“It’s a big place,” she says, smiling.
“Say, you live out there, don’t you? How come you get all the way in here by yourself? Doesn’t your mom get in a flap? Mine would, if she knew I was going to Coney alone.”
Mary says, “I came in with Mom. Some friend of hers has a small art exhibition opening. She said I could go home alone. After all, she knows I’m not going to get lost.”
I say, “Gee, it’d be great to have a mother that didn’t worry about you all the time.”
“Oh, Mom worries.” Mary giggles. “You should have heard her when I said I liked Gone With the Wind and I didn’t like Anna Karenina. I pretty nearly got disowned.”
“What does she think about science fiction?” I ask, and Mary makes a face, and we both laugh.
I go on. “Well, my mom doesn’t care what I read. She worries about what I eat and whether my feet are wet, and she always seems to think I’m about to kill myself. It’s a nuisance, really.”
Mary looks solemn all of a sudden. She says slowly, “I think maybe it’d be nice. I mean to have someone worrying about whether you’re comfortable and all. Instead of just picking your brains all the time.”
This seems to exhaust the subject of our respective mothers, and Mary picks up the record of West Side Story and says, “Gee, I’d like to see that. Did you?”
I say No, and to tell the truth I hadn’t hardly heard of it.