I looked at his bullet-shaped head. He had a good resemblance to Soapley, especially the forehead part. “I can’t pretend I’m a pretty girl.”
“Just do it for God’s sake.”
So I pretended I was Maurey Pierce for a minute, which is a good exercise for a short-story writer.
I pretended I hated Sam Callahan and sat down to pee.
The ugly dog’s right eye closed and opened.
“He winked at me.”
Soapley hit it big with pride. “Smartest dog in Teton County.”
“Oh.”
Back in my own cabin, I found Mom on the couch. “Lydia, this dog across the street rides on top the truck cab and winks.”
She stared at me across her long fingers, through the blue haze of cigarette smoke. “You expect me to show an interest in this?”
“Not especially.”
“Then don’t muddle the air with details. I don’t want any details whatsoever about goings on in this state.”
As neither one of us still knew how to light the stove, Lydia and I ate in the White Deck Cafe that night. Lydia never was much for cooking anyway.
For food, there was the White Deck Cafe between a barbershop and an art gallery on the town triangle—as opposed to other towns that have a square—and the Tastee Freeze out on the highway by the Forest Service headquarters; except on Sunday nights when the VFW had all the wienies and beans you can eat for a buck.
Anyone celebrating an anniversary or whatever would drive the twenty miles into Jackson where the restaurants had soupspoons and the cash register wasn’t a Dutch Masters box.
The only reason for going to the White Deck was to eat.
After we slid into the booth I started flipping the jukebox wheel while Lydia cleaned silverware with the hem of her shirt. For being a total slob at home, Lydia had remarkably high standards for cleanliness in others.
The waitress called, “Keep your pants zipped, Jack, I’ll be there when I get there,” as she swept by with three dinner plates on her left arm and one in her right hand. She was in her early thirties, maybe ten pounds overweight, and on the back of her belt in white, square letters, I read the word dot.
“Her name is Dot,” I said to Lydia.
Lydia looked at her teeth reflected in the butter knife. “What kind of woman would name a child Dot. I’d rather be blind than saddled with a name like Dot.”
Dot brought the plastic-wrapped menus and two waters all in one hand. “Max told me you’re the folks in Doc Wardell’s place. The guys paid me a dollar each to find out if you’re single.”
There were four other booths of customers, four men each in three of the booths, all with their sleeves rolled up, and two ancient geezers looking dead in the corner. Lydia was the only woman, besides Dot, and I was the only kid. No one used the tables or the stools along the counter.
Lydia inspected the water glasses for spots. “Who’s Max?”
“He owns the place. Max said Doc Wardell rented his house to your father or grandfather or somebody —”
“Tell them I have five husbands,” Lydia said, loud enough for the men to hear for themselves. “Every one of them rich, mean, and jealous. I’ll be rotating them through on a weekly basis.”
Dot broke up. I love people who laugh so hard they break up. I’ve never broken up in my life. She went on for a good minute while the men shifted in their booths, suddenly developing a need for salt or mustard, anything to keep their hands moving. One skinny fart with a king-hell Adam’s apple stared right at Lydia, like she was in a zoo. I took him for a preacher.
Dot draped her hand across my shoulder and I didn’t mind. “That line’ll be all over the valley by sundown,” she said. “Thirty years from now your name’ll come up in conversation and they’ll say, ‘Did you hear about her first night at the White Deck?’”
Lydia opened her menu. “Just tell them I own a rifle.”
I looked up at Dot and she smiled at me.
One thing I’ve always wondered is whether or not men found Lydia good-looking. It’s so hard to be objective on