Free Watch Your Mouth by Daniel Handler Page A

screechy voices; that sec- tion of the dialog is at the top of most sopranos’ ranges.
    I nodded miserably. Mrs. Glass was cutting shiny foil for another dagger. “By the time the books come there won’t be any time to write my paper.”
    “Then you have to write your paper without those books,” Mrs. Glass said firmly. She disapproved of my incomplete.
    “Yes, Mrs. Glass,” I said mock-meekly.
    Mrs. Glass smiled. “I thought you were going to call me Mimi,” Mimi said. “I’m sorry to snap at you. I’m just stressed that the season’s approaching so quickly. There’s only some-
    thing like twelve days before we open, and all the clay hasn’t even arrived for—”
    “I know,” I said. “The summer’s going really fast. It seems like last night when I had my first dinner here and Dr. Glass told me he lusted after your daughter.” Or, I got to meet Cyn’s grandmother. Or, we had that delicious salmon-and-sake thing. Or something.
    “Just wait until you get older,” she said, creasing the tip of the blade. Next she opened a small jar of clear sticky glue, to keep everything in place and make it shine. “Your whole life will just race by. I can’t believe my daughter’s already the age I was when Ben and I were—well, when I was in my first year at college, Ben and I met and immediately—well, I can’t believe she’s bringing somebody home already, you know? Nothing against you, of course. I just can’t believe—Ben and I weren’t married yet, but both of us were free thinkers, and—you know? It just races by.”
    “Um,”
    “I just can’t—I can’t believe. I mean, little Cynthia! I was her age when Ben and I”—she gestured circularly with the half- finished dagger—“and now that little baby is bringing boys home —I just can’t believe you guys are having sex already! I mean, if Cynthia were my age—Cynthia is my age—she’d be having sex with Ben! Her father! I mean—”
    “I know what you mean,” I said. On the wall, mapped out in masking tape, were the outlines of tools that had been taken down.
    “I’m sorry,” Mimi said, wiping the wet dagger with her fingers like she was smoothing a feather. “It’s just on my mind. Cynthia is already in college, and even Steven is getting bigger and bigger.
    When he was born he was completely hairless, Joseph. You should have seen it. Ben always said that it was a wonder, be- cause I’m so hairy.” She shook her hair and held up the dagger to the light. Though the orchestration to this point should be as bewildering as the aria itself, here when the new dagger glints everything should stop. Absolutely.
    “You don’t seem that hairy to me,” I said, believing this to be the polite response.
    “You haven’t seen all of me,” she said, sweeping her arm down her front as if describing an apron. “ All over, I’m telling you. But Steven came out of my body like a Ping-Pong ball. You know? I remember holding him in my hands and his head was like those white peaches that show up at the Farmer’s Market for maybe three weeks tops. I forget what they’re called.”
    “I know what you mean,” I said, eager to skip past the table- tennis part of the conversation. “They’re like albino peaches but they’re not. Or something.”
    “Right,” she said, stabbing the dagger into herself again, checking the tip again, starting another dagger. “His head was fuzzy like that. It was so fuzzy and warm, fuzzy and warm like the belly of a bird. I wanted him so safe, when he was hairless like that. I felt the same thing when Cyn came out of me—fierce and tender love, this book called it.” She took one long-nailed hand off the raw dagger and reached over to a book that lay next to her purse. She scratched her sticky hands on the jacket, briefly, like she was typing a single word. I couldn’t see the title. “Fierce and tender love. He just felt so vulnerable. I wanted him safe in the world.”
    I thought of the big brick house