Boys!

It was as if I heard a hiss come out of my mother, or she was letting me have it some way with air when I said to her You look so beautiful.

But she didn’t do that.

What she did do was she looked at me.

Maybe not even that, because I was standing—my mouth was at her ear—when I said You look so beauti­ful, so that no one else sitting at the table would hear. Was I whispering because her face had looked to me manhandled, if that were possible, with dips and curves lying pleasingly on her, pleasingly to me on her face?

So what happened then? Because it was her turn. Was I pulled away to say something to someone else?

No, I think I sat back down next to her. There was no getting away from her. I had been put there with her for the meal.

But I did not look at her. I was looking to see the shine on my plate rim, the sauce shine on my meal, and I was seeing the beauty of the man next to me, which was so careful in his hair, in his wife’s hair that matched his hair, in his wife’s pink mouth when she spoke. And with all this beauty going on, my knife, I kept it slicing competently through my meal. I kept it slicing, and I kept putting my knife back into the correct station on the rim of my plate after having sliced.

So when my meal was finished, and I felt that it was finished with no trouble, I got up and I left the people at the table. It must have been just for a moment when I got up, which was to go to the commotion why I finally got up, not to leave my mother—because I am a mother, too, and the commotion was my problem, my children, a disorganization.

My children were going around and around the ta­ble. I think that they were going so fast that I could not have caught the sleeve of even the youngest, even if I had tried reaching out for it. I think, maybe, I did try reaching out for it. But perhaps I didn’t.

They all must have been waiting for me for what I would do, everyone else at the table—all the grown-up people—but I was just looking at my children, my children going on and on, and their noise was like huge spills to me that kept being sudden and kept pouring.

And it was pleasing to me, then it was, in a certain way, the motion and the commotion, the children get­ting away from me, and I was watching it, and it was all my fault until the time when it would be over, and it wasn’t as if anything could be ruined, I didn’t think.

Then I called Boys! which I thought was loud, but when I hardly heard the word, because it was as if I had sent the word away, when the children hardly heard the word—they must not have—then I knew it must have been very faint out of my mouth, or just loud enough to be just another push of air to send them around again, to keep them going.

Then I saw a little girl, little enough that I must have missed her when she was going around with the boys, someone else’s little girl, shorter than my littlest boy, that I did not know.

She must have thought she was so cute. The girl looked full of glee to me, and I was standing there, waiting for some other mother, the mother of the girl I did not know, to stand up and do something—because it was clear to me then that this little girl was the cause, that it was all her fault, and that she was the one in charge.