Free Fiends by John Farris Page A

tackle from the trunk of his car and gone down to the torpid green pond with Arne to see if any bream were biting in the afternoon heat.
    "Now that you mention it, I guess not."
    "You outdid yourself at the table. I mean, you haven't carried on like that since you were four years old. I was embarrassed for you."
    "I'm sorry," Marjory said grimly, and mishandled a plate Enid gave to her dripping from the rinse water. She caught it before it hit the floor.
    "Careful."
    Marjory sucked a breath and said, as if she'd been accused of going to the devil, "It was your fault; I never have broken a piece of mama's best china, and I never will!"
    "Oh, Marjory, hush, what is it with you today?"
    "Him," Marjory said, doing a quick, overly frenzied impression of Arne Horsfall's sign language.
    "I cannot believe you. Don't you have compassion for anyone but your own selfish person?"
    "That's not fair!"
    "Of course he acted nervous—to begin with. Don't you understand what a day like this means to him? To be accepted in our home, treated with kindness, afforded his dignity? That's the first thing they take away from you in an institution, Marjory, your dignity. And without it—do you see what I'm saying?"
    "Yeh," Marjory mumbled. "When's he going back?"
    "Tomorrow."
    "Oh, Enid, you don't mean—"
    "Yes, I do mean, he's staying the night, I've already arranged with—"
    "Enidddd," Marjory moaned, "that's the dumbest—"
    "Marjory Waller, shut up!" Enid said, in a tone of voice that Marjory hadn't heard for nearly two years. Marjory stared at her for several taut seconds, then turned and put the plate she'd been drying on the table, turned again and stalked out of the kitchen.
    "You'd better," Enid called after her, a little shrill from temper, "just stay in your room until you get ready to act right again! And while you're at it—" She had reached the kitchen door, the better to make herself heard as Marjory hit the top of the stairs with a resounding thump and went down the hall so fast she was getting nylon burns from the carpet runner, "—you might open your Bible and read—" Marjory slammed the door on this suggestion hard enough to loosen a little more of the plaster next to the jamb and jumped on her bed, not thinking about how careful she needed to be in her piqué dress. It opened at the seams like a dropped sack of flour.
    Marjory clubbed her fists into a pillow, expelling a few feathers that floated lazily in the hot slant of sun through open windows. Then she lay, rigidly, for a few minutes in a deepening bath of perspiration, studying the cracks in her ceiling, the shadowy shapes of expired insects in the milk glass of the lighting fixture. She heard Ted's voice from the pond. She felt awful, too wretched to cry. Not wrong, exactly, but guilty because she knew she ought to be outgrowing tantrums by now. After a while she got up and stripped soggily, blotted her breasts and shoulders with a corner of the nubby chenille bedspread, then pulled on shorts and a Grateful Dead T-shirt of a faded blue still dark enough to disguise the absence of a bra. She switched on the fan, which began swiveling its ugly old black head like a creature in a Godzilla movie, and fiddled with the antenna of the black-and-white TV set on the shelf of her armoire. There wasn't much to see this time of the afternoon but a gospel quartet—all of them wearing baggy silk suits and pompadours with bushy sideburns, none whom she would call cute—and The American Sportsman, with Curt Gowdy. Stalking bighorn sheep in Alaska was low on the list of things she hoped to do someday, ranking just ahead of communal farming in British Honduras, and autopsies.
    Marjory returned her attention to the backyard. Enid had (unselfishly) finished doing the dishes and was strolling to the gazebo, accompanied by several cats, theirs and the neighbors'. She had a sketchpad and a box of colored pencils with her. Marjory yawned. A nap began to seem like a good idea. Then she could