"So," he says. "You see Stavros again?"
"You told me not to."
"Big deal, what I tell you. How was he? Still clutching his heart?"
"He's touching. Just the way he carries himself."
"Boo hoo. You analyze me some more?"
"No, we were selfish, we talked about ourselves. He saw right through me. We were halfway into the first drink and he looks me up and down through those tinted glasses and says, `You work the field don't you?' Gimme a peanut."
He tosses a fistful overhanded; they pelt her on the chest. She is wearing a twitchy little dress that buttons down the front and whose pattern imitates lizardskin. When she puts her feet up on the hassock he sees clear to the crotch of her pantyhose. She acts lazy and soft; her eyes have relented, though the makeup shines as if freshly applied. "That's all you did?" he asks. "Eat lunch."
"Th-that's all, f-f-folks."
"What're you tryin' to prove? I thought you came East to help Mom."
"To help her help you. How can I help her, I'm no doctor."
"Well, I really appreciate your help, fucking my wife's boyfriend like this."
Mim laughs at the ceiling, showing Harry the horseshoe curve of her jaw's underside, the shining white jugular bulge. As if cut by a knife the laugh ends. She studies her brother gravely, impudently. "If you had a choice, who would you rather went to bed with him, her or me?"
"Her. Janice, I can always have too, I mean it's possible; but you, never.
"I know," Mim gaily agrees. "Of all the men in the world, you're the only one off bounds. You and Pop."
` And how does that make me seem?"
She focuses hard on him, to get the one-word answer. "Ridiculous."
"That's what I thought. Hey, Jesus. Did you really give Stavros a bang today? Or're you just getting my goat? Where would you go? Wouldn't Janice miss him at the office?"
"Oh – he could say he was out on a sale or something," Mim offers, bored now. "Or he could tell her to mind her own business. That's what European men do." She stands, touches all the buttons in the front of her lizardskin dress to make sure they're done. "Let's go visit Mom." Mim adds, "Don't fret. Years ago, I made it a rule never to be with a guy more than three times. Unless there was some percentage in getting involved."
That night Mim gets them all dressed and out to dinner, at the Dutch smorgasbord diner north toward the ball park. Though Mom's head waggles and she has some trouble cutting the crust of her apple pie, she manages pretty well and looks happy: how come he and Pop never thought of getting her out of the house? He resents his own stupidity, and tells Mim in the hall, as they go in to their beds – she is back in her old room, Nelson sleeps with him now – "You're just little Miss Fix-It, aren't you?"
"Yes," she snaps, "and you're just big Mister Muddle." She begins undoing her buttons in front of him, and closes her door only after he has turned away.
Saturday morning she takes Nelson in her Toronado over to the Fosnachts; Janice has arranged with Mom that she and Peggy will do something all day with the boys. Though it takes twenty minutes to drive from Mt. Judge to West Brewer, Mim is gone all morning and comes back to the house after two. Rabbit asks her, "How was it?"
"What? "
"No, seriously. Is he that great in the sack, or just about average in your experience? My theory for a while was there must be something wrong with him, otherwise why would he latch on to Janice when he can have all these new birds coming up?"
"Maybe Janice has wonderful qualities."
"Let's talk about him. Relative to your experience." He imagines that all men have been welded into one for her, faces and voices and chests and hands welded into one murmuring pink wall, as once for him the audience at those old basketball games became a single screaming witness that was the world. "To your wide experience," he qualifies.
"Why don't you tend your own garden instead of hopping around nibbling at other people's?" Mim asks. When she turns in that clown outfit, her lower half becomes a gate of horizontal denim stripes.
"I have no garden," he says.
"Because you didn't tend it at all. Everybody else has a life they try to fence in with some rules. You just do what you feel like and then when it blows up or runs down you sit there and pout."
"Christ," he says, "I went to work day after day for ten years."
Mim tosses this off. "You felt like it. It was the easiest thing to do."
"You know, you're beginning to remind me of Janice."
She turns again; the gate opens. "Charlie told me Janice is fantastic. A real wild woman."
Sunday Mim stays home all day. They go for a drive in Pop's old Chevy, out to the quarry, where they used to walk. The fields that used to be dusted white with daisies and then yellow with goldenrod are housing tracts now; of the quarry only the great gray hole in the ground remains. The Oz-like tower ofsheds and chutes where the cement was processed is gone, and the mouth of the cave where children used to hide and frighten themselves is sealed shut with bulldozed dirt and rusted sheets of corrugated iron. "Just as well," Mom pronounces. "Awful things. Used to happen there. Men and boys." They eat at the aluminum diner out on Warren Street, with a view of the viaduct, and this meal out is less successful than the last. Mom refuses to eat. "No appetite," she says, yet Rabbit and Mim think it is because the booths are close and the place is bright and she doesn't want people to see her fumble. They go to a movie. The movie page of the Vat advertises: I Am Curious Yellow, Midnight Cowboy, a double bill of Depraved and The Circus (Girls Never Played Games Like This Before!), a Swedish X-film titled Yes, and Funny Girl. Funny Girl sounds like more of the same but it has Barbra Streisand; there will be music. They make it late to the 6:30 show. Mom falls asleep and Pop gets up and walks around in the back of the theater and talks to the usher in a penetrating whine until one of the scattered audience calls out "Shh." On the way out, the lights on, a trio of hoods give Mim such an eye Rabbit gives them back the finger. Blinking in the street, Mom says, "That was nice. But really Fanny. Was very ugly. But stylish. And a gangster. She always knew Nick Arnstein was a gangster. Everybody. Knew it."
"Good for her," Mim says.
"It isn't the gangsters who are doing the country in," Pop says. "If you ask me it's the industrialists. The monster fortunes. The Mellons and the du Ponts, those are the cookies we should put in jail."
Rabbit says, "Don't get radical, Pop."
"I'm no radical," the old man assures him, "you got to be rich to be radical."
Monday, a cloudy day, is Harry's first day out of work. He is awake at seven but Pop goes off to work alone. Nelson goes with him; he still goes to school in West Brewer and switches buses on Weiser. Mim leaves the house around eleven, she doesn't say where to. Rabbit scans the want ads in the Brewer Standard. Accountant. Administrative Trainee. Apprentice Spray Painter. Auto Mechanic. Bartender. The world is full of jobs, even with Nixon's Depression. He skips down through Insurance Agents and Programmers to a column of Salesmen and then turns to the funnies. Goddam Apartment 3-G: he feels he's been living with those girls for years now, when is he going to see them with their clothes off? The artist keeps teasing him with bare shoulders in bathrooms, naked legs in the foreground with the crotch coming just at the panel edge, glimpses of bra straps being undone. He calculates: after two months' pay from Verity he has thirty-seven weeks of welfare and then he can live on Pop's retirement. It is like dying now: they don't let you fall though, they keep you up forever with transfusions, otherwise you'll be an embarrassment to them. He skims the divorce actions and doesn't see himself and goes upstairs to Mom.