The Stand

little.

“Yeah, so you said. Mr. Geoghan is gonna be on us like a ton of bricks if the damned floor-wax doesn’t stop going out.”

“I didn’t get in a barroom fight and I wasn’t in a strip-joint. It wasn’t anything like that. It was just…” He trailed off.

She turned around, eyebrows arched in that old sardonic way he remembered so well. “Was what?”

“Well…” He couldn’t think of a convincing lie quick enough. “It was. A. Uh. Spatula.”

“Someone mistook you for a fried egg? Must have been quite a night you and Buddy had out on the town.”

He kept forgetting that she could run rings around him, had always been able to, probably always would.

“It was a girl, Ma. She threw it at me.”

“She must be a hell of a shot,” Alice Underwood said, and turned away again. “That dratted Consuela is hiding the requisition forms again. Not that they do much good; we never get all the stuff we need, but we get plenty I wouldn’t know what to do with if my life depended on it.”

“Ma, are you mad at me?”

Her hands suddenly dropped to her sides. Her shoulders slumped.

“Don’t be mad at me,” he whispered. “Don’t be, okay? Huh?”

She turned around and he saw an unnatural sparkle in her eyes—well, he supposed it was natural enough, but it sure wasn’t caused by the fluorescents in here, and he heard the oral hygienist say once more, with great finality: You ain’t no nice guy. Why had he ever bothered to come home if he was going to do stuff like this to her… and never mind what she was doing to him.

“Larry,” she said gently. “Larry, Larry, Larry.”

For a moment he thought she was going to say no more; even allowed himself to hope this was so.

“Is that all you can say? ‘Don’t be mad at me, please, Ma, don’t be mad’? I hear you on the radio, and even though I don’t like that song you sing, I’m proud it’s you singing it. People ask me if that’s really my son and I say yes, that’s Larry. I tell them you could always sing, and that’s no lie, is it?”

He shook his head miserably, not trusting himself to speak.

“I tell them how you picked up Donny Roberts’s guitar when you were in junior high and how you were playing better than him in half an hour, even though he had lessons ever since second grade. You got talent, Larry, nobody ever had to tell me that, least of all you. I guess you knew it, too, because it’s the only thing I never heard you whine about. Then you went away, and am I beating you about the head and shoulders with that? No. Young men and young women, they go away. That’s the nature of the world. Sometimes it stinks, but it’s natural. Then you come back. Does somebody have to tell me why that is? No. You come back because, hit record or no hit record, you got in some kind of jam out there on the West Coast.”

“I’m not in any trouble!” he said indignantly.

“Yes you are. I know the signs. I’ve been your mother for a long time, and you can’t bullshit me, Larry. Trouble is something you have always looked around for when you couldn’t just turn your head and see it. Sometimes I think you’d cross the street to step in dogshit. God will forgive me for saying it, because God knows it’s true. Am I mad? No. Am I disappointed? Yes. I had hoped you would change out there. You didn’t. You went away a little boy in a man’s body and you came back the same way, except the man got his hair processed. You know why I think you came home?”

He looked at her, wanting to speak, but knowing the only thing he would be able to say if he did would make them both mad: Don’t cry, Mom, huh?

“I think you came home because you couldn’t think where else to go. You didn’t know who else would take you in. I never said a mean word about you to anyone else, Larry, not even to my own sister, but since you’ve pushed me to it, I’ll tell you exactly what I think of you. I think you’re a taker. You’ve always been one. It’s like God left some part of you out when He built you inside of me. You’re not bad, that’s not what I mean. Some of the places we had to live after your father died, you would have gone bad if there was bad in you, God knows. I think the worst thing I ever caught you doing was writing a nasty word in the downstairs hall of that place on Carstairs Avenue in Queens. You remember that?”

He remembered. She had chalked that same word on his forehead and then made him walk around the block with her three times. He had never written that word or any other word on a building, wall, or stoop.

“The worst part, Larry, is that you mean well. Sometimes I think it would almost be a mercy if you were broke worse. As it is, you seem to know what’s wrong but not how to fix it. And I don’t know how, either. I tried every way I knew when you were small. Writing that word on your forehead, that was only one of them… and by then I was getting desperate, or I never would have done such a mean thing to you. You’re a taker, that’s all. You came home to me because you knew that I have to give. Not to everybody, but to you.”

“I’ll move out,” he said, and every word was like spitting out a dry ball of lint. “This afternoon.”

Then it came to him that he probably couldn’t afford to move out, at least not until Wayne sent him his next royalty check—or whatever was left of it after he finished feeding the hungriest of the L.A. hounds—on to him. As for current out-of-pocket expenses, there was the rent on the parking slot for the Datsun Z, and a hefty payment he would have to send out by Friday, unless he wanted the friendly neighborhood repo man looking for him, and he didn’t. And after last night’s revel, which had begun so innocently with Buddy and his fiancee and this oral hygienist the fiancee knew, a nice girl from the Bronx, Larry, you’ll love her, great sense of humor, he was pretty low on cash. No. If you wanted to be accurate, he was busted to his heels. The thought made him panicky. If he left his mother’s now, where would he go? A hotel? The doorman at any hotel better than a fleabag would laugh his ass off and tell him to get lost. He was wearing good threads, but they knew. Somehow those bastards knew. They could smell an empty wallet.

“Don’t go,” she said softly. “I wish you wouldn’t, Larry. I bought some food special. Maybe you saw it. And I was hoping maybe we could play some gin rummy tonight.”

“Ma, you can’t play gin,” he said, smiling a little.

“For a penny a point, I can beat the tailgate off a kid like you.”

“Maybe if I gave you four hundred points—”

“Listen to the kid,” she jeered softly. “Maybe if I gave you four hundred. Stick around, Larry. What do you say?”

“All right,” he said. For the first time that day he felt good, really good. A small voice inside whispered he was taking again, same old Larry, riding for free, but he refused to listen. This was his mother, after all, and she had asked him. It was true that she had said some pretty hard things on the way to asking, but asking was asking, true or false? “Tell you what. I’ll pay for our tickets to the game on July fourth. I’ll just peel it off the top of whatever I skin you out of tonight.”

“You couldn’t skin a tomato,” she said amiably, then turned back to the shelves. “There’s a men’s down the hall. Why don’t you go wash the blood off your forehead? Then take ten dollars out of my purse and go to a movie. There’s some good movie-houses over on Third Avenue, still. Just stay out of those scum-pits around Forty-ninth and Broadway.”

“I’ll be giving money to you before long,” Larry said. “Record’s number eighteen on the Billboard chart this week. I checked it in Sam Goody’s coming over here.”

“That’s wonderful. If you’re so loaded, why didn’t you buy a copy, instead of just looking?”

Suddenly there was some kind of a blockage in his throat. He harrumphed, but it didn’t go away.

“Well, never mind,” she said. “My tongue’s like a horse with a bad temper. Once it starts running, it just has to go on running until it’s tired out. You know that. Take fifteen, Larry. Call it a loan. I guess I will get it back, one way or the other.”

“You will,” he said. He came over to her and tugged at the hem of her dress like a little boy. She looked down. He stood on tiptoe and kissed her cheek. “I love you, Ma.”

She looked startled, not at the kiss but either at what he had said or the tone in which he had said it. “Why, I know that, Larry,” she said.

“About what you said. About being in trouble. I am, a little, but it’s not—”

Her voice was cold and stern at once. So cold, in fact, that it frightened him a little. “I don’t want to hear about