The Folded Leaf by William Maxwell

their hair and on the sleeves of their overcoats.
    “I’ll come some other time,” Lymie said. “If I go home with you now, your mother won’t be expecting me and she’ll—”
    “My mother won’t mind,” Spud said patiently. “Why should she?”
    “Well,” Lymie said, “it means a lot of extra trouble.”
    “If you think she’s going to send me out for ice cream on your account——”
    “That’s not what I meant,” Lymie said. “She may not be counting on anybody extra and she’ll be upset.”
    “You don’t know my mother,” Spud said. “Honestly, Lymie, she likes to have me bring kids home. When we lived in Wisconsin I did it all the time. Pete Draper used to eat more meals at our house than he did at his own. When anybody asked his mother how Pete was, she’d say, ‘I don’t know. You’ll have to ask Mrs. Latham.’ Jack Wilson and Wally Putnam used to be there too on account of the ring I fixed up in the back yard, to shoot baskets. And Roger Mitchell and a lot of my sister’s friends.”
    Under Spud’s persuasion, Lymie gave in once more and then wished he hadn’t. A block from the apartment building where the Lathams lived, he and Spud went through the whole argument all over again, stamping their feet and swinging their arms to keep warm. Still certain that it was wrong, that no good would come of it, Lymie watched Spud fit his key into the inside vestibule door and kick it open.
    The Lathams lived on the second floor. When they got inside, Spud tossed his coat and muffler in the general direction of the chair in the hall and disappeared. The muffler fell where it was intended to, but the coat landed in a heap on the floor, between the chair and the hall table. Lymie picked it up and put it on the chair, with his own on top of it. When he turned and walked into the living room he knew instantly why it was that he hadn’t wanted to come here, and that he ought to get out as soon as he possibly could. There, staring him in the face, was everything he’d been deprived of for the last five years.
    He had thought he remembered what it used to be like but he hadn’t at all. He didn’t even have the house straight in hismind. It had taken on the monotonous qualities, the ugliness of the cheap hotels and furnished apartments he and his father had lived in ever since—all so similar that when he woke in the night he couldn’t remember for a second whether he was in the one on Lawrence Avenue or the one on Howard Street or the one on Lakeside Place. He had totally forgotten how different furniture was that people owned themselves from the kind that came with a furnished apartment; and that tables and chairs could tell you, when you walked into a place, what kind of people lived there.
    His eyes went on a slow voyage around the room, taking in every detail, fixing it (he hoped) forever in his mind: the curtains, the blue rug, the sofa, the lighted lamps, the phonograph, the Chinese embroidery, the sewing basket with the lid left open, the ashtrays, the brass bowl, the package of pipe cleaners, the fireplace, the brass candlesticks, the English cottage at twilight. This was how people lived, boys his own age, who didn’t have to get their own breakfast in the morning, or wash their face in a dirty washbowl, or go to sleep at night in a bed that hadn’t been made; boys whose fathers didn’t drink too much and talk too loud and like waitresses.
    When Spud came back, bringing Mrs. Latham, Lymie turned, ready to apologize and pick up his things and leave. He saw that Mrs. Latham’s hair was not bobbed, that she had no makeup on, and that her skirt was well below her knees.
    “Mother, this is Lymie Peters,” Spud said.
    “How do you do, Lymie,” Mrs. Latham said, and shook hands with him. Before Lymie could explain that he had changed his mind and wasn’t staying for supper after all, she turned to Spud and said, “Show him where the bathroom is, and see that he gets a clean towel.