558
THALIA SELZ
with this habitual loftiness that is not hauteur so much as the
result of her persistent romanticism.
At twelve I consider my mother absolutely the creature of
her dreams. She must make a ritual even of our l!imple, monot–
onous meals! But faced with exposure I feel my stomach curling
up to tap startlingly at my palate. I swallow it back down again,
and Jason sniggers the dirty snot-eyed pig behind
his
smelly
paw. I am contemplating him being run over by a railroad
train, when my mother quite simply puts Joshua X. down
beside me, places a napkin between his transparent fingers,
ladles stew onto his sunset-colored plate, and tells him not to
wait ...
"We are never
polite
with each other in the family circle."
She makes politeness sound like B.O.
Joshua X. did not get to sleep on the iron maiden in the
basement. (Oh, honor those harsh spikes, corners, and springs
smelling of rust and, deliciously, of moist cement; they've pierced
courage into many a poor stumblebum!) Mother put him on
the parlor couch, but the next morning she would not allow
Jason or me to touch anything in the room until he returned
with a pink OK slip from the chest X-ray unit in the neighbor–
hood clinic. Then she carefully made up the couch herself,
tenderly folding her ancestors and my father's and laying them
away in the coat closet till evening,
"Anyhow, I
won't
have
him
sleeping in the basement.
He
is
much
too frail! Daphne, see that he gets fresh bedding every
week, like the rest of us."
"How long is he going to stay, Mother?" My love was
already blooming in bleeding stigmata on my underdeveloped
bosom, but she didn't notice.
"Daphne, we never ask a guest how long he is going to
stay." She was embarrassed for me: with the Otis and Kara–
moulis blood in my veins I should have known better
instinctively
than to breathe the vaguest suggestion of a termination to his
visit.
