Collected Stories of Carson McCullers by Carson Mccullers

pregnant woman," he said. "Yeah. It'll be some sweet hour like this when you come to simper your sweet sneakret into my ear. Another cute little Marshall. Ain't we fine—look what we can do. Oh, God, what dreariness."
    "I loathe you," she said, watching her hands (that were surely not a part of her?) begin to tremble. "This drunk brawling in the middle of the night—"
    As he smiled his mouth seemed to her to take on the same pink, slittcd look that his eyes had. "You love it," he whispered soberly. "What would you do if once a week I didn't get soused. So that—glutinously—you can paw over me. And Marshall darling this and Marshall that. So you can run your greedy little fingers all over my face—Oh yes. You love me best when I suffer. You—you—"
    As he lurched across the room she thought she saw that his shoulders were shaking.
    "Here Mama," he taunted. "Why don't you offer to come help me point." As he slammed the door to the bathroom some vacant coat-hangers that had been hung on the doorknob clashed at each otner with tinny sibilance.
    "I'm leaving you—" she called hollowly when the noise from the coathangers had died down. But the words had no meaning to her. Limp, she sat on the bed and looked at the wilted lettuce leaf across the room. The lampshade had been knocked atilt so that it clung dangerously to the bulb—so that it made a hurtful passage of brightness across the grey disordered room.
    "Leaving you," she repeated to herself—still thinking about the late-at-night squalor around them.
    She remembered the sound of Phillip's footsteps as he had descended. Nightlike and hollow. She thought of the dark outside and the cold naked trees of early spring. She wanted to picture herself leaving the apartment at that hour. With Phillip maybe. But as she tried to see his face, his small calm little body, the oudines were vague and there was no expression there. She could only recall the way his hands had poked at the sugar-grained bottom of a glass with the dishcloth—as they had done when he helped her with the dishes that night. And as she thought of following the empty sounds of the footsteps they grew softer, softer—until there was only black silence left.
    With a shiver she got up from the couch and moved toward the whiskey bottle on the table. The parts of her body felt like tiresome appendages; only the pain behind her eyes seemed her own. She hesitated, holding the neck of the bottle. That—or one of the Alka-Seltzers in the top bureau drawer. But the thought of the pale tablet writhing to the top of the glass, consumed by its own effervescence—seemed sharply depressing. Besides, there was just enough for one more drink. Hastily she poured, noting again how the glittering convexity of the bottle always cheated her.
    It made a sharp little path of warmness down into her stomach but the rest of her body remained chill. "Oh damn," she whispered—thinking of picking up that lettuce leaf in the morning, of the cold outside, listening for any sound from Marshall in the bathroom. "Oh damn. I can never get drunk like that."
    And as she stared at the empty bottle she had one of those grotesque little imaginings that were apt to come to her at that hour. She saw herself and Marshall—in the whiskey bottle. Revolting in their smallness and perfection. Skeetering angrily up and down the cold blank glass like minute monkeys. For a moment with noses flattened and stares of longing. And then after their frenzies she saw them lying in the bottom—white and exhausted—looking like fleshy specimens in a laboratory. With nothing said between them.
    She was sick with the sound of the bottle as it crashed through the orange peels and paper wads in the waste basket and clanked against the tin at the bottom.
    "Ah—" said Marshall, opening the door and carefully placing his foot across the threshold. "Ah—the purest enjoyment left to man. At the last sweet