Boys and Girls Together by William Saroyan

said.
    â€˜I telephoned you, didn’t I? I left my work to telephone you. Take good care of the kids. Give them a good lunch and clean up the joint a little. The whole house is a shambles.’
    â€˜What are
you
going to do?’
    â€˜I’ll come down and help you after a while. We’ll have some coffee when they’re having their naps. Phone me when they’re asleep.’

Chapter 11
    He saw the mail-carrier coming down the street, so he went down to the street-level basement where the mail was dropped. The shelves along the entire far wall were loaded with books and magazines, the baby-grand pianola was there beside the gas furnace, the pianola that had been in his last play on Broadway, the flop, the third in a row. The car was there, and all the junk from New York: the baby carriages and other things with wheels that small children were pushed around in, the cribs and canvas bathing tubs for infants, the toys, the tricycles, and the boy’s bicycle that he couldn’t ride yet from the seat but could somehow ride, that he loved so much but could only have when someone was there to help and see that he didn’t hurt himself. The garden tools, the pruning shears for the rose trees and bushes, the shovel and rake, the lawn-mower.
    Christ, he thought, I ought to get up at seven and be at work in an office in town somewhere by nine and come home at six, and live the way everybody else around here does.
    One day when he was cutting the lawn and letting Johnny help—it was sundown then, about seven in the evening—a man came out of the top flat of a house just like his house across the way and called out to him, ‘What are you writing?’
    The mail was good for nothing.
    A woman in Richmond, Virginia, wrote to say that he had twice described someone as being cultured when the correct term was cultivated. The woman asked if he had done this on purpose, as part of his style, or because he didn’t know any better.
    The lecture-bureau man who had been writing him for five years wrote again saying that he could arrange for a very profitable series of lectures at a moment’s notice, in almost any part of the country, including the Far West.
    There was a royalty statement from his publisher which only reminded him that he was still in debt, even though the books had sold fairly well over a period of six months.
    There was an invitation from a cousin who lived four or five miles across town to go to the races at Bay Meadows and make a killing.
    There was a cheque for $27.81, which representedhis share of royalties from an anthology of one-act plays.
    There was a letter from a girl who had been eleven years old when she had appeared in one of his plays but was now eighteen, and there was a snapshot of her in the letter. She wore a low-cut evening dress so that he could see how nicely she had grown and she said she never would forget him for picking her out from all the others and giving her her start in the theatre. She was in Hollywood now, and when was he going to go there and show them how to make moving pictures? She said her mother sent him her love and hoped he would visit them in their nice apartment when he got to Hollywood.
    And there was a letter for his wife from her friend Lucretia in New York.
    He put the letter with the small cheque in it and the one with the snapshot in it in the back pocket of his trousers, and then went up to the lower flat and let himself in with a key, calling out to the woman first so that she wouldn’t be frightened. He handed her the mail, because she liked to look at everything.
    â€˜Is this all?’
    â€˜What’s Lucretia say?’
    â€˜Are you sure you haven’t kept out some of the mail?’
    â€˜Go ahead. Open it and see what she’s up to.’
    The woman tore open the fine envelope with the fancy writing all over it and glanced quickly at thefirst of the five or six pages of very thin paper, and then she said,