Mary shakes her head. “We ought to get our mothers together. Mine thinks I’m wasting time if I even _go_ to the aquarium. I do, though, all the time. I love the walrus.”
“Father? He teaches philosophy at Brooklyn College. So I get it from both sides. Just think, think, think. Father and Nina aren’t hardly even interested in _food_. Once in a while Nina spends all day cooking some great fish soup or a chicken in wine, but the rest of the time I’m the only one who takes time off from thinking to cook a hamburger. They live on rolls and coffee and sardines.”
Mary puts our cups in the sink and then opens a low cupboard. Instead of pots and pans it has stacks of records in it. She pulls out _West Side Story_ and then I see there’s a record player on a side table. What d’you know? A record player in the kitchen! This Left Bank style of living has its advantages.
“I sit down here and eat and play records while I do my homework,” says Mary, which sounds pretty nice.
I ask her if she has any Belafonte, and she says, “Yes, a couple,” but she puts on something else. It’s slow, but sort of powerful, and it makes you feel kind of powerful yourself, as if you could do anything.
“It’s called ‘The Moldau’—that’s a river in Europe. It’s by a Czech named Smetana.”
I wander around the kitchen and look out the window. The wind’s still howling, but not so hard. I remember the ocean, all gray and powerful, spotted with whitecaps. I’d like to be out on it.
“You know what’d be fun?” I say out loud. “To be out in a boat on the harbor today. If you didn’t sink.”
“We could take the Staten Island ferry,” Mary says.
“Huh?” I hadn’t even thought there was really any boat we could get on. “Really? Where do you get it?”
“Down at Sixty-ninth Street and Fourth Avenue. It’s quite a ways. I’ve always gone there in a car. But maybe we could do it on bikes, if we don’t freeze.”
“You can use my brother’s. He’s away at college. Maybe I can find a windbreaker of his, too.”
She finds the things and we get ready and go into the living room, where Nina is sitting reading and sipping a glass of wine.
“We’re going on our bikes to the ferry and over to Staten Island,” Mary says. She doesn’t even ask.
“Oh-h-h.” It’s a long, low note, faintly questioning.