PARTISAN REVIEW
229
black line unless green light is flashing. A little cobalt here, a little
cobalt there--eh- -it's like nothing at all. You lay on a table and
this machine goes pzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
J
woke up one
night after her ninth treatment out of a series of twenty, and in a
period of ten minutes pulled out all of her hair and piled it on the
sheet in front of her.
It
came out easily, aimlessly, softly, wherever
she touched, like a November leaf, without pressure or pain. I
scooped it up and flushed it down the toilet. So it goes.
I am lost in Queens. Nuts. I stop and ask a lady where Tinker
Street is, but she doesn't even look at me. It begins to pour and
the Met game is called.
"I remember that," I say to the cop.
"Gowanus to Utopia to Tinker," he says.
"Ah, yes."
It's still raining like hell when my two children step off the
camp bus. I hardly recognize them. My twelve-year-old daughter
with her guitar slung over her back and my ten-year-old son with a
sweatband around his head look like two hitchhikers I didn't pick
up on the way in. We dash for the car soaked through.
"How come Mother didn't come?" Susan asks.
"She's not feeling well."
"The same thing she had before?"
"I thought she was going to get better. You wrote me once
that she was feeling better," Pete says. He is belligerent.
"Well, some days she's better and some days she isn't."
"Susan kissed a boy."
"Oh, shut up."
"I saw her do it. Before we got on the bus at camp."
"Shut up, freak."
"He had pimples allover his face. His nose was one huge
creepy pimple."
She hit him, and he hit her, and they both started to cry. I
pulled the car over to the side of the road and made Pete sit in the
front and Susan in the back. "Nice," I said. "Nice."
"Will Mommy be at the ferry?" Pete asks after a time.
We had to sit in the hold of the ferry going over to Fire
Island. It was still raining pretty hard and it wasn't so pleasant
down there. "Your mother is pretty sick," I say to the two of
them.
