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can get unused!"
"Enough unused I have to get used to already.... Not enough words?" turning off the vacuum a moment to hear herself answer. "Because soon enough we'll need only a little closet, no windows, no furniture, nothing to make work, but for worms. Because now I want room.... Screech and blow like you're doing, you'll need that closet even sooner.... Ha, again !"

 

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for the vacuum bag wailed, puffed half up, hung stubbornly limp. ''This time fix it so it stays; quick before the phone rings and you get too important-busy."
But while he struggled with the motor, it seethed in him. Why fix it? Why have to bother? And if it can't be fixed, have to wring the mind with how to pay the repair? At the Haven they come in with their own machines to clean your room or your cottage; you fish, or play cards, or make jokes in the sun, not with knotty fingers fight to mend vacuums.
Over the dishes, coaxingly: "For once in your life, to be free, to have everything done for you, like a queen."
"I never liked queens."
"No dishes, no garbage, no towel to sop, no worry what to buy, what to eat."
"And what else would I do with my empty hands? Better to eat at my own table when I want, and to cook and eat how I want."
"In the cottages they buy what you ask, and cook it how you like. You are the one who always used to say: better mankind born without mouths and stomachs than always to worry for money to buy, to shop, to fix, to cook, to wash, to clean."
"How cleverly you hid that you heard. I said it then because eighteen hours a day I ran. And you never scraped a carrot or knew a dish towel sops. Now for you and mewho cares? A herring out of a jar is enough. But when I want, and nobody to bother." And she turned off her ear button, so she would not have to hear.
But as he had no peace, juggling and rejuggling the money to figure: how will I pay for this now?; prying out the storm windows (there they take care of

 

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this); jolting in the streetcar on errands (there I would not have to ride to take care of this or that); fending the patronizing relatives just back from Florida (at the Haven it matters what one is, not what one can afford), he gave her no peace.
''Look! In their bulletin. A reading circle. Twice a week it meets."
"Haumm," her answer of not listening.
"A reading circle, Chekhov they read that you like, and Peretz. * Cultured people at the Haven that you would enjoy."
"Enjoy!" She tasted the word. "Now, when it pleases you, you find a reading circle for me. And forty years ago when the children were morsels and there was a Circle, did you stay home with them once so I could go? Even once? You trained me well. I do not need others to enjoy. Others !" Her voice trembled. "Because you want to be there with others. Already it makes me sick to think of you always around others. Clown, grimacer, floormat, yesman, entertainer, whatever they want of you."
And now it was he who turned the television loud so he need not hear.
Old scar tissue ruptured and the wounds festered anew. Chekhov indeed. She thought without softness of that young wife, who in the deep night hours while she nursed the current baby, and perhaps held another in her lap, would try to stay awake for the only time there was to read. She would feel again the weather of the outside on his cheek when, coming late from a meet-
*Isaac Loeb Peretz, turn-of-the-century Russian writer of fiction in Yiddish.

 

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ing, he would find her so, and stimulated and ardent, sniffing her skin, coax: ''I'll put the baby to bed, and youput the book away, don't read, don't read."
That had been the most beguiling of all the "don't read, put your book away" her life had been. Chekhov indeed!
"Money?" She shrugged him off. "Could we get poorer than once we were? And in America, who starves?"
But as still he pressed:
"Let me alone about money. Was there ever enough? Seven little onesfor every penny I had to askand sometimes, remember, there was nothing. But always I