Young Lonigan - James T. Farrell [371]
“Put it on,” she said, raising her hand.
He slipped their engagement ring back onto her finger. She kissed it, and looked at him tenderly. She pulled him down onto her lap, kissed him, toyed with his hair, pressed his head against her breasts.
“I don’t want you ever to fight with me again,” she said with assumed sternness, again kissing him.
He was proud to have his girl back, and to receive her attentions. But not wanting to show his feelings too much, he let himself act a little bored.
“We better get those dishes done,” he said with transparent gruffness.
“I see you’re beginning to get trained right.”
He got up and commenced to pick dishes off the table.
“You’re so inefficient,” she said, smiling with a sense of superiority. “Here, scrape the leavings off the plates, and then stack them and save yourself extra trouble.”
He helped carry out the dishes, thinking that there’d been a time when Studs Lonigan had never thought he’d be doing a thing like this —and liking it, too.
“Nice looking monkey-suit you got me into,” he said with pretended discomfort after she had tied an apron on him.
She laughed and left the kitchen. Returning with her hands behind her back, she smiled impishly.
“Close your eyes.”
He complied, and she placed a lace night cap on his head.
“You look so sweet and innocent and domestic now. . . . No, don’t you dare do that. William Lonigan, you keep that cap on. Don’t you dare. I won’t let you take it off.”
He looked at her, helpless and petulant. Laughing again, she threw her arms around him and kissed him.
“You’re my dear, sweet, adorable boob.”
“I guess I am,” he sighed disconsolately.
She laughed.
“Nice compliments I’m getting.”
“Beautiful compliments they are.”
She let hot water into the dishpan and dropped in a handful of soap chips. Studs lit a cigarette, dropped the lace cap on the sideboard, and draped a dish towel over his arm, while she commenced to wash the dishes.
“Wait until it’s rinsed,” she said dictatorially when he started drying a soapy dish.
“All right.”
“You men, you’re such babies and incompetents in the kitchen. You talk so big and pretend so much for yourselves, and when it comes to doing simple, practical little things, you’re all left-handed.”
“Yeah,” he countered with playful irony.
Drying the dishes, he admitted to himself that he liked this, and he liked her, and she sure was a rest and a consolation to him, and he was damn glad that they’d patched up their quarrel. But he couldn’t say too much of such thoughts out loud because he’d look goofy and seem like a mollycoddle.
He wondered about the fellows like Red Kelly. Did he do things like this around his home and like it? Slowly and carefully, he dried the dishes and silverware. She put the dishes away, and he watched in a mellow, happy state while she perfunctorily swept the kitchen. It was going to be nice, too, when they got married, and she was going to make a real wife, and with her to help him he couldn’t help but get along. And the difference between her and such a lying, lowdown broad as that Jackson bitch!
“You get one hundred percent for this,” she said when he meekly handed her the apron he had worn.
“Sure, I go to the head of the class.”
“You’re so funny,” she said, kissing him, and they walked arm-in-arm from the kitchen.
IV
“Let’s take in a show.”
“Oh, let’s not. We’re going to be alone. Let’s just sit and pretend that it’s our own home,” she said with an inviting smile.
He wasn’t certain what it meant, and if it meant more than he usually hoped for from her. He looked at her nonplussed. She seemed to grow a little vague and almost misty before his eyes, and he liked her, and the way she looked at him left him happy but uncertain, just as Lucy had done sometimes.
“It’s nice here, isn’t it, when it’s just getting dark and it is so quiet,” she said when they were seated on the parlor couch.
“Yes,” he said dreamily, hearing an automobile pass outside, thinking how the quarrel had given him again a real appreciation of her.
“Bill,” she exclaimed moodily.
“What?” he replied