Free Cold Spring Harbor by Richard Yates Page B

drawback.
    “You’re amazing, Rachel, you know that? How’d you find out about this?”
    “Wait—I’m getting to that. The drawback is, it wouldn’t exactly be private. It’s a sharing arrangement, you see. We’d be sharing the house with two other—two other people.”
    “Oh?” Evan frowned and began thoughtfully peeling the paper label off his beer bottle. “Well, but still, that might not necessarily be so bad. You know who the other people are?”
    “I’m getting to that. Just let me finish, okay?” And she took a deep breath. “The point is, this whole thing is my mother’s idea. We’d be sharing the house with her, you see, and with my brother, too, when he’s home on vacations.”
    And Evan conveyed all his disappointment in one sad syllable: “Oh.”
    “Well, I
said
I didn’t think you’d like it, Evan, didn’t I? Haven’t I made that clear from the start? We can simply drop the whole subject now, if that’s what you want to do.”But a minute later, as if the subject were still too whole and too fragile to be dropped, she said “I only wish—”
    “Only wish what?”
    “Oh, well, I was just going to say I wish I didn’t have to call her tomorrow and tell her, that’s all. She takes these things so hard. She’ll be ‘hurt.’ She’s dying to live in Cold Spring Harbor and she knows she could never afford to take this house alone, so she’ll be ‘hurt’ for that reason; then the other thing is she’s come to think of it all as some big generous way of doing
us
a favor, you see, so now she’ll be ‘hurt’ for that reason too. She’s impossible. I mean she’s my mother and I love her and everything, but she’s really a very, very—”
    “Oh, I know, dear,” Evan said quietly.
    “God, and here I am talking about it when I said I wouldn’t. Well, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
    “That’s all right. I don’t mind if you talk.”
    “She’s really sort of—crazy, Evan. I mean that. She’s always been crazy. Oh, I don’t suppose anybody’d want to commit her to an insane asylum or anything, but she’s crazy. All my life she’s kept coming up with some scheme for a new place to live every year, and I think she always really
has
believed it’d make everything happier for us, each time. Isn’t that crazy? Oh, and she used to say my father’s a ‘coward’ because he hasn’t gotten ahead in business; that’s crazy too.”
    Rachel became slowly aware now, even while talking and listening to her own voice, that there might well be something universal about the pleasure a grown girl could take in disparaging her mother. Maybe it happened with sons and their fathers, too, or with all grown children and the ever-diminishing presence of parents in their lives; in any case, the knowledge didn’t prevent her from pressing on, as if to see how far she would dare to go.
    “… And she doesn’t smell very good, either.”
    “Doesn’t what?”
    “Smell very good. I guess that’s a horrible thing to say about my own mother, but it’s true. It may be that she doesn’t take baths often enough, or that when she does take a bath she forgets to use the soap, but I’ve dreaded getting up close to her as long as I can remember. And do you know a funny thing, Evan? I’ve never told anybody about that until this very minute.”
    “Well, good,” he said. “I like it when we tell each other things.”
    “She smells sort of like—rotten tomatoes,” Rachel said in a hesitant, tentative way, distorting her face with the need to find a precise comparison, “or maybe more like old, rancid mayonnaise.”
    The pleasure of disparaging her mother was fading fast—maybe it would always be something you couldn’t sustain very long—and besides, she wanted to go back and think about the completely unexpected remark her husband had just made: “I like it when we tell each other things.”
    Wasn’t it supposed to be the girl, rather than the man, who said unashamedly vulnerable