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“Yes, well, thank you for calling. The lines are open, folks. That number is 222-1144. One more time. 222-1144. Hello, Jeff Lewis speaking.”

“Hi Jeff, I’d like to talk to you about shock treatment for patients in state hospitals.”

“That was a show we did last week, sir. Today we’re talking about unisex, the practice of men and women dressing alike.”

“But what’s more important? It seems to me that we should concentrate on the more important issues in life.”

“Thank you for your opinion, sir. But we follow a certain structure here and today we are talking about unisex.”

“Talk, talk yourself sick, you idiot,” the man said. “Drop dead! I—”

“I have another call here. Hello, this is Jeff Lewis. Go ahead please.”

“Jeff, that woman that called up before that man from Staten Island has the wrong idea. The young own the world
only
and I stress that word
only
if we give it to them. What’s wrong with the old ways, what’s wrong with the kind of life our parents and our grandparents gave us? I remember a decent world, Jeff, with decent hardworking people in it. Black, white, pink, green. We didn’t always have it so easy, Jeff. But there was a sense of decency. That’s the key word, here. Decency. I remember a family sitting down to dinner with respect and love for each other. My father held the door open for my mother, we never took one bite until she sat down at that table. Look at the Chinese race, Jeff, if you want to see respect for old people, if you want …”

“Thank you very much for your opinion, Madam. This is the place to sound off, folks. This is your host, Jeff Lewis, and the number to call is …”

Then I was driving into the parking lot, past the places reserved for doctors only, past the massive air-conditioning unit, past the kitchen, where I could see women in white caps lifting huge pots. I parked and went upstairs to Jay’s room. Martin’s mother and father were just taking Martin, in a wheelchair, for a ride down the corridor.

It was the first time that Jay and I had been alone since I’d told him. “Sandy,” he said. “We have to talk. Come on, sweetie, we have to talk sometime.”

I sat on his bed, my legs dangling. He took my hands between his and pressed them lightly. “I’m tired. Don’t make me do all the work.”

“Jay,” I said.

“But we have to make plans for the kids, for your future.”

“You sound like an insurance salesman,” I said.

But Jay didn’t smile. “You know where the policies are. There’ll be something extra from the union and whatever is in the pension now. God, we were never savers, Sandy.”

I thought of the things we spent money on, of clothes hanging round-shouldered on hangers at home, of meals, eaten, digested, eliminated. Toys, magazines, cameras, radios, electric blankets. What would I do with Jay’s clothing?

“Speak to Murray. He’ll want you to invest carefully in some things. Blue chips, mutual funds. The market’s so crazy.” He drew a terribly deep breath and put a hand to his chest.

“Shhh,” I said.

“Sandy, I’m sorry.”

“Oh, shhh. Don’t.” I leaned over and put my head against his chest, lightly, holding back my weight. I could hear the hollow thrumming of his heartbeat and an echo of my own crazy pulse.

“I don’t believe it. Not really. I say it but I don’t believe it, as if I’m talking about somebody else.” His voice reverberated painfully against my ear.

“Me too,” I whispered.

“The thing is I always thought that I would get old. I
worried
about it. How we would look, how hard it would be.”

“Oh Jay,” I said. “I only want to be with you.”

“And the kids …” His voice broke.

I sat up and looked into his eyes. “Jay, what about Mona?”

“You never said anything to her? You never wrote?”

I shook my head.

He breathed another long shuddering sigh. “Don’t tell her,” he said.

I thought he meant never, to never tell her. “I
can’t
…” I began.

“No, listen. Call her when it’s too late.”

“Jay, she has a right …”

“Sandy, if you call her now, she’ll come right here. You know Mona. Sandy, I couldn’t look at her. When my father died … Her face is like a broken heart. I couldn’t stand it,” and then he began to cry, in harsh broken sounds that I had never heard before.

“I won’t. I promise, I won’t. Jay, sweetheart, I promise.”

He grew quiet again and his hand slipped around my waist.

Then Martin and his parents came back into the room. They found me with my face against Jay’s throat, with his hand under my sweater, cooling the skin of my back.

