“What was wrong?” she asked. They were walking down Fifth Avenue, having wandered far from the apartment after dinner. She had asked it not so much because she was convinced that Griffin was bothered by something, but rather because she was wondering aloud.
“Nothing’s wrong. You don’t like it when I’m moody, and when I’m not you act as though I am.”
“I didn’t mean to criticize you. I was wondering aloud, really. That’s all I meant.”
“Was it like other Christmases?”
“No. It was quieter.”
“Do they usually get along?”
“Who?” she said.
“Your mother and father.”
“They’ve always gotten along.”
He was swinging her hand, answering but not paying too much attention to the conversation.
“They’re always like that?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Then they don’t get along. Or they get along, but there’s something wrong.”
“What’s wrong?” she said, trying to remember if it was true that they always acted that way.
“It’s obvious, isn’t it? He’s a famous man and she’s his wife, and she’s in awe of him but also resents him.”
For the first time she lifted her head from staring at the sidewalk to look at him.
“Let’s not be serious on Christmas,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Later, on the walk home, she thought uncomfortably about her response to Griffin. It had been too deferential. Her mother, all her life, had been too deferential to her father. As they walked farther she thought that there was some logic to that at least: her father was Horace Cragen. But Griffin was only Griffin, and he shouldn’t declare her moods. Sorry that she had said she was sorry, she eased her hand out of his and plunged it into the deep silk-lined pocket of her coat.
They had just begun to live together.
In February her father sent her a new poem. Much of it she did not understand, but the allusions to their days roller-skating — the parts of the poem about her — she understood well. She left it on the table, with the morning mail, along with the letter from her father.
“What’s this?” he said, sitting at the kitchen table and trying to rub some life into his body. He had gotten little sleep, in spite of the fact that it was almost eleven o’clock, because he had gone to a jazz club with his friend Tony and then gone drinking at another friend’s apartment after the bars closed.
“Go ahead and read it,” she answered.
When he had come back at four in the morning, drunk, they had quarreled: hadn’t he said he wouldn’t drink to get drunk anymore? Didn’t he think she might worry — couldn’t he have called? He picked up the poem and read it, and then the letter, too. The letter asked her if she would come to her father’s favorite cousin’s remarriage on February 25—just the time she and Griffin had planned to visit friends up north.
“So what are you telling him?” he said. He shook the coffee jar but did not get up to make coffee.
“I think I should go, if you don’t mind delaying the trip a week.”
“Charlie and Inez will have to be out of the house then. They only rent it for February. The weekend after that is March.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I still think I ought to go. I haven’t seen them since Christmas, and he’s been depressed because his back has been bothering him.”
“I haven’t seen my parents since Christmas either.”
“I get along with my parents, and you don’t get along with yours.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” he said. “I sit like a stone with my parents, and you sit like a stone with yours.”
“That’s untrue! What are you talking about?”
“Forget it,” he said. “Go to the wedding. I’m going to Charlie and Inez’s.”
“Since you prefer getting drunk to being with me, I don’t see why you’re sulking.”
“Because I’m sorry for you, goddamn it. Because he’s ordering you around, and I don’t like that. Because he sent that sentimental poem about his baby girl, and after stroking her with the pen stabbed her in the heart and told her to come home.”
She looked at him to see if he could be serious. He looked very serious.
“You’re wrong,” she said.
“You are,” he said.
He went into the bedroom and dressed, and left the apartment without saying goodbye. Either he was crazy, or she was crazy. And she was sorry for him—he had looked so sick when he came into the kitchen. He had been sick from the night before. Since he was not there to talk to, she talked to herself. Through clenched teeth she said, “They are a poem and a letter.” She took them both with her when she went back to the bedroom and stretched out on the still-unmade bed. She did not go to class.
March was a good month for them, and April was, too, until late in the month when he lost his job at the library. His friend Tony got him a job selling shoes, and he needed the money (he no longer would accept anything from his parents), but he found the job unbearable. All day women would come in and try to fit into shoes that were too small and that the store did not have in their size, and Griffin was supposed to tell them that he would take the shoes in the back and put them on the shoe stretcher. The shoe stretcher was a mop handle which he inserted in the shoe, then whomped down hard: the pressure would break the lining in the toe, and the women would have a fraction of an inch more room. Tony, who worked in the store part-time and was always stoned, thought it was hilarious. But after a week Griffin was miserable and began to drink again — this time topping off the evening by smoking grass with Tony. He went back to the apartment and fought with her, and she went into a rage, throwing clothes into a suitcase, saying that she was not going to live with him any longer. But she looked back and saw him, pale-faced and probably sorry for what he had said — he told her so often that he was sorry for blaming her for things she couldn’t help and to please forgive him — and she threw the things from the suitcase to the floor, shaking her head at him and at herself: if she was leaving, why would she take the Equadorian sweater but not a nightgown? Throwing things so randomly into the suitcase, she could not even have appeared serious to him about going.
“I think about what my father did to me — about how he implied it was all right not to consider women’s feelings — the way he was to my mother, taking her along, taking her hand the same way he took mine — on his outings. And it’s no wonder it’s taking me so long to know how to act.”
He lit a cigarette. When he drank, or was hung-over, he had begun to smoke cigarettes.
“You’re obsessed with your father,” she said. Before, she had screamed that, but now it was such a familiar line that she said it quietly, perturbed but stating the obvious. “Forget about your father and live your life.”