A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

One night they were sitting in a snack-bar lingering over a couple of cups of coffee, when he started talking to her about himself. About the part of him, that is, that dated from before she had known him. In every friendship, and in every love where the love has outstripped the time required for a true, deep understanding of one another, a time comes for one to tell the other the things about himself that he or she does not yet know. Sometimes little things, sometimes big. Even as he was speaking she realized dimly that she would have to face up to this herself some day, and in her case it was no mere anecdote that was to be told. But as yet this was only a tiny black speck in a whole vast sky of blue, too far away to be feared or thought about.

He didn’t speak well and he didn’t speak artfully, his words were commonplace and sometimes badly put, and sometimes halt and slow in coming, for lack of extensive-enough vocabulary. But it was his story, and so she drank in every word, cheeks propped within her cupped hands, elbows on tabletop.

His mother had died when he was no more than three or four, so he was left with no impression of her. After a fairly longish interval studded with feminine overnight house-guests, his father finally married a fat, ugly-tempered blonde, who never got fully dressed and who lay sprawled on a settee all day drinking beer through the holes punched in cans. This woman developed a hatred of her predecessor, and by the time she was through had managed to discard or get rid of every reminder or memento of her that was to be found around the house. All but one, the living reminder, which there was no way for her to discard or get rid of. So she found another way to vent her venom.

She fell into the habit of spanking him unmercifully while his father was at work. For anything, for nothing, for everything. If he looked at her, she spanked him for that. “Whaddye lookin’ at me for? I’ll teach you not to look at me!” If he didn’t look at her, remembering the last spanking, then she spanked him for not looking. “Look at me when I’m talking to ya! I’ll teach you not to turn your head away!”

She walloped him with anything and everything she could get her hands on — one of her own flat-heeled house-slippers with a wilted pom-pon stitched to it, or a magazine if its pages were stiff enough to be rolled into a good tight bludgeon — but her favorite implement came to be a large, round, shallow aluminum skillet, which had a wooden grip attached to it. This was feather-light in weight, but for some undetermined reason hurt more than all the heavier things did. It was so large in diameter that she couldn’t fail to hit him with at least part of its surface, even in oblique shots. Also it tired her less to wield it. She could bounce it like a yo-yo.

He told Marie sometimes he couldn’t even stand up to walk when she finally released him, he had to get away by crawling along the floor on his hands and knees.

In the beginning he was too small to complain coherently to his father about it. Then later, when he might have been able to, she warned him if he did she would give him such a beating on the day following that it would make all the previous spankings seem to have been like caresses. The whole thing was a moot point, in any case. His father’s paternal instinct was practically nil; all he had was mating-instinct.

Then, on the day that he found that his legs had grown long enough to carry him beyond her reach faster than she could overtake him, the epoch of corporal punishment ended as irrationally as it had begun. She was top-heavy and water-logged with beer, and after a few floundering attempts to go after him during which she nearly brained herself falling over rolling beer-cans and the sides of chairs, she gave up trying.

An uneasy armed truce existed between them for a brief period after this — no more than a week, possibly — during which, if he had to go past her, he went past on the outside, with some table or chair between them. Then this too ended, and a state of complete neutrality set in. They ignored each other from then on, for the rest of the time she remained in the house. Whatever spark of malignancy had existed in her mind that had made her want to maltreat him had dimmed and gone out for lack of anything to feed on. Or perhaps she had convinced herself to her own satisfaction by now that she was a better woman than the first wife.

They never exchanged a direct word from then on, communicating only through his father.