colored drawing in the center did not interest him at all. He was not-thinking. This was a frequent, familiar sensation to him now, there was something exciting and important about not-thinking, Victor felt, and he thought one day he would find something about it—perhaps under another name—in the Public Library or in the psychology books around the house that he browsed in when his mother was out.
“Veec-tor! What are you doing?”
“Nothing, Mama!”
“That is exactly it! Nothing! Can you not even think ?”
A warm shame spread through him. It was as if his mother read his thoughts about not-thinking. “I am thinking,” he protested. “I’m thinking about not -thinking.” His tone was defiant. What could she do about it, after all?
“About what?” Her black, curly head tilted, her mascaraed eyes narrowed at him.
“Not-thinking.”
His mother put her jewelled bands on her hips. “Do you know, Veec-tor, you are a little bit strange in the head?” She nodded. “You are seeck. Psychologically seeck. And retarded, do you know that? You have the behavior of a leetle boy five years old,” she said slowly and weightily. “It is just as well you spend your Saturdays indoors. Who knows if you would not walk in front of a car, eh? But that is why I love you, little Veector.” She put her arm around his shoulders, pulled him against her and for an instant Victor’s nose pressed into her large, soft bosom. She was wearing her flesh-colored dress, the one you could see through a little where her breast stretched it out.
Victor jerked his head away in a confusion of emotions. He did not know if he wanted to laugh or cry.
His mother was laughing gaily, her head back. “Seeck you are! Look at you! My lee-tle boy still, lee-tle short pants—Ha! Ha!”
Now the tears showed in his eyes, he supposed, and his mother acted as if she were enjoying it! Victor turned his head away so she would not see his eyes. Then suddenly he faced her. “Do you think I like these pants? You like them, not me, so why do you have to make fun of them?”
“A lee-tle boy who’s crying!” she went on, laughing.
Victor made a dash for the bathroom, then swerved away and dived onto the sofa, his face toward the pillows. He shut his eyes tight and opened his mouth, crying but not-crying in a way he had learned through practice also. With his mouth open, his throat tight, not breathing for nearly a minute, he could somehow get the satisfaction of crying, screaming even, without anybody knowing it. He pushed his nose, his open mouth, his teeth, against the tomato-red sofa pillow, and though his mother’s voice went on in a lazily mocking tone, and her laughter went on, he imagined that it was getting fainter and more distant from him. He imagined, rigid in every muscle, that he was suffering the absolute worst that any human being could suffer. He imagined that he was dying. But he did not think of death as an escape, only as a concentrated and painful incident. This was the climax of his not-crying. Then he breathed again, and his mother’s voice intruded:
“Did you hear me?— Did you hear me? Mrs. Badzerkian is coming for tea. I want you to wash your face and put on a clean shirt. I want you to recite something for her. Now what are you going to recite?”
“In winter when I go to bed,” said Victor. She was making him memorize every poem in A Child’s Garden of Verses . He had said the first one that came into his head, and now there was an argument, because he had recited that one the last time. “I said it, because I couldn’t think of any other one right off the bat!” Victor shouted.
“Don’t yell at me!” his mother cried, storming across the room at him.
She slapped his face before he knew what was happening.
He was up on one elbow on the sofa, on his back, his long, knobby-kneed legs splayed out in front of him. All right, he thought, if that’sthe way it is, that’s the way it is. He looked at her with