The New Yorker Stories

“How do you know, huh?” Wanda says. “I ask dumb questions. I’m not used to having kids around.” She bends to pick up the match. The tops of her arms are very fat. There are little bumps all over them.

“I got married when I was fifteen,” Wanda says. “Your mother got married when she was eighteen—she had three years on me—and what’s she do but drive all around the country rounding up your dad? I was twenty-one the second time I got married, and that would have worked out fine if he hadn’t died.”

Wanda goes to the refrigerator and gets out the lemonade. She swirls the container. “Shaking bruises it,” she says, making a joke. She pours some lemonade and tequila into a glass and takes a long drink.

“You think I talk to you too much?” Wanda says. “I listen to myself and it seems like I’m not really conversing with you—like I’m a teacher or something.”

May shakes her head sideways.

“Yeah, well, you’re polite. You’re a nice kid. Don’t get married until you’re twenty-one. How old are you now?”

“Twelve,” May says.

After lunch, May goes to the front porch and sits in the white rocker. She looks at her watch—a present from her father—and sees that one of the hands is straight up, the other straight down, between the Road Runner’s legs. It is twelve-thirty. In four and a half hours she and Wanda will eat again. At Wanda’s they eat at nine, twelve, and five. Wanda worries that May isn’t getting enough to eat. Actually, she is always full. She never feels like eating. Wanda eats almost constantly. She usually eats bananas and Bit-O-Honey candy bars, which she carries in her shirt pocket. The shirt belonged to her second husband, who drowned. May found out about him a few days ago. At night, Wanda always comes into her bedroom to tuck her in. Wanda calls it tucking in, but actually she only walks around the room and then sits at the foot of the bed and talks. One of the stories she told was about her second husband, Frank. He and Wanda were on vacation, and late at night they sneaked onto a fishing pier. Wanda was looking at the lights of a boat far in the distance when she heard a splash. Frank had jumped into the water. “I’m cooling off !” Frank hollered. They had been drinking, so Wanda just stood there laughing. Then Frank started swimming. He swam out of sight, and Wanda stood there at the end of the pier waiting for him to swim back. Finally she started calling his name. She called him by his full name. “Frank Marshall!” she screamed at the top of her lungs. Wanda is sure that Frank never meant to drown. They had been very happy at dinner that night. He had bought her brandy after dinner, which he never did, because it was too expensive to drink anything but beer in restaurants.

May thinks that is very sad. She remembers the last time she saw her father. It was when her mother took the caps off her father’s film containers and spit into them. He grabbed her mother’s arm and pushed her out of the room. “The great artist!” her mother hollered, and her father’s face went wild. He has a long, straight nose (May’s is snubbed, like her mother’s) and long, brown hair that he ties back with a rubber band when he rides his motorcycle. Her father is two years younger than her mother. They met in the park when he took a picture of her. He is a professional photographer.

May picks up the National Enquirer and begins to read an article about how Sophia Loren tried to save Richard Burton’s marriage. In a picture, Sophia holds Carlo Ponti’s hand and beams. Wanda subscribes to the National Enquirer. She cries over the stories about crippled children, and prays for them. She answers the ads offering little plants for a dollar. “I always get suckered in,” she says. “I know they just die.” She talks back to the articles and chastises Richard for ever leaving Liz, and Liz for ever having married Eddie, and Liz for running around with a used-car salesman, and all the doctors who think they have a cure for cancer.

After lunch, Wanda takes a nap and then a shower. Afterward, there is always bath powder all over the bathroom—even on the mirror. Then she drinks two shots of tequila in lemonade, and then she fixes dinner. Mrs. Wong comes back from the library punctually at four o’clock. May looks at Wanda’s National Enquirer. She turns the page, and Paul Newman is swimming in water full of big chunks of ice.

Mrs. Wong’s first name is Maria. Her name is written neatly on her notebooks. “Imagine having a student living under my roof !” Wanda says. Wanda went to a junior college with May’s mother but dropped out after the first semester. Wanda and May’s mother have often talked about Mrs. Wong. From them May learned that Mrs. Wong married a Chinese man and then left him, and she has a fifteen-year-old son. On top of that, she is studying to be a social worker. “That ought to give her an opportunity to marry a Negro,” May’s mother said to Wanda. “The Chinese man wasn’t far out enough, I guess.”

Mrs. Wong is back early today. As she comes up the sidewalk, she gives May the peace sign. May gives the peace sign, too.

“Your mama didn’t write, I take it,” Mrs. Wong says.

May shrugs.

“I write my son, and my husband rips up the letters,” Mrs. Wong says. “At least when she does write you’ll get it.” Mrs. Wong sits down on the top step and takes off her sandals. She rubs her feet. “Get to the movies?” she asks.

“She always forgets.”

“Remind her,” Mrs. Wong says. “Honey, if you don’t practice by asserting yourself with women, you’ll never be able to assert yourself with men.”

May wishes that Mrs. Wong were her mother. It would be nice if she could keep her father and have Mrs. Wong for a mother. But all the women he likes are thin and blond and young. That’s one of the things her mother complains about. “Do you wish I strung beads?” her mother shouted at him once. May sometimes wishes that she could have been there when her parents first met. It was in the park, when her mother was riding a bicycle, and her father waved his arms for her to stop so he could take her picture. Her father has said that her mother was very beautiful that day—that he decided right then to marry her.

“How did you meet your husband?” May asks Mrs. Wong.

“I met him in an elevator.”

“Did you go out with him for a long time before you got married?”

“For a year.”

“That’s a long time. My parents only went out together for two weeks.”

“Time doesn’t seem to be a factor,” Mrs. Wong says with a sigh. She examines a blister on her big toe.