134
PARTISAN REVIEW
radio on. He prefers the television and asks her to take her glasses off.
She agrees to the television, but prefers to lie with her back to it. Now
he can't see it over her shoulder because she is lying on her side. She
can't see it because she is facing him and her glasses are off He asks her
to move her shoulder.
Old Mother hears the footsteps of the Grouch in the lower hall as
he leaves the living room on his way to bed. She looks around the bed–
room to see what will bother him. She removes her feet from his pillow,
stands up from his side of the bed, turns off a few lights, takes her slippers
out of his way into the room, and shuts a dresser drawer. But she knows
she has forgotten something. What he complains about first is the noise
of the white mice running in their cage in the next room, and then the
wrinkled sheets.
"Maybe I could help with that," says Old Mother sincerely as they
are driving in the car, but after what she did the night before she knows
he will not want to think of her as a helpful person. The Grouch only
snorts.
Old Mother shares a small triumph with the Grouch, hoping he will
congratulate her. He remarks that some day she will not bother to feel
proud of that sort of thing.
"I slept like a log," he says in the morning. "What about you?"
Well, most of the night was fine, she explains, but toward morning
she slept lightly, trying to keep still in a position that did not hurt her
neck. She was trying to keep still so as not to bother him, she adds.
Now he is angry.
"How did you sleep?" she asks him on another morning as he comes
downstairs late.
"Not very well," he answers. "I was awake around 1:30. You were
still up."
"No, I wasn't still up at 1:30," she says.
"12:30, then."
"You were very restless," says the Grouch on yet another morning.
"You kept tossing and turning."
"Don't accuse me," says Old Mother.
''I'm not accusing you, I'm just stating the facts. You were very
restless."
"All right: the reason I was restless was that you were snoring."
