Pin Read Free Page B

many times. We have a bathroom downstairs, right off the living room. To the left of the living room is a small bedroom situated behind the garage. This is Pin’s room.
    Upstairs we have three bedrooms and a bathroom. Ursula’s bedroom and my bedroom have an adjoining door. We left our parents’ room just the way it was the day they died. We didn’t give any oftheir clothes away or upset any furniture arrangements. We don’t go in there much, and the door is always closed. Our bedrooms have windows that open to the road outside. My room is toward the high side of the hill and Ursula’s is toward the low side.
    The house has faded white wood shingles with black aluminum shutters. We had the shutters put on recently. We haven’t made many improvements on the house; neither of us really takes much interest in what it looks like. Ursula says as long as the heating works and the plumbing works, why worry about it? Pin rarely goes outside, so he couldn’t care less about its appearance. People are always coming around or calling up to try to sell us some kind of home improvements. They all know we have money. My father was a very successful doctor here. Practically everyone went to him. His and my mother’s funeral was a mob scene.
    Once in a while I fooled around with my father’s stethoscope and other paraphernalia. I’d take Pin’s blood pressure and listen to his heartbeat and he’d do the same to me. When we were kids, Ursula and I always used to listen to each other’s heartbeat. We still do sometimes, just for gags. The other night, I remember, we all had a little too much to drink and I took out the old stethoscope, putting it in my ears and walking around the place the way my father used to walk around. Then Ursula took off her blouse and called me over to listen to her heart. It was beating rapidly. I stuck the thing down into her bra and tickled the nipple on her breast. She laughed and screeched. Pin almost fell out of his seat in hysterics. Then she wanted Pin to listen to herheartbeat. She nearly ripped the earlobes off me, pulling the damn thing away from me, and sauntered over to him. She shoved her breasts in his face and stuck the stethoscope into his ears. It kept falling out. Finally, she had to hold it to his head. He looked at me as if to say, “We’ve got to humor her when she gets like this.” I turned away.
    After Ursula drank too much and got silly, she would always get maudlin and cry. I’d have to take her upstairs and help her get undressed and into bed. She would really get helplessly infantile at these times. I guess it all had to do with our losing our parents the way we did. At least, that’s the way Pin explained it away. He was very learned and well read on the subject of psychology, and usually pedantic about his knowledge, I might add. I suppose he was right. Whatever the reason, Ursula needed the tenderness and affection. She wouldn’t want to wear nightclothes. Naked, she slipped into the bed, sobbing softly and pressing my fingers against her lips. I would sit on the bed and stroke her hair. Sometimes she fell asleep quickly, and sometimes she talked. Usually her conversations centered around the Need and how she reacted to it. It was very intimate talk, but she had no one besides me to confide in.
    The Need was one thing my father discussed with us. He had very liberal ideas about sex and he was always very factual and clinical about it. There wasn’t a question he wouldn’t answer if we had the nerve to ask it, and he loved to make fun of the words and expressions some parents thought up to avoid telling it like it is. One day he sat Ursula and me down in the living room and went through thewhole sexual process. I was two years older than she, of course, but, remarkably, our bodies were coming into maturity at the same time. He used the word “remarkable.” He explained sex to us in terms of a