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coquettishly to her throat. “You do it so well. And Charlotte’s hair will be all done. She goes to the beauty parlor every Friday.”
    We spread dresses on the bed. “Say, isn’t this new?”
    She gives it a punishing slap. “Since when do I have a penny to spend on myself? I picked it up on sale, ages ago.”
    Letting the kimono slide from her plump shoulders she beckons for the dress, turquoise with white flowers. I take up the comb. “Your hair’s in good form. You’ll see, it’ll look fine.” Page boy, handmaiden, mirror to my mother, you see me in a role I have played since I was old enough to sit up and say yes to her tales and complaints, in recent years consciously disarming her wary jealousy by flattery. Why she is jealous is opaque to me, for all I do with a mirror is make faces. Even before my own reflection over her head as she flirts with herself, I avert my eyes self-consciously. I have seen my mother naked hundreds of times, for she often calls me in to wash her back, but I rarely see my father less than fully dressed. Even bathing suits are unusual. In center city Detroit there is not a lot of water around, even though when you look at the Great Lakes on a map, we look as if we’re afloat. Maybe twice a summer we go to a beach. I am scared of the water, as of so much else; I have all my mother’s fears and a few extra. Although I learned to swim in high school, I would feel disloyal. Dad can swim but Mother can’t. To swim would be to desert her, clutching my hand, nervous in a foot of water.
    “So he wants you to share a room with the skinny blond one.” She snorts. “What’s the use of going away to Ann Arbor if you don’t meet new people and make useful contacts? You never got on with your father’s people anyhow.”
    He comes in, taking a tie from the door rack and whipping it playfully at her behind. He is impatient for the company of men where a couple of drinks will loosen his humor. He has strict notions what talk becomes a man: baseball, football and hockey in their seasons, union matters and politics—if the other fellows are regular Democrats too. When he mentions Roosevelt his voice catches. The thirties were his Armageddon. Although his work is dirty, he puts on a suit as often as he can, for his father taught him not to dress like a workman. “Yes, sir, we’ll beat the pants off Gene and Charlotte.”
    “Oh?” She turns, her eyes glinting anger. “So that’s what you’d like to do to Charlotte? I’ve always suspected as much.” It is impossible to tell if she is joking. Does she know?
    He gives his hair a quick rake and tosses the comb to his bureau. “Hustle it up or they’ll be asleep before we get there.” He looks well in a suit, for he is lean.
    Mother chirps around him picking off lint. Suddenly her eyes are doleful. “If Gene suggests playing for money, you put a stop to it. How much are you taking?”
    He brushes ash from his lapel. “Don’t worry about it.”
    “With the refrigerator and the TV still not paid for! It would shame us before the neighbors if they take them away!”
    I stand at the front window while the Packard pulls from the driveway. My father will not drive a Ford or a GM car. He remembers how Bennett’s Ford Service fired on the unemployed and how they beat the UAW people, mostly women, who came to leaflet outside the gate, breaking the back of one and fracturing another’s skull. He describes the sit-down strikes at GM. We have Terraplanes, Hudsons, Studebakers until they fail one by one. “Henry Ford hated Jews,” my mother whispers. “Ford was a union buster,” my father mutters. History soaks into me.
    Then I draw the blinds and swirl around. Empty, empty house. I run to do the dishes twice as fast as usual, so that the house is truly mine, without duty standing at my shoulder interrupting.
    Done, flushed with the heat of the water, I grab a glass and clatter downstairs past the grade door that leads to the yard. Damp