‘You left your dirty work clothes in the middle of the bathroom floor.’
‘I was just going back to pick them up,’ Reb said. He was hastily tucking in his shirttails when his mother came into his room.
Reb was the youngest of her three children, the only one of them still with her, and at one and the same time Angelina was amused and exasperated by him. ‘And another thing. After you take a shower I want you to get in the habit of wiping the glass around the tub.’
‘Wiping the glass. What for?’
‘The water leaves white spots if you don’t.’
‘But the thing ain’t worth having if you have to wipe it every time,’ Reb said.
‘I don’t care. I want to keep it looking nice and new. When you finish drying yourself pass the towel over the glass. How long does that take?’
‘Okay, Ma, okay.’ He spent half his time trying to outfox and outmaneuver her and the other half shamelessly getting around her. It was a science.
He knew just what word would disarm her, what tone would melt her. For her part the moment she detected what he was up to she laughed and let him win. The moment he won he relented and conceded something to her. It was like a crucial contest played out in fun.
Last year they had remodeled the kitchen, this year the bathroom. The bathroom was Angelina’s pride. She had chosen the color of the fixtures and tiles herself. Sunny yellow. The new tub was enclosed with sliding glass panels. Reb knew she brought people upstairs to show the room off.
Angelina hovered over a table, examining the stack of shirts he had brought home that afternoon from a Chinese laundry. ‘Haven’t I told you over and over I don’t want you throwing money away sending your shirts out? I want to do them for you.’
‘But I got so many, Ma. And the laundry does them cheap.’ He spoke to her over his shoulder, inspecting his closet and wondering what clothes to pack.
‘Look at this. When I iron a collar is this the way it comes out? Only a few years ago you were wild if I didn’t do your shirts just so. You used to be so particular.’
‘I just don’t want you killing yourself washing and ironing all them shirts any more, that’s all.’ The old closet was tall and narrow and so tightly hung with clothes that he seldom bothered to wear anything it held. Instead he had begun building himself a new closet with shelves and sliding doors along one whole wall. The drawers of two small bureaus were stuffed with shirts and sweaters. He had a cache of at least two dozen dress shirts, almost half French cuffed, most in mint condition, all of them inaccessible. The bulging closet held eight or nine suits but over and over he wore only the same couple of handy ones that hung on a hook behind his door and some six or so shirts that went in a shuttle to the Chinese laundry.
‘What will people think of your mother if you wear a shirt like this?’
‘Which is it, Ma? You worried I’m wasting money or you worried what people are going to say about you?’
She laughed. ‘Got a clean handkerchief?’
‘Yeah. But do me a favor and get my razor and toothbrush for me, will you?’
She took away his wet towel. He chose a necktie and moved to the window where he nervously eyed the driveway. No sign of his father yet. His sister Livvy’s two kids were at the far end of the yard playing under the pear trees. Behind the garage the old bathtub with its claw feet lay on its side.
In the last couple of years change had come over the whole neighborhood. Gone were the sprawling stacks and piles of useless or unused bits of material: sand and brick and stone, rusting machinery, rusted iron pipes, broken cement blocks, bleached planks, rotting cords of firewood. Gone even were the clumps of chokecherry under which this treasure had once been stored. Gone was the big shed out behind the garage where Soderini had kept staging timber and sawhorses. One by one the bevy of chicken sheds, pens, and rabbit hutches had disappeared. As had the occasional neighborhood goat and the pigs. Trucks were fewer too, vegetable gardens smaller, and what remained of them was no longer fenced with iron bedsteads and wire and scraps of wood. No one grew grapes or made wine anymore. Money and order had come, the place had risen into respectability, and now there were tidy lawns and flowerbeds. The clawfooted tub stood in decay, chipped, stained, oozing rust, a relic, a memento. Already at twentytwo for Reb a world was dead. Angelina returned with the toilet articles. Reb went to her, the tie draped around his neck, and gave her his back. She fit the necktie under his collar and patted the collar down smooth.
‘I hope you’re still going down the beach,’ she said. ‘I picked a lot of tomatoes for you.’ He thanked her. ‘I put the bag in your car. They’re all washed.’ He knotted his tie before the mirror and gave his hair a few quick licks with a comb, then was on his knees looking under the bed. ‘You seen my suitcase anywhere?’
‘You never let me touch anything in here.’ Her eyes went around the room. The new closet was framed but still unpaneled. One door was partly hung, the other waited against a wall. The few finished shelves were piled with socks and underwear. Tools, sawdust, plywood scraps, unopened boxes of vinyl tile lay everywhere. She sighed.
‘Oh, Ma, don’t start that again now. I know it’s a pigsty but soon as I get the chance I’ll finish it.’ He sprang up, brightening. Maybe she had been nagging his father to get after him about the room and that’s what Emilio wanted to speak to him about. But what did Kropotkin and the encyclopedia have to do with his bedroom? The gloom fell again.
‘How many times I’ve heard that story. Just get it done, will you? Your father had a look around the other day and he agrees with me. You don’t let me do anything in here but make the bed and I’m so ashamed when people come.’
‘People? What do you mean people? Why do you have to bring people in my room?’ But he saw her unhappiness and changed his tone. ‘Hey, if you want to worry worry about what I’m going to carry my clothes in. How about going down in the kitchen and finding me a nice big shopping bag, okay?’
He laid various clothes out on the bed, wondering who he could have lent his suitcase to. To rush or not to rush, that was the question. Should he bolt before his father got home or make only moderate haste and attempt a less deliberate getaway? He decided it would be fair simply to leave when he was ready if by then Soderini had not returned. Foraying into the old closet he found himself rushing to locate the suit coat that matched the trousers he was wearing. He heard Angelina come up the stairs.
Asking what else he wanted from the garden she nudged him aside and began refolding and packing his clothes.
‘That’s okay, Ma. Just the tomatoes.’
‘We’re having beans with prosciutto tonight.’
‘I smelled it.’
‘Sit down and have a dish before you go.’ He let the suggestion pass.
‘What’s the matter. Beans with prosciutto. It’s your favorite dish,’ she said.
‘Gee, Ma, I haven’t got time now.’ It was a plea. He was having kittens with the way she was taking such pains with the packing.
She allowed his impatience to make no impression on her and launched into a litany of warnings and instructions. She had picked him some lettuces, which he was to wash carefully because she had not had time to and there were bugs and everything in the garden. Each leaf right under the faucet was the idea and not just to run water over the whole head. He said he knew all that. If they were eating sausages, she continued, you had to cook pork a long time otherwise you could get sick. He knew that too but to cause no further delay he said nothing. Pork had to be cooked until the pink was all gone, the lesson concluded.
‘Ma, you don’t have to tell me everything.’
‘I don’t? You need someone just to follow you around.’
‘Am I that bad?’ He put on his hurt tone. ‘You marry a nice girl and I’ll be happy.’
‘And build me a nice house out in back?’
‘Yes. You know there’s plenty of room here and you’re always welcome to live in this house. But if you want to build your own place in back that’s fine with me. I know every girl likes to have her own home today.’
It was a whole litter of kittens now.
‘Look, Ma. It’s getting late and I’m in a hurry. Why don’t you just go down and put all the salad stuff in the car, huh.’ Then he buttered his voice and added, ‘Please?’