Play or Go Home_ _)_ I play a game of ping-pong. "Tennis, we call that in the States," he says. "Yes," I say. "We say ping-pong." "You could look it up in the encyclopedia, then." "I know." It is after two a.m. It would take me ten minutes to walk home through the silent streets. But I am having the conversation. I am not bored yet. "What do you want to be when you grow up?" I ask him. He tells me he wants to be an artist, and then he tells me how he plans to make the paintings. First he will pick out all the colors and then he will use one color on one side of his paintings and another color on the other side and when you put the paintings together they will make a three-dimensional image. He tells me he is making a picture of a lake and I can see he is very excited about this. He tells me the lake is blue, and the sky is blue and the tall grasses on the shore are green. I am a little disappointed in this lake, because it will not have the big trees and dark woods I want to live in. But it is a nice place for a summer day. He's going to make some small drawings of me on a piece of paper before he paints the picture of me. I tell him no, that he must not do this, because no one must see the picture of me. He thinks I'm joking and we talk about who is going to see the picture and how it will be bad luck for him if this happens. I say what people might say and he doesn't understand at first and he is quiet. He is so quiet and nice in this hotel room I don't want to push him away. "My father was very lonely and he died young," he says, "and my mother had a nervous breakdown and she never really got over it and she's been in and out of sanitariums all my life. My mother would think I was disgusting. All the stuff about my getting my pictures in the newspapers, this is only to please her. To get her to talk to me. It's not right, the way I am. But I can't help it." _I will be like him one day_ , I say. _Maybe_ , I say. _Only not that young_. He tells me he has a very old aunt who lives in the country, and I say I'd like to see her one day, if she is real. He says she is real. He tells me what she looks like, how she talks. "It's hard to get away," he says. "It's hard for me to get away," I say. "I only get my chance to see my father every two years. Even if my mother would let me come to New York and visit I wouldn't get to go. The last time was in 1939. He's been in a sanitarium for nine years." I tell him how I got a chance to get away the first time. "No," he says. "They don't let us out at that age." "They let me go for six weeks with my cousin, and he was nice to me. But at the end of the six weeks he wrote my mother that I was a bad influence on him. It was hard on me, too, after he left." "I know," he says. "Sometimes I tell them you are my little sister." "I was nine when my mother brought me to you," I say, "and I don't think she told anyone else where I was." "I know," he says. "She is so worried about me. I can't remember her really being happy or like she was when we lived in that little house in Connecticut. I don't know how she could ever leave that house." "Well, I love you," he says. "She loves you, too, you know." "I think so," I say. "I'm not sure." He picks up his shoes and his jacket and he says good night to me and he leaves. His voice still rings in my ears. I don't sleep. I am thinking of my father. What he would think of it all. He is the one that really wants to see me. He always told me to be a good girl. How I was the only one he ever cared about, the only one he talked to. In our small house. He could talk about anything in the world and I knew it all because I listened and I listened all the time. I would sit by the fire and I would listen to him. Sometimes I would hear a sound and I would turn around and there he would be, smiling, waiting for me. We never talked much. I know I talked too much. But sometimes I think he liked it that way. Sometimes it was as if he was afraid of me. I know my mother loved me. When we lived in the big house she loved me. She was nicer to me then. She did not hate me, but she never wanted me around. She did not want me to be a baby. She wanted me to go away to school. I was nine when we moved from the small house. And she wanted to get married and be happy and have all the things in the world she had lost. But she never had all the things. Not really. She was not really happy either. It wasn't the people that she married or the things she lost or her life, it was me. The only one she had lost was me. Because she never really had me. It is the dead of winter, but I am still so young and it is warm inside me. I have seen his picture on the beach. It's a good photograph of him. He was sitting in the sun and there was a lot of wind and a lot of waves. And he looks happy. I've tried to see if there is any way to make him happy. He was so happy that day, but I've always been the one who made him unhappy. But it's not really me, it's just the way I am, and no matter how hard I try I can't make myself different. And maybe he will forgive me one day. I am sitting in my room when he comes to my door and he is surprised to see me still up. "I thought you were going to be asleep," he says. "You look beautiful lying in the sun," he says. "I didn't know you could be so beautiful." He comes in and sits next to me on the bed and he takes my hand. "Why don't you stay?" he says. "I'd love to spend more time with you." "I will," I say. "But not now." I tell him that I'm not as young as I used to be and he can't understand this. He says he is not that young either. He knows how it is when you are young. He tells me to look at him and I try. I try to look at him, but it is no use. My eyes keep straying, not to anything in particular, just over and over, and he must know it is not true. _He can't be that lonely_ , I tell myself. _He doesn't even want to be lonely anymore. All he wants to do is get away from his Aunt, whom he loves so much_. But maybe that is only the way he talks, and I tell him I have a headache, and I tell him I will go to sleep. It is always hard to sleep with people. Especially people who care about you so much. When I wake up he is asleep beside me. His face is young and relaxed and happy and in the morning it is hard for me to remember how it is when I am not happy. I get up and go into the bathroom. He is awake, lying on the bed, when I come out. He looks so young and happy, I feel it in my eyes, and it is hard to believe it is true. He tells me I look lovely and I tell him he looks happy. He tells me he loves me. He wants me to be happy and to feel how much he loves me. But I can't be happy with him, I can't do that. So instead he kisses me. That is all he wants to do and I have the same feeling inside me as when he wanted to talk to me about his mother. _What is the difference, then, between his mother and I? How can you really feel lonely if you can kiss and hold your daughter_? My father had never been away from us, my mother and me, before. But now he had to go away because of his health. I did not like that at all. I was sad when he was out of the house. Even when I was asleep and he was asleep I could not sleep. Because I would lie there in the dark with the other part of me that I didn't like or understand yet and it would not be quiet and I would feel as if something terrible were going to happen and there was nothing I could do about it. When my mother died in 1942, she was only forty-eight. She had tried for years to get away, even before my father's death, to