He inferrupted her as he disappeared down the stairs. "Plenty of time," he said. "Elizabeth, what are you doing in there?" Beth's mother spoke from the kitchen where she had been rattling Sunday dinner dishes very obviously for the past five minutes. Beth was still in the chair and she scarcely moved her mouth when she answered. "Nothing." "Elizabeth," her mother said as if she'd warned her before. "What do you want, Mother?" She turned on her side in the chair; bending her knees, trying to sleep. "Elizabeth, what are you doing? Are you doing anything, Elizabeth?" Her mother was still in the kitchen but the dishes were silent now. "No, nothing," she yawned, "Mother." "I can't hear you. What are you doing, dear?" Beth sat up on her elbow and scowled toward the doorway. "I'm not doing anything, Mother," she said with her voice raised patronizingly. "Is that all right, Mother?" Beth heard her mother coming toward the living room and she grimaced before she lay back down and shut her eyes. Steps quieted by the carpet, her mother's voice came suddenly from just above her. "Why don't you do something instead of just lying there all day? Why don't you get dressed? It's after two o'clock, Elizabeth. Don't just lie there," she said with hands on her hips. She was an attractive lady, about forty years old who was frankly alarmed at her twenty-year-old daughter's lack of interest in anything. Appropriately thin, with every hair of her beauty shop hair-do in place, she walked over to the quilted sofa and straightened a pillow when her demand hung unheeded in the air. "I know you're busy, Elizabeth," she went on, leaning over the coffee table and picking up a dirty ashtray as she spoke, "but you waste so much time." She looked at Beth's closed eyes and a definite frown distorted her kindly face. "C'mon Mom," Beth said sleepily, from the chair, "You'll wrinkle your face." She yawned. "Leave me alone, will you? I'm thinking." Guiltily she relaxed her face, and then resentful because Beth had caught her frowning, she said, "Surely Elizabeth, you've got things to do. There's always your ironing. And didn't you tell me you had a paper due tomorrow?" Beth didn't move. "Isn't it?" It took Beth a long time to answer then it was slow. "Yeess." "Well?" Her mother gestured with the ashtray. Beth tilted the chair up to a sitting position surprisingly fast and went up the blue-green stairs to the bathroom. In a few minutes her mother followed Beth's path up the stairs and stood outside the bathroom door. With her hand on the doorknob and gaze directed at the carpet she said, "Elizabeth, may I come in?" Beth's weary-sounding voice came over the hissing of the water and through the door, "I don't care." Her mother went in and detoured around Beth who was bent over the sink, washing her face with great splashes of water. Her mother sat down on the hand-made blue and white bath mat thrown over the side of the tub. She had crocheted that bath mat herself only a few weeks before and when she sat down now she rested one hand on either side of her on its sweatery surface. "Where are you going?" her mother asked. But she was being nice now, even submissive. Patting her face with a big white towel Beth's answer was muffled. "I don't know somewhere." She kept her back toward her mother and spread the towel out on top of the cabinet. Then she sat on the towel and pulled her knees up beside her. Her mother frowned behind her. "Elizabeth, do you have to do that?" Brushing her eyebrows back into place with the tips of her fingers, she answered, "Yes." Her mother was quiet and Beth reached her make-up bag from out of the top drawer, and dumped its bottles and brushes on the towel in front of her. "We're going to have to do something about that blind," her mother said. Beth twisted around and said, "What?" "Yes, we're definitely going to have to do something about that," said her mother, rising to fiddle with the blue blind that had always needed the fixing she spoke of. Beth looked back in the mirror. "Have to get your father up here to look at it," she went on, but then she sat back down on the bath mat, something evidently on her mind. She looked at the spot of mer-thiolate that she could never get off the gold and white linoleum. And then studying her ridgey right hand fingernails she spoke slowly. "Elizabeth, what happened to us? We used to be such good friends." "Ha!" Beth said concentrating on drawing a black line across her eyelid. Her mother was quiet. Beth tilted her face up toward the mirror and drew the wide streak. 38 Then rubbing the brush on the black cake of eyeliner and starting on the other eye she said, "We'd still be ,good friends,' Mother, as you put it, if I still thought the same about everything as you do. A lot of the things I always believed don't make much sense to me now because none of them were my own ideas." "You never talk to me anymore," her mother said, looking down at the folds in her jersey dress. "You never listen to me anymore never have," Beth said, busy now with the mascara brush. "You hear so little of what I say it's not funny." Downstairs the TV went off and Mr. Mockely's heavy feet on the stairs rattled the metal railing. "Well," he said in a loud voice as he skipped a stair, pushing himself up with his hand on his knee. "Not gonna play this afternoon after all. Well," he said exhaling a lot of air. "Guess I'll go rake the lawn." Speaking to no one particularly, he rubbed his hand over the gray whiskers on his chin. Then he began to sing shout really the nonsensical song he always sang about the monkey who wrapped his ears around the flagpole. He didn't remember all the words and when the back door shut he was ineptly whistling the melody. Beth slid off the cabinet and rubbed her towel-textured leg for a minute before starting to comb her boyish brown hair. Talking into the mirror as she furiously ratted her hair she asked, "Mother, did you ever used to wonder what was going to happen to you?" "Why all the time, dear," her mother answered, smiling. "I mean like you wondered if it was all worth it and what it was all for." "If what was worth it?" her mother asked. "Just being here. I don't know, it's hard to explain." Her mother was quiet, but looked at her. "Elizabeth," she paused. "I've been meaning to tell you I don't like those new friends of yours." "Why?" She turned on her mother incredulously. "What's that got to. do with anything? They're the only real friends I've ever had!" "They're a bad influence, Elizabeth." Watching the objection rising on her daughter's face she added quickly, "Maybe not all of them. But you're different now, you've changed." "I'm older now." "But you're still part of the family, Elizabeth." Her mother stood and they faced each other. She enumerated each point on her fingers as she lectured. "You don't talk to us, never eat, stay out till all hours of the night, never tell us where you're going. Why," she shook her head, "I just worry every minute. What do you do until so late at night? Where do you even go at that hour?" She looked intently at Beth for the first time in a long time. She saw the vindictiveness hardening her daughter's features. "Not that it's any of my business." she amended, "I just wonder where you go." Her voice trailed off. Beth stood there hating her mother for the minute. Hated her for wor- 39