“What did Stephanie have with her roast beef, Davy?” Mother asks and asks again after I tell her that she had a lot of stuff.
“What kind of stuff?”
“You know,” I tell her, “vegetables and bread and that stuff.”
“What vegetables?”
“I don’t know. Vegetables!”
“Did she have potatoes?”
“I don’t think so,” I say. “No, she didn’t. She had beans, I think.”
“Beans! What kind? Yellow? Green?”
“Green.”
“How were they prepared?”
And I tell my mother that I don’t know how they were prepared. They were just beans. Beans are beans. What does she think I did, go out in my father’s kitchen and watch Stephanie make the supper? And Mother says that all she wanted to know was if they were fresh beans or were they frozen. I tell her how do I know? She gets mad and says it’s all right not to tell her anything if that’s the way I want it. What did I come to New York for if it wasn’t to have a good time with her and to share everything together?
“I’m sorry, Mother. I don’t know about all that stuff in the kitchen. Ask Fred. He spent most of his time out there with her.”
I think that’s kind of funny, so I bend down to Fred and ask him to tell Mother what kind of beans Stephanie had with the roast beef tonight and how were they prepared? And did he see her take them out of a frozen package or did they come out of the big bean garden they have growing in the back part of my father’s apartment?
Mother doesn’t think I’m such a funny fellow though. “That’s all right, young man,” she says. “It probably doesn’t mean anything to you that I was home here alone all afternoon and that I had dinner by myself, knowing that it was important for me to give up my evening so that I would be here when you came home. The least I could have expected from you was for you to share with me what appears to have been a very pleasant day.”
“Come on, Mother,” I say.
“Don’t ‘come on’ me, Davy! You’re just lucky you have a home to come home to and a loving mother waiting for you! You’re just lucky …”
She starts to go on, but I guess I look at her with surprise mapped out all over my face.
“Oh, dear, Davy,” she goes on, “I didn’t mean it like it sounded. Of course you have a home. Of course I’ll wait here for you. You know that, don’t you, dear?”
“Sure,” I say. We look at each other without saying anything for a long time. The trouble with a New York apartment is that there isn’t anyplace you can turn to to wait for something like what was happening between Mother and me to pass. Mother turns away and then back. She says she’ll get a cold drink for me if I want one. Do I want one? she asks me two times, and I say No. The third time I say Yes, and she tells me she knew I did. She wants to get it for me. She wants one too.
She messes around out there in the kitchen. I can hear two or three ice cubes hit the floor, followed by Mother’s kitchen oaths. Oath time usually comes with the cocktail hour for Mother, and I guess from the way she smells and from her lively curiosity about Stephanie’s dinner, Mother has been sitting around having a lot of cold drinks.
“Dear Davy,” Mother starts when she gets back in the room, “I’m sorry I sounded so harsh a minute ago. You know that I get carried away at times, don’t you, dear?”
I tell her that sure I do, and I’m sorry that I didn’t answer her questions about dinner when she asked them, and that in addition to beans Stephanie had a green salad, rolls from Pepperidge Farm, and carrots with some goo on them. I tell her that they drank a bottle of wine and I had Diet Pepsi because I didn’t feel like having milk. We had fancy peaches for dessert.
