“Don’t you read any _real_ poetry? Donne? Auden? Baudelaire?”
Three more torpedoes. “We didn’t get to them yet.”
Nina blows out a great angry cloud of smoke and explodes, “Schools!” Then
she sails out of the kitchen.
I guess I look a little shook up. Mary laughs and shoves a mug of cocoa
and a plate of cinnamon toast in front of me. “Don’t mind Mother. She just
can’t get used to New York schools. Or Coney Island. Or hardly anything
around here.
“She grew up on the Left Bank in Paris. Her father was an artist and her
mother was a writer, and they taught her to read at home, starting with
Chaucer, probably. She never read a kids’ book in her life.
“Anything I ever tell her about school pretty much sounds either childish
or stupid to her. What I really love is science—experiments and stuff—and
she can’t see that for beans.”
“Our science teacher is a dope,” I say, because she is, “so I really never
got very interested in science. But I told Mom and Dad I was coming to the
aquarium to take notes today, so they wouldn’t kick up such a fuss.”
Mary shakes her head. “We ought to get our mothers together. Mine thinks
I’m wasting time if I even _go_ to the aquarium. I do, though, all the
time. I love the walrus.”
“What does your pop do?”
“Father? He teaches philosophy at Brooklyn College. So I get it from both
sides. Just think, think, think. Father and Nina aren’t hardly even
interested in _food_. Once in a while Nina spends all day cooking some
great fish soup or a chicken in wine, but the rest of the time I’m the
only one who takes time off from thinking to cook a hamburger. They live
on rolls and coffee and sardines.”
Mary puts our cups in the sink and then opens a low cupboard. Instead of
pots and pans it has stacks of records in it. She pulls out _West Side
Story_ and then I see there’s a record player on a side table. What d’you
know? A record player in the kitchen! This Left Bank style of living has
its advantages.
“I sit down here and eat and play records while I do my homework,” says
Mary, which sounds pretty nice.
I ask her if she has any Belafonte, and she says, “Yes, a couple,” but she
puts on something else. It’s slow, but sort of powerful, and it makes you
feel kind of powerful yourself, as if you could do anything.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“It’s called ‘The Moldau’—that’s a river in Europe. It’s by a Czech named
Smetana.”
I wander around the kitchen and look out the window. The wind’s still
howling, but not so hard. I remember the ocean, all gray and powerful,
spotted with whitecaps. I’d like to be out on it.
“You know what’d be fun?” I say out loud. “To be out in a boat on the
harbor today. If you didn’t sink.”
“We could take the Staten Island ferry,” Mary says.
“Huh?” I hadn’t even thought there was really any boat we could get on.
“Really? Where do you get it?”
“Down at Sixty-ninth Street and Fourth Avenue. It’s quite a ways. I’ve
always gone there in a car. But maybe we could do it on bikes, if we don’t
freeze.”
“We won’t freeze. But what about bikes?”
“You can use my brother’s. He’s away at college. Maybe I can find a
windbreaker of his, too.”
She finds the things and we get ready and go into the living room, where
Nina is sitting reading and sipping a glass of wine.
“We’re going on our bikes to the ferry and over to Staten Island,” Mary
says. She doesn’t even ask.
“Oh-h-h.” It’s a long, low note, faintly questioning.
“We thought with the wind blowing and all, it’d be exciting,” Mary
explains, and I think, Uh-o, that’s going to cook it. _My_ mother would
have kittens if I said I was going out on a ferry in a storm.
But Nina just says, “I see,” and goes back to reading her book. I say
good-bye and she looks up again and smiles, and that’s all.
It’s another funny thing—Nina doesn’t seem to pay any attention to who
Mary brings home, like most mothers are always snooping if their daughter
brings home a guy. Without stopping to think, I say, “Do you bring home a
lot of guys?”
Mary laughs. “Not a lot. Sometimes one of the boys at school comes home
when we’re studying for a science test.”
I laugh, too, but what I’m thinking of is how Pop would look if I brought
a girl home and said we were studying for a test!
14
[Illustration: Dave and Mary on ferry with other people.]