PARTISAN REVIEW
"She'd be better off in a home," he says as he always says at
this hour, and nobody ever answers.
At the window the old woman busily twists and twists the body
of the doll. Sometimes she makes a show of hiding it in a fold of her
cotton skirt and waits for someone to notice, and sometimes she lets
it fall and plays with her own gnarled fingers a while, but she always
comes back to it, and always after a time
will
throw it out the window.
She looks like the father and like the boy. They all have the same
long narrow nose quirked up at the end, the eyes too close together
and the big cheek-bones wide, only from her jaw-bone the skin drapes
away, colorless and used up like the kitchen towels.
She weaves her secret fabrics from the shreds of stuffing at the
doll's neck, while like a tin roof in the sun the high note from the
juke-box next door establishes itself as a thing outside of time, im–
pervious and interminable, and the heat crawls on centipede feet
through the hairs on
all
their bodies.
The father brings the razor once down his cheek and when he
shakes the razor the lather drops in the sink like a cow patty.
"Anyway there're too many nigger drivers in this town."
"He wasn't a nigger."
"I never said he was. I said there're too many nigger drivers
driving taxis in this town. You can't hardly trust yourself in the
street."
"Driving along one minute and dead the next."
"He's no more dead than you are."
"You can still see it," the sister says from the window, this time
with .awe. "You can still see the wet place, right where it was before."
"Cluck cluck cluck," goes the old woman, rattling her teeth.
It seems that no day has ever been different from this one, and
there will never be any other time of the day. The boy might just
as well be his father or his grandmother or the doll without a head;
there is no difference between them.
The mother tells him to take the baby down to the yard, and
after they have been there a while the doll falls again with a little
soft padding sound in the dust near
his
feet.
Nothing matters, there is nothing he wants to do. All the noises
he hears seem to come through some thick moist substance like the
fat of the women's arms at the windows, so that there is no difference
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