to clean up in a way I can’t, spots or clumps of dust I never see — I like my quietness, nobody around but the family or at least for extended stays, and if we have to move to a ranch house, which is what, the one-floor family house? then we’ll do it since I make enough to live OK, but I don’t want my girls spoiled with too many things they don’t need, trunks stuffed with dolls, closets with party dresses and dressers with sweaters and hose, certainly not private schools at so early an age unless there are killers or idiot teachers in the public ones they’re assigned to, and nothing to do with ponies or any of the horsey-set pets, just what I need are pony turds all over my yard and the cult of the equine inside, and as a teacher I get longer vacations than a month, we like going to Maine all summer to a simple rented cottage overlooking the ocean and doing our nonschool work there,” “You can buy that ocean cottage and a piece of the ocean, then add a couple of out-of-the-house studios with bathrooms and little kitchens in them so you both can work to your hearts’ content, but probably not in Maine since you want it to be a spot you can go weekends to summers when you have to be at the office and for skiing and short drives up all year,” “If I make enough doing what I’m doing maybe I will buy a cottage on a Maine beach, two bedrooms, where we can each work in one, maybe a little room for a guest, but nothing big where we have to do a lot of furnishing and cleaning up, but look, you got to believe I once really wanted to become a dentist, not to make a great living, or so I sold myself the idea then, but to go to very poor areas here and abroad and work on rotting teeth, but after a few predent courses I knew it wasn’t for me — truthfully, you loved working on mouths, which I admired you for a lot — I love people to have healthy and pain- and stink-free teeth — while I couldn’t even cut up an earthworm in bio