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By Root 1409 0

out about him a few days ago. At night, Wanda always comes into her bedroom to tuck her in. Wanda calls it tucking in, but actually she only walks around the room and then sits at the foot of the bed and talks. One of the stories she told was about her second husband, Frank. He and Wanda were on vacation, and late at night they sneaked onto a fishing pier. Wanda was looking at the lights of a boat far in the distance when she heard a splash. Frank had jumped into the water. “I’m cooling off !” Frank hollered. They had been drinking, so Wanda just stood there laughing. Then Frank started swimming. He swam out of sight, and Wanda stood there at the end of the pier waiting for him to swim back. Finally she started calling his name. She called him by his full name. “Frank Marshall!” she screamed at the top of her lungs. Wanda is sure that Frank never meant to drown. They had been very happy at dinner that night. He had bought her brandy after dinner, which he never did, because it was too expensive to drink anything but beer in restaurants.

May thinks that is very sad. She remembers the last time she saw her father. It was when her mother took the caps off her father’s film containers and spit into them. He grabbed her mother’s arm and pushed her out of the room. “The great artist!” her mother hollered, and her father’s face went wild. He has a long, straight nose (May’s is snubbed, like her mother’s) and long, brown hair that he ties back with a rubber band when he rides his motorcycle. Her father is two years younger than her mother. They met in the park when he took a picture of her. He is a professional photographer.

May picks up the National Enquirer and begins to read an article about how Sophia Loren tried to save Richard Burton’s marriage. In a picture, Sophia holds Carlo Ponti’s hand and beams. Wanda subscribes to the National Enquirer. She cries over the stories about crippled children, and prays for them. She answers the ads offering little plants for a dollar. “I always get suckered in,” she says. “I know they just die.” She talks back to the articles and chastises Richard for ever leaving Liz, and Liz for ever having married Eddie, and Liz for running around with a used-car salesman, and all the doctors who think they have a cure for cancer.

After lunch, Wanda takes a nap and then a shower. Afterward, there is always bath powder all over the bathroom—even on the mirror. Then she drinks two shots of tequila in lemonade, and then she fixes dinner. Mrs. Wong comes back from the library punctually at four o’clock. May looks at Wanda’s National Enquirer. She turns the page, and Paul Newman is swimming in water full of big chunks of ice.

Mrs. Wong’s first name is Maria. Her name is written neatly on her notebooks. “Imagine having a student living under my roof !” Wanda says. Wanda went to a junior college with May’s mother but dropped out after the first semester. Wanda and May’s mother have often talked about Mrs. Wong. From them May learned that Mrs. Wong married a Chinese man and then left him, and she has a fifteen-year-old son. On top of that, she is studying to be a social worker. “That ought to give her an opportunity to marry a Negro,” May’s mother said to Wanda. “The Chinese man wasn’t far out enough, I guess.”

Mrs. Wong is back early today. As she comes up the sidewalk, she gives May the peace sign. May gives the peace sign, too.

“Your mama didn’t write, I take it,” Mrs. Wong says.

May shrugs.

“I write my son, and my husband rips up the letters,” Mrs. Wong says. “At least when she does write you’ll get it.” Mrs. Wong sits down on the top step and takes off her sandals. She rubs her feet. “Get to the movies?” she asks.

“She always forgets.”

“Remind her,” Mrs. Wong says. “Honey, if you don’t practice by asserting yourself with women, you’ll never be able to assert yourself with men.”

May wishes that Mrs. Wong were her mother. It would be nice if she could keep her father and have Mrs. Wong for a mother. But all the women he likes are thin and blond and young. That’s one of the things her mother complains