me that the Catholics had done this to her-whatever it was, it surely qualified for the unmentioned UNSPEAKABLE OUTRAGE that Owen claimed his father and mother had suffered. There was something about Mrs. Meany's obdurate self-imprisonment that smacked of religious persecution-if not eternal damnation.
'How did it go with the Meanys?' I asked my mother.
'They told Owen I was there?' she asked.
'No, they didn't tell him. He recognized your perfume.'
'He would,' she said, and smiled. I think she knew Owen had a crash on her-all my friends had crashes on my mother. And if she had lived until they'd all been teenagers, their degrees of infatuation with her would doubtless have deepened, and worsened, and been wholly unbearable-both to them, and to me. Although my mother resisted the temptation of my generation-that is to say, she restrained herself from picking up Owen Meany-she could not resist touching Owen. You simply had to put your hands on Owen. He was mortally cute; he had a furry-animal attractiveness-except for the nakedness of his nearly transparent ears, and the rodentlike way they protruded from his sharp face. My grandmother said that Owen resembled an embryonic fox. When touching Owen, one avoided his ears; they looked as if they would be cold to the touch. But not my mother; she even rubbed warmth into his rubbery ears. She hugged him, she kissed him, she touched noses with him. She did all these things as naturally as if she were doing them to me, but she did none of these things to my other friends-not even to my cousins. And Owen responded to her quite affectionately; he'd blush sometimes, but he'd always smile. His standard, nearly constant frown would disappear; an embarrassed beam would overcome his face. I remember him best when he stood level to my mother's girlish waist; the top of his head, if he stood on his toes, would brush against her breasts. When she was sitting down and he would go over to her, to receive his usual touches and hugs, his face would be dead-even with her breasts. My mother was a sweater girl; she had a lovely figure, and she knew it, and she wore those sweaters of the period that showed it. A measure of Owen's seriousness was that we could talk about the mothers of all our friends, and Owen could be extremely frank in his appraisal of my mother to me; he could get away with it, because I knew he wasn't joking. Owen never joked.
'YOUR MOTHER HAS THE BEST BREASTS OF ALL THE MOTHERS.' No other friend could have said this to me without starting a fight.
'You really think so?' I asked him.
'ABSOLUTELY, THE BEST,' he said.
'What about Missus Wiggin?' I asked him.
'TOO BIG,' Owen said.
'Missus Webster?' I asked him.
'TOO LOW,' Owen said.
'Missus Merrill?' I asked.
'VERY FUNNY,' Owen said.
'Miss Judkins?' I said.
'I DON'T KNOW,' he said. 'I CAN'T REMEMBER THEM. BUT SHE'S NOT A MOTHER '
'Miss Farnum!' I said.
'YOU'RE JUST FOOLING AROUND,' Owen said peevishly.
'Caroline Perkins!' I said.
'MAYBE ONE DAY,' he said seriously. 'BUT SHE'S NOT A MOTHER, EITHER.'
'Irene Babson!' I said.
'DON'T GIVE ME THE SHIVERS,' Owen said. 'YOUR MOTHER'S THE ONE,' he said worshipfully. 'AND SHE SMELLS BETTER THAN ANYONE ELSE, TOO,' he added. I agreed with him about this; my mother always smelted wonderful. Your own mother's bosom is a strange topic of conversation in which to indulge a friend, but my mother was an acknowledged beauty, and Owen possessed a completely reliable frankness; you could trust him, absolutely. My mother was often our driver. She drove me out to the quarry to play with Owen; she picked Owen up to come play with me-and she drove him home. The Meany Granite Quarry was about three miles out of the center of town, not too far for a bike ride-except that the ride was all uphill. Mother would often drive me out there with my bike in the car, and then I could ride my bike home; or Owen would ride his bike to town, and she'd take him and his bike back. The point is, she was so often our chauffeur that he might have seemed to her like a second son. And to the extent that mothers are the chauffeurs of small-town life, Owen had reason to identify her as more his mother than his own mother was. When we played at Owen's, we rarely went inside. We played in the rock piles, in and around the pits, or down by the river, and on Sundays we sat in or on the silent machinery, imagining ourselves in charge of the quarry-or in a war. Owen seemed to find the inside of his house as strange and oppressive as I did. When the weather was inclement, we played at my house-and since the weather in New Hampshire is inclement most of the time, we played most of the time at my house. And play is all we did, it seems to me now. We were both eleven the summer my mother died. It was our last year in Little League, which we were already bored with. Baseball, in my opinion, is boring; one's last year in Little League is only a preview of the boring moments in baseball that lie ahead for many Americans. Unfortunately, Canadians play and watch baseball, too. It is a game with a lot of waiting in it; it is a game
