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eroticize anything (except their spouses). Each of their marriages cried out for a countermarriage in which the adulterers attack their feelings of captivity. Didn’t she know a marvel when she saw one?
    He was badgering her so relentlessly because he was fighting for his life.
    She not merely sounded as though she were fighting for hers but she looked it, looked as though she and not his mother were the ghost. During the last six months or so Drenka had been suffering with abdominal pains and nausea, and he wondered now if they were not symptoms of the anxiety that had been mounting in her as she approached the day in May that she had chosen to present this crazy ultimatum. Until today he had tended to account for her cramps and the occasional bouts of vomiting as the result of the pressures at the inn. Having been at the job for over twenty-three years, she was herself not surprised by the toll the work was now taking on her health. “You have to know food,” she lamented wearily, “you have to know the law, you have to know every aspect of life there is. This happens in this business, Mickey, when you have to serve the public all the time—you become a burnt-out case. And Matija still cannot be flexible. This rule, that rule—but the smarter thing is to accommodate the people where you can instead of to say always no. If I could just get a break from the bookkeeping part of it. If I could get awayfrom the staff part of it. Our older staff, they are people full of problems all their lives. The people who are married, the housekeepers, the dishwashers, you can know from the way they behave something is going on that has nothing to do with us. They bring in what’s going on outside. And they never go to Matija to tell him what’s wrong. They go to me, because I’m the easier one. Every summer he is going, going, going, and I’ll say, ‘So-and-so did this, did that,’ and Matija says to me, ‘Why do you always bring me these problems? Why don’t you tell me something pleasant!’ Well, because I’m upset by what’s going on. To have these kids on the staff. I can’t take any more kids. They don’t know shit from Adams. So I wind up doing their job on the floor, like I’m the kid. Trays all over the place. I clean up. Carrying trays. A busgirl. It builds up, Mickey. If we had our son with us. But Matthew thinks the business is stupid. And sometimes I don’t blame him. We have a million dollars’ worth of liability insurance. Now I have to get
another
million dollars. We are advised to do this. The dock in the water at the inn’s beach that everybody enjoys? The insurance company says, ‘Don’t do that anymore. Somebody’s going to hurt themselves.’ So the good things you would like to provide to the American public, they will just get you in trouble. And now—computers!”
    The big thing was to get computers in before the summer, an expensive system that had to be wired all over the place. Everybody had to learn to use the new system, and Drenka had to teach them after she had learned herself at a two-month course at Mount Kendall Community College (a course taken also by Sabbath so that once a week they could meet afterward, just down from Mount Kendall, at the Bo-Peep Motel). For Drenka, with her bookkeeping skills, the computer course had been a snap, though teaching the staff was not. “You have to think like that computer thinks,” she told Sabbath, “and most of my staff don’t even think like a human being yet.” “Then why do you keep working so hard? You keep getting sick—you don’t enjoy anything any longer.” “I do. The money. I still enjoy that. And mine is not the hard job anyway. In the kitchen is the harder job. I don’tcare how hard for me my job is, how big an emotional strain it is. The physical stamina that you need in the kitchen—you have to be a horse to do that. Matija is a gentleman, thank God, and he doesn’t resent that he has the horse’s job. Yes, I enjoy