“Uh-oh,” Martin’s father said. “Maybe we should have knocked.”

But his mother took it all in, the red eyes, the sorrow that hung in the room like something visible.

Poor Martin looked frightened. Had he ever seen his parents embrace, even in joy? “Love in bloom,” I said.

“They vant to be alone,” Martin’s father croaked. He helped Martin to climb back into bed.

Then we all talked, idle, drifting chatter, half listening to one another and to the other sounds around us, until the shadows grew long in the room, and it was time to go home again.

T
HE POSTCARD WAS PRINTED:

Dear Mrs. (and here my name had been typed in). It is now six months since your last gynecological checkup. An appointment has been arranged for you on Thursday, January 23
^rd
, at 10
A.M
. If for some reason you cannot keep this appointment, please notify this office at least 48 hours before the scheduled time.

The same postcards always came twice a year to my mother and me. We arrange to have our appointments on the same day and in the past we had gone shopping together and out for lunch. I called my mother and told her that I didn’t think I was up to it now, that I would go at some other time. (Thinking—never again, what difference does it make, who cares.) We hung up and a few minutes later she called back and gave me a long lecture about taking care of myself for the sake of the children, that I owed it to Jay to be both mother and father to them, that my body was a sacred temple, that she hated to go by herself—sometimes she felt a little dizzy afterwards, you read in the paper about not waiting too long, because God knows what’s going on inside you, God forbid, and I couldn’t stop living, even if I felt like it.

Finally I said, “All right, all right,” and she breathed a long whistling sigh. “Tootsie,” she said. “I know how you feel.”

We traveled together as we always did. I drove to the beauty shop and honked the horn two times.

My father came out with a hairbrush in his hand. Inscribed on his smock in an intricate scrolled script was
Mr. B.
He reached in the window to touch my cheek and I saw that his hand trembled slightly. “She’ll be out in a minute,” he said. “She’s just getting her coat.”

“Go inside, Daddy. It’s cold.”

“I’m all right,” he insisted. “I can take the cold.” But he backed away anyway, waving, and went into the store. Then in a few minutes they appeared together at the doorway and my father reached into his pocket for his wallet. He gestured briefly toward the car and then he gave her some money.

My mother ran in those funny choppy steps, as if her legs were tied together, and then she sat down beside me in the car. “We shouldn’t have had a Thursday,” she said. “It’s a busy day for us. They should have given us a Monday or a Tuesday.”

“Ma,” I said. “I was willing to change.”

“Tootsie, some things can’t be put off.” She lowered the visor mirror to look at herself, leaning close and squinting. She lifted her lips in a terrible leer and shook her head. “Don’t neglect your teeth,” she said.

At the clinic we went into adjoining curtained booths and undressed. We put on the paper gowns and slippers provided for us and then we opened the curtains and sat on the little stools and waited.

A nurse came by and said that they were a little delayed and that we would have to wait about fifteen minutes. “So just relax,” she advised.

“Ha!” my mother said. Then she reached behind her and brought her pocketbook onto her lap. “I want to give you something.”

“Ma,” I said. “We have medical insurance. The network has been very generous.”

“Take it for Daddy. He specifically said.”

The paper gowns rustled as I held out my hand. “Tell him thank you. Thank you both.”

“I always hate this,” she said, looking around.

“Waiting?”

“The whole business. I know they don’t even think about us, the doctors. Not as women. But it makes me nervous, anyway, to put my feet up like that.” She shuddered.

“It only takes a few minutes.” In my head I lie on the bed at home, my arms opened. Oh come into me. Your voice enters me. Come in. Jay parts my legs like brambles in a forest and goes through.

“Yeah, well …” my mother said.

“Think about something else. Pretend you’re in Paris and Doctor Miller is your lover.”

“Some lover.”

“Pretend you’re at the dentist’s. Open wide now, dear.”

“You!” She blushed. “Listen, do you know what I do? I shut my mind off completely.”

“I wish that I could do that.”

“I thought you didn’t mind the examination.”

“Not that,” I said. “I just wish that I didn’t have to think.”

“My poor girl,” she said, and she patted my hand. She looked down at her bare legs, embroidered with blue veins. “Older people should go first.”

