“And you don’t want to come home?”
“No, Mother.”
“Your father said last night that he’d be more than willing to pay for it if you’d go away someplace by yourself and think things over. You could take a lovely cruise. We both thought—”
“No, thanks,” said the girl, and uncrossed her legs. “Mother, this call is costing a for—”
“When I think of how you waited for that boy all through the war—I mean when you think of all those crazy little wives who—”
“Mother,” said the girl, “we’d better hang up. Seymour may come in any minute.”
“Where is he?”
“On the beach.”
“On the beach? By himself? Does he behave himself on the beach?”
“Mother,” said the girl, “you talk about him as though he were a raving maniac—”
“I said nothing of the kind, Muriel.”
“Well, you sound that way. I mean all he does is lie there. He won’t take his bathrobe off.”
“He won’t take his bathrobe off? Why not?”
“I don’t know. I guess because he’s so pale.”
“My goodness, he needs the sun. Can’t you make him?
“You know Seymour,” said the girl, and crossed her legs again. “He says he doesn’t want a lot of fools looking at his tattoo.”
“He doesn’t have any tattoo! Did he get one in the Army?”
“No, Mother. No, dear,” said the girl, and stood up. “Listen, I’ll call you tomorrow, maybe.”
“Muriel. Now, listen to me.”
“Yes, Mother,” said the girl, putting her weight on her right leg.
“Call me the instant he does, or says, anything at all funny—you know what I mean. Do you hear me?”
“Mother, I’m not afraid of Seymour.”
“Muriel, I want you to promise me.”
“All right, I promise. Goodbye, Mother,” said the girl. “My love to Daddy.” She hung up.
“See more glass,” said Sybil Carpenter, who was staying at the hotel with her mother. “Did you see more glass?”
“Pussycat, stop saying that. It’s driving Mommy absolutely crazy. Hold still, please.”
Mrs. Carpenter was putting sun-tan oil on Sybil’s shoulders, spreading it down over the delicate, winglike blades of her back. Sybil was sitting insecurely on a huge, inflated beach ball, facing the ocean. She was wearing a canary-yellow two-piece bathing suit, one piece of which she would not actually be needing for another nine or ten years.
“It was really just an ordinary silk handkerchief—you could see when you got up close,” said the woman in the beach chair beside Mrs. Carpenter’s. “I wish I knew how she tied it. It was really darling.”
“It sounds darling,” Mrs. Carpenter agreed. “Sybil, hold still, pussy.”
“Did you