it for three months and in all that time has gotten an unreal idea of what love is. She exaggerates its importance, has imagined it into something rare and precious she’s entitled to half of when all he wants is to get rid of it so he can move on, on into sleep, down the straight path, for her sake. It’s for her sake.
“Roll over,” he says.
“I love you,” she says with relief, misunderstanding, thinking he’s dismissing her. She touches his face in farewell and turns her back.
He scrunches down and fits himself between her buttocks, cool. It’s beginning to work, steady, warm, when she twists her head and says over her shoulder, “Is this a trick your whore taught you?”
He thumps her shoulder with his fist and gets out of bed and his pajama bottoms fall down. The night breeze filters in through the window screen. She turns on her back into the center of the bed and explains out of her dark face, “I’m not your whore, Harry.”
“Damn it,” he says, “that was the first thing I’ve asked from you since you came home.”
“You’ve been wonderful,” she says.
“Thanks.”
“Where are you going?”
He is putting on his clothes. “I’m going out. I’ve been cooped up in this damn hole all day.”
“You went out this morning.”
He finds his suntans and puts them on. She asks, “Why can’t you try to imagine how I feel? I’ve just had a baby.”
“I can. I can but I don’t want to, it’s not the thing, the thing is how I feel. And I feel like getting out.”
“Don’t. Harry. Don’t.”
“You can just lie there with your precious ass. Kiss it for me.”
“Oh for God’s sake,” she cries, and flounces under the covers, and smashes her face down into her pillow.
Even this late he might have stayed if she hadn’t accepted defeat by doing this. His need to love her is by, so there’s no reason to go. He’s stopped loving her at last so he might as well lie down beside her and go to sleep. But she asks for it, lying there in a muddle sobbing, and outside, down in the town, a motor guns and he thinks of the air and the trees and streets stretching bare under the streetlamps and goes out the door.
The strange thing is she falls asleep soon after he goes; she’s been used to sleeping alone lately and it’s a physical relief not having him in bed kicking his hot legs and twisting the sheets into ropes. That business of his with her bottom made her stitches ache and she sinks down over the small pain all feathers. Around four in the morning Becky cries her awake and she gets up; her nightie taps her body lightly. Her skin feels unnaturally sensitive as she walks about. She changes the baby and lies down on the bed to nurse her. As Becky takes the milk it’s as if she’s sucking a hollow place into her mother’s body; Harry hasn’t come back. By this time if he just went out to cool off he would be back.
The baby keeps slipping off the nipple because she can’t keep her mind on her; a taste like dry toast keeps touching her lips; she keeps listening for Harry’s key to scratch at the door.
Mother’s neighbors will laugh their heads off if she loses him again, she doesn’t know why she should think of Mother’s neighbors except that all the time she was home Mother kept reminding her of how they sneered and there was always that with Mother the feeling she was dull and plain and a disappointment, and she thought when she got a husband it would be all over, all that. She would be a woman with a house on her own. And she thought when she gave this baby her name it would settle her mother but instead it brings her mother against her breast with her blind mouth poor thing and she feels she’s lying on top of a pillar where everyone in the town can see she is alone. She feels cold. The baby won’t stay on the nipple nothing will hold to her.
She gets up and walks around the room with the baby on her shoulder patting to get the air up and the baby poor thing so floppy and limp keeps sliding and trying to dig its little boneless legs into her to hold tight and the nightie blown by the breeze keeps touching her calves the