“No,” I said. “Nobody should go, ever.”

“Don’t be crazy. It would be like the BMT in the rush hour. As you get older, you change, anyway.” She stood up and stepped back into her booth. She crooked her finger. “Come here for a second.”

I walked into her booth and she reached up and pulled the curtain. Then she parted the gown and lifted it. “I once had a beautiful figure,” she said. “Look at that.”

Her skin was mottled pink and white, as if she had just come from a hot bath. Her breasts were two pale tilting moons. There were sharp red marks where her girdle had held her and the thin line of an old scar ran across her belly, disappearing into the sparse, graying bush. She pointed to the trembling flesh of her thigh.

“Ma,” I said, “you still …”

“Feel that. Just feel that.”

I reached out and touched her skin briefly.

She smiled triumphantly.
“That’s
what happens!” She lowered the gown and opened the curtain again.

I went back to my own booth and sat down.

“It happens to everyone,” she said. “Things don’t work so well anymore.”

“Don’t you feel well? Is it Daddy?”

She shrugged.
“Everybody
slows down. You can’t do all the things you could
always
do.”

Suddenly I realized what she was talking about. I leaned over to look at her and she was staring down into the open pocketbook in her lap. I wanted to say something compassionate, as if she had just told me of the sudden death of a friend, but I found that I couldn’t speak.

“Some
people think that they are going to live forever, that time is never going to get in their way.” Her mouth closed in a narrow furrow.

I wanted to say, “Forgive him then.” I felt terribly disloyal, knowing this news of my father. I thought of him looking at his own reflection above the head of a seated customer, combing his moustache, sucking in his belly and then letting it out again with a long hissing sigh. I imagined that she thought he had met a just punishment. I wanted to say, “Forgive him,” but my mother snapped her pocketbook shut with a final click that ended the conversation.

Then the nurse came down the hall, humming a tune. “Okay girls,” she said. “You’re on.”

I
WAS NEVER REALLY
afraid of the basement in our building. There are women who make their husbands or teen-age sons go with them when they use the laundry, or they travel in groups, like flocks of frightened birds. For me, nothing, no danger lurked in the shadows of those stippled gray walls.

We had less laundry now. It seemed a pitiable pile without Jay’s clothing among ours. I sat in the straight-backed peeling kitchen chair facing the dryers, with an open book in my lap. In front of me the clothes tossed and whirled as if swept by a fitful wind. Every few minutes I raised my eyes from the book, unable to concentrate, and saw bits of yellow, blue, or white: Paul’s baseball pajamas, my own nightgown. I could hear motors starting and then stopping, water screaming in the pipes overhead, and the whine of the elevator ascending. Somewhere in the distance doors slammed, and muted voices spoke.

Then the elevator descended again and there were footsteps in the corridor leading to the storage room. I stood up and looked through the doorway.

Estrella Caspar was there, her arms filled with bulging shopping bags. She seemed to be costumed for a starring role in a futuristic movie. Whatever she was wearing was made of a dazzling vinyl, reflecting the lights in the room. She wore large dark glasses, goggles actually. Her hair rose in a wild black cloud and an Indian headband was pulled across her forehead. “Oh, it’s
you,”
she said, and she rushed ahead toward the storage lockers.

I went back to my vigil at the dryers. There were ten minutes left on the timer. I could hear the metallic echoes of a locker being slammed shut, and then her footsteps again as she returned.

This time she paused in the doorway. “It’s snowing again,” she said. “I’m going to wear my brown patent leather boots …”

“Is it sticking?” I asked.

But she was bending over now, peering into the window of the spinning dryer. She turned her head in a circular motion, in playful imitation of the tossing clothes. “Hey, this is even better than the late show!” she said, and her birdcall laugh reverberated everywhere. Then she stooped to look at me, lifting the dark glasses to her forehead. Her eyes were like something seen through a microscope, so terrible were they in detail. Her false lashes were thick and black like the enlarged legs of insects. “You could do something,” she said. “You should change your lipstick.”

Automatically, my hand came up to my mouth. If I had been wearing any lipstick, I had already eaten it off.