Chuckette stuffed the scarf in her purse. “It’ll do, I guess. You’ll have to buy me a gold chain for our anniversary.”
“Our anniversary?”
Across the cafeteria, I saw Maurey carrying her tray over to a table of ninth-graders. She had on Dothan’s jacket.
“And another thing,” Chuckette said. “All touching stays above the neck until we’re engaged.”
When I came home, Hank’s truck was parked in the yard, which I took as a good sign. Lydia’s the kind of person who when she’s not happy she doesn’t want anyone around her happy either. She can be real uncomfortable to live with when she sets her mind on it. A bitch.
Otis hopped across the road and dropped a red ball at my feet, then gazed up at me with those melted chocolate eyes that only a dog can pull off. Thirty below or not, I had to throw the damn thing.
Otis was really fast, when you consider his missing part. The problem—there’s always a problem—was the ball was rubber and he’d slobbered on it and the slobber froze to my mitten, so throwing didn’t work out well. The ball had a tendency to stick for an instant, then wobble off about ten feet the wrong way. Otis would pounce on it with his front feet and drool some more before getting a good grip.
I finally launched a fairly good throw way up and toward the house. Otis took off like a shaky shot, timing his leap so as to be most impressive. Just as he jumped, the rubber ball hit the wall and shattered into a zillion pieces.
Made me feel like cold crap. Otis hopped around looking for his toy, actually stepping on the shards of frozen rubber. You’d think I’d destroyed his best pal. Maybe I did, hell, dogs can’t tell toys from friends.
Inside, the toilet paper rolls were gone from Les’s nose and the door to Lydia’s room was closed, so I figured we were into a make-up scene. They really did like each other. It’s a shame when people who like each other aren’t on speaking terms. Goes against the natural order.
I sang “Surfer Joe” which was big on KOMA that week, so they’d know the kid was home from school and to keep it down. Cute couple or not, I wasn’t in the mood for moans and screams from my own mother. I fed Alice, popped open a Dr Pepper and dug out some peanut butter cookies, and wandered into the living room.
The thing with Chuckette bothered me, but the thing with Maurey bothered me more. This jacket deal was some kind of a localized social ritual indicating romantic commitment. An anthropologist could go to town on these northern rural types. Maybe in the early days when a warm coat was a matter of survival, giving a woman your jacket was the ultimate love gesture. Anyhow, Maurey was wearing Dothan’s tan-and-dirt letter jacket with the gv on the right breast—definitely a sign of bad news.
She’d be coming over later to do things which the letter jacket implied were off-base, but I couldn’t very well ask her about it for fear of causing her to feel bad. Maurey might get in a bad mood and stop practice if I said something she didn’t want to hear.
In the midst of this daydreaming, I wandered down the hall, stopped to listen at Lydia’s door, and, not hearing a sound, I went into the bathroom. Lydia and Hank were in the tub, together, naked.
“Hi, honey bunny,” she said.
“Hi, Lydia.” Why is it that whenever something interesting happens to my mother it so often revolves around the can? Hank was behind her with his back up against the end of the claw-legged tub and his hands on her hips. Lydia had the toes of her left foot propped on the faucet.
“Hank got the water going,” she said. “Give me a sip.”
I handed her the Dr Pepper. “What?”
Hank looked embarrassed no end. I think the family weirdness had just crossed his acceptable-level line.
“Hank crawled under the house with a torch and thawed the pipes. Wasn’t that nice of him?” Lydia’s breasts were a lot bigger than Maurey’s but not as big as the girls in Playboy. They kind of pointed down and the nipples were dark. Her stomach had creases where she was bent forward. Casual as I kept it for the purpose of not coming off squirrelly in front of Hank, I wasn’t in the habit of nude conversation.
Lydia offered Hank a hit off the pop, but he shook his head without looking at either of us. She handed the bottle back to me. “There’s a letter from Caspar on top of the end table.”
“What’s it say?”
“I wouldn’t open mail from him. I may be your mother, but I respect your privacy.”
“Right.” I took my pop and left.
As I read the letter a second time, Lydia came from the bathroom barefoot in her white terrycloth robe. She didn’t look any older than I felt.
“What’s dear Daddy got to say?” she asked.
“He’s been reading again.”
“God, I hate it when he does that.”
“Well, are you going to kiss me or not?”
Chuckette had asked an interesting question. Whenever you can kiss a girl, you should. I knew that. I’d be a fool to pass, but on the screen a horde of girls in bathing suits were running across the sand and although I knew the movies would never let an entire tit pop all the way out, I could always imagine that might happen, and the flesh they showed was interesting—a lot more breast than I was likely to see anytime soon in real life. So it was a question of taking the tangible kiss from a drab girl who couldn’t stop playing with her retainer, or waiting on a possible visual tit that I knew would never happen.
The picture was
The plot was that Gidget and Moondoggie have a fight and she flies to Hawaii with her parents where, even though she’s an outsider, Gidget instantly becomes popular on the local scene.
“Are you?” Chuckette asked again.
“You’ll have to take out your gum.”
“If I can touch your tongue you can touch my gum.” It was Chicklets, three pieces. Her mouth hadn’t stopped snapping and popping since we hit Dothan’s ’59 Ford. I can’t stand girls who chew gum; never could. Makes them look stupid.
