@@@@@When the time comes I'll be happy for you to 801
@@@@@When the time comes I'll be happy for you to be married, and I only hope you should get a wife who deserves you
But I don't even deserve Natalie
Nonsense! Nothing is too good for you
Mama, you got to face itI'm going to get marriedNu, you've got a half year yet, and then you got to find a job with this weldingI only want you should keep an open mind on the question, and when the time comes we'll see
But my mind's made upIt's no longer an issueI swear, Mama, you make me so upset
She becomes silent, and they eat for a few minutes without speaking, both troubled, both absorbed with new arguments they are loath to use for fear of beginning it againAt last she sighs and looks at him
Joey, you shouldn't say anything of what I said about Natalie, I've got nothing against her, you know thatCautious, half convinced, she is beginning to hedge the bet
He graduates from welding school, gets a job for twenty-five dollars, and they get marriedThe wedding presents come to almost four hundred dollars, enough for a bedroom set from a department store, and a couch and two chairs for the living roomThey extend their furniture with a few pictures, an inaccurate calendar scene of cows in a pasture at sunset, a cheap reproduction of "The Blue Door" and a Maxfield Parrish from an advertisementOn an end table, Natalie puts their wedding pictures, joined like book covers in a double frameHis mother gives them a whatnot and a collection of tiny painted cups and saucers with plump nude angels chasing around the circumferenceThey settle down in their three-room flat, and are very happy, very warm and absorbed in each otherBy the end of the first year he is making thirty-five a week, and they are moving through the regular ordained orbit of friends and relativesJoey becomes adept at bridgeTheir marital storms are infrequent and quickly lost, the memories of them buried in the avalanche of pleasant and monotonous trivia that makes up their life
Once or twice there is some tension between themJoey, they decide, is very virile and the knowledge that she wants him less often than he needs her is bitter and sometimes u
