starboard on the walk down the hall, I remember - he'd had f6ur or five beers with his dinner to go with the nine or ten he'd took on over the course of the afternoon. Once we were inside the room, he stood there lookin at me so long I asked him if he saw anythin green.
'No,' he says, 'but I seen a man down there in that restaurant lookin up your dress, Dolores. His eyes were just about hangin out on springs. And you knew he was lookin, didn't you?'
I almost told him Gary Cooper coulda been sittin in the corner with Rita Hayworth and I wouldn't have known it, and then thought, Why bother? It didn't do any good to argue with Joe when he'd been drinkin; I didn't go into that marriage with my eyes entirely shut, and I'm not gonna try to kid you that I did.
'If there was a man lookin up my dress, why didn't you go over and tell him to shut his eyes, Joe?' I asked. It was only a joke - maybe I was tryin to turn him aside, I really don't remember - but he didn't take it as a joke. That I do remember. Joe wasn't a man to take a joke; in fact, I'd have to say he had almost no sense of humor at all. That was something I didn't know goin into it with him; I thought back then that a sense of humor was like.a nose, or a pair of ears - that some worked better than others, but everybody had one.
He grabbed me, and turned me over his knee, and paddled me with his shoe. 'For the rest of your life, nobody's gonna have any idear what color underwear you've got on but me, Dolores,' he said. 'Do you hear that? Nobody but me.'
I actually thought it was a kind of love-play, him pretendin to be jealous to flatter me - that's what a little ninny I was. It was jealousy, all right, but love had nothing to do with it. It was more like the way a dog will put a paw over his bone and growl if you come too near it. I didn't know that then, so I put up with it. Later on I put up with it because I thought a man hittin his wife from time to time was only another part of bein married - not a nice part, but then, cleanin toilets ain't a nice part of bein married, either, but most women have done their fair share of it after the bridal dress and veil have been packed away in the attic. Ain't they, Nancy?
My own Dad used his hands on my Mum from time to time, and I suppose that was where I got the idear that it was all right - just somethin to be put up with. I loved my Dad dearly, and him and her loved each other dearly, but he could be a handsy kind of man when she had a hair layin just right across his ass.
I remember one time, I must have been, oh I'm gonna say nine years old, when Dad came in from hayin George Richards's field over on the West End, and Mum didn't have his dinner on. I can't remember anymore why she didn't, but I remember real well what happened when he came in. He was wearin only his biballs (he'd taken his workboots and socks off out on the stoop because they were full of chaff), and his face and shoulders was burned bright red. His hair was sweated against his temples, and there was a piece of hay stuck to his forehead right in the middle of the lines that waved across his brow. He looked hot and tired and ready to be pissed off.
He went into the kitchen and there wasn't nothing on the table but a glass pitcher with flowers in it. He turns to Mum and says, 'Where's my supper, dummy?' She opened her mouth, but before she could say anythin, he put his hand over her face and pushed her down in the corner. I was standin in the kitchen entry and seen it all. He come walkin toward me with his head lowered and his hair kinda hangin in his eyes - whenever I see a man walkin home that way, tired out from his day of work and his dinner-bucket in his hand, it makes