"
"I'm up to snuff," he said, and gyrated so that the bamboo cane looped a
circle.
She almost cried as she looked at him, so swift was her change of mood,
her lips trembling with the quiver of flesh that has been bruised.
"Oh, Getaway!" she said, "get away." And pushed him aside that she might
walk on. He did not know, nor did she, for that matter, the rustling
that was all of a sudden through her voice, but it was almost one of
those moments when she could make his eyes smart.
But what he said was, "For the luvagod, whose dead?"
"Me, in here," she said, very quickly, and placed her hand to her flimsy
blouse where her heart beat under it.
"Whadda you mean, dead?"
"Just dead, sometimes--as if something inside of me that can't get out
had--had just curled up and croaked."
The walk from the shirt factory where Marylin worked, to the long, lean
house in the long, lean street where she roomed, smelled of unfastidious
bedclothes airing on window sills; of garbage cans that repulsed even
high-legged cats; of petty tradesmen who, mysteriously enough, with
aerial clotheslines flapping their perpetually washings, worked and
sweated and even slept in the same sour garments.
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