She’s got on a black T-shirt and blue jeans and old sneakers, and her hair is in a long braid, with uneven bangs in front.
Mary waves a saucepan vaguely at us both and says, “Nina—Davey—this is my mother.”
So Nina is her mother. I stick out my hand. “Uh—how do you do?”
“Hel-looo.” Her voice is low and musical. “I think there is coffee on the stove.”
“I thought I’d make cocoa for a change,” says Mary.
“All right.” Nina puts a cigarette in her mouth and offers one to me.
“Tell me....” She talks in this low, intense kind of voice. “Are you in school with Mary?”
So I tell her I live in Manhattan, and how I ran into Mary when I had Cat on the beach, because that makes it sound sort of respectable, not like a pickup. But she doesn’t seem to be interested in Cat and the beach.
“What do you _read_? In your school?” she asks, launching each question like a torpedo.
I remember Mary saying something about her mother and poetry, so I say, “Well, uh—last week we read ‘The Highwayman’ and ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus.’ They’re about—I mean, we were studying metaphors and similes. Looking at the ocean today, I sure can see what Longfellow meant about the icy....”
I thought I was doing pretty well, but she cut me off again.
“Don’t you read any _real_ poetry? Donne? Auden? Baudelaire?”
Three more torpedoes. “We didn’t get to them yet.”
Nina blows out a great angry cloud of smoke and explodes, “Schools!” Then she sails out of the kitchen.
I guess I look a little shook up. Mary laughs and shoves a mug of cocoa and a plate of cinnamon toast in front of me. “Don’t mind Mother. She just can’t get used to New York schools. Or Coney Island. Or hardly anything around here.
“She grew up on the Left Bank in Paris. Her father was an artist and her mother was a writer, and they taught her to read at home, starting with Chaucer, probably. She never read a kids’ book in her life.
“Anything I ever tell her about school pretty much sounds either childish or stupid to her. What I really love is science—experiments and stuff—and she can’t see that for beans.”
“Our science teacher is a dope,” I say, because she is, “so I really never got very interested in science. But I told Mom and Dad I was coming to the aquarium to take notes today, so they wouldn’t kick up such a fuss.”