“No, Mother,” Barney said. “We have no plans to be married.”

Mother pursed her lips. “You’re very… liberated,” she said.

“Oh, come on, Mother. It’s no big deal and you know it.”

“Barney,” Mother said. “I’m not thinking about what other people do. And God knows you’re old enough to do as you like.”

He looked at her. She was Mother all right, with the dewlaps at her neck—or wattles, or whatever they were—and the pink-painted and wrinkled lips in a kind of pout. He had seen that pout a hundred times on the streets of New York. She sat now in the deck chair with her knees a foot apart and the hem of her rayon dress pulled back. He could see the sagging white flesh of her inner thighs above her rolled-down beige nylons. He turned his head away, pretending to look at the blue jay. “Then what are you thinking of, Mother?” he said.

“Of your health, Barney,” she said, and he looked back at her own rampant unhealthiness. “Of the doctors who told me you should take it easy, should not excite yourself…”

My God, he thought. That again. “Mother,” he said aloud, “I’ve had cardiograms yearly for thirty years. I don’t have rheumatic heart anymore.” Yet in her presence he hardly believed it. “I’m not a sick child.” But the words lacked conviction.

Isabel stood up and stretched. “I’ve got to get back to work at the museum,” she said. Isabel was a director of the American Museum of Folk Art; Barney had been in love with her for nearly a year. She was forty-three, twice divorced, with a Ph.D. in Art History from Glasgow and a perfect bottom. “Good-bye, Mrs. Witt and Mr. Witt,” she said. “Your son’s a terrific lover.” She finished off her wine at a gulp and left. No one had eaten lunch.

“Well,” Mother said, “she certainly is up-to-date. I see she feels comfortable without a bra.”

“Come off it, Mother,” he said. “Are you trying to tell me she’s a whore?”

Mother looked away with a grimace. “Times change, Barney,” she said, as though they didn’t. “I just hope you’re sure she’s what you really want.”

“I hear you, Mother,” he said. “You said that about my first bicycle, the red one.”

“It’s just that your father and I want you to make up your own mind about what’s right for you…”%

“My father hasn’t said anything about Isabel,” he said. It was something new for him to speak like that and he felt a sense of exceeding proper limits. But he did not look at his father, the pathetic and silent figure in the chair.

“I know how your father feels about you,” she said. “We’ve been married a long time.”

“How are your… your existences, now?” he said, changing the subject.

She brightened a bit. “Your father rests well,” she said. “I still seem to have my old difficulty sleeping.” As far as he could remember, his mother slept all right. She only liked complaining about not sleeping, about “tossing and turning.” “You know, Barney,” she went on, “where we stay now sometimes our forms change and we become different ages of our lives. Sometimes I’m the age I was before you were born. And sometimes your father and I become babies, just little fat things with diapers on. When that happens I just sleep and sleep.”