It was an old strip, one his mother had given him, about a cat in love with a mouse who despised her. With every brick the mouse threw at her head the cat fell more deeply in love, until her head was lost in a whirlwind of hearts and exclamation points, the mingled signs of her devotion and her wounds. Billy had so adored the comic strip he'd begged his mother to let him keep it, and he looked at it almost every day, the big-nosed cat stupefied by love for the furious, spindle-armed mouse. His mother had read the words to him until he knew them by heart. “Ignatz my dollink. I loves ya a million times. Wham.” The sequence of panels excited him, stirred around in his chest. He never tired of watching the cat and the mouse go through their unchanging sequence of injury and pure, bottomless affection.
He went downstairs to dinner and sat at his usual place, watching everything. His father didn't speak. His father ate with a finicky reluctance that was not his ordinary way, cutting each bite precisely, like a tailor. Occasionally as he cut his meat he emitted a low moan, as if the stroke of the knife had touched his own flesh. Billy glanced at his father's hands, red and veined, big enough to palm his head. He reminded himself that he must not stare. He concentrated instead on the other, less dangerous members of the dinner. Zoe sat playing with a spoon that sparked and dimmed and sparked again in the lamplight. Susan sat across from Billy, blank and perfectly behaved, although Billy knew that her whole attention was focused on making sure no food on her plate touched any other food.
Billy's mother ate with cool precision. Eating, for her, was a task to be done methodically and thoroughly. As she ate she kept up a vivid stream of talk. Everything was a subject. It was her job to buy and cook the food and it was her job to take in the world and offer it back to her family as conversation. “I stopped by Widerman's today,” she said, “just to pick up a few things, and what do you think? They had a shelf full of transistor radios with a big sign that said, 'Special, Three Ninety-nine.' I couldn't believe it. I thought there had to be something wrong with them, so I asked Jewel, the one with the son who died at Pearl Harbor. Anyway, I said, 'Jewel, what's the matter with those radios?' And she said, 'Mary, I know what you mean, but there's not a thing wrong with them. They're Japanese.' The Japanese, it seems, will work for practically nothing, so these radios hardly cost more than the parts and the shipping. Can you beat that? These are the people who killed Jewel's only son, and now she's standing there selling their radios at prices no American company could possibly match. Jewel didn't seem to think anything about it, they're just cheap radios as far as she's concerned, but I told her I'd rather buy an American radio even if it cost four times as much. And you know what she did? She looked at me like I was crazy. This poor woman who's ruined her legs working at Widerman's for twenty years, and lost her only son to the Japanese, and she doesn't see anything wrong with people buying these radios. It made me wonder if she really understood about things. I wondered if, you know, she'd lost her mind a little. I think people can go crazy and just keep on about their business, I mean not every crazy person ends up in a strait-jacket. Like the other morning, when I was at the market—”
Billy marveled at his mother. Her inspiration never flagged. Each subject found its way to another. Billy's family lived in his mother's ongoing conversation the way they might have lived with a portable radio that played from early morning until after midnight, pouring out news and music and dramas both high and low. She was divine in the inexhaustible breadth of her interests. She worried over the extinction of nations and over a sparrow's tiny hiccup of death against the picture window.
Billy's father set his knife down on his plate and said, “So what's wrong with a cheap radio?”
His mother had moved on to something else, and was taken by surprise. “What?” she said.