“I said cold cream, not Vaseline,” Martha said, and that did it; for the next five minutes the two women
laughed until they cried. Delores spilled her bottle of beer and it ran foaming across the table and then they
laughed at that.
14
But nothing was really funny, and Delores knew it. And when Martha went on, she simply listened, hardly
believing what she was hearing.
“It was maybe a week after that time at Mama Delorme’s, or maybe it was two,” Martha said. “I don’t
remember. Been a long time since it all happened. By then I was pretty sure I was pregnant – I wasn’t
throwing up or nothing, but there’s a feeling to it. It don’t come from places you’d think. It’s like your gums
and your toenails and the bridge of your nose figure out what’s going on before the rest of you. Or you want
something like chop suey at three in the afternoon and you say, ‘Whoa, now! What’s this?’ But you know what
it is.
“I was in the bedroom of his suite. He’d gone out for one of his publishers’ meetings. The bed was a double,
messed up on both sides, but that didn’t mean nothing; he was just a restless sleeper. Sometimes when I came
in the groundsheet would be pulled right out from underneath the mattress.
“Well, I stripped off the coverlet and the two blankets underneath – he was thin-blooded ‘and always slept
under all he could – and then I started to strip the top sheet off backwards, and I seen it right away. It was his
spunk, mostly dried on there.
“I stood there looking at it for … oh, I don’t know how long. It was like I was hypnotized. I seen him, lying
there all by himself after his friends had gone home, lying there smelling nothing but the smoke they’d left
behind and his own sweat, I seen him lying there on his back and taking himself by the hand and thinking
about something and jacking himself off. I seen that as clear as I see you now, Delores; the only thing I didn’t
see is what he was thinking about, what sort of pictures he was making in his head to get himself off … and
considering the way he talked and the way he was when he wasn’t writing his books, I’m just as glad I didn’t.
I might never sleep again if I did.”
Delores was looking at her, frozen, saying nothing.
“Next thing I know, this . . . this feeling came over me.” She paused, thinking. “This compulsion came over me. It was like wanting chop suey at three in the afternoon, or ice cream and pickles at two in the morning,
or … what did you want, Delores?”
“Rind bacon,” Delores said through lips so numb she could hardly feel them. “Harvey went out and couldn’t find me any, but he brought back a bag of those pork rinds and I just gobbled them.”
Martha was nodding.
15
When Delores came back from the bathroom she was at first not able to look at Martha. When she finally
made herself, she saw that Martha was looking at her with a warm kindness and concern that nearly broke her
heart. With no idea of what she was going to do, she went around the table and hugged her friend. Twenty
minutes ago they had laughed madly together; now Martha burst into wild tears. After a few moments of
holding back Delores joined her, and when she kissed Martha on the cheek and told her to go on, their tears
mingled.
16
“I worked the rest of that day in kind of a daze. It was like I was hypnotized. People talked to me, and I
answered them, but it was like I was hearing them though a glass wall and speaking back to them the same
way. I’m hypnotized, all right, I remember thinking.
She hypnotized me. That old woman. Gave me one of those posthypnotic suggestions, like when a stage
hypnotist says, ‘Someone says the word Chiclets to you, you’re gonna get down on all fours and bark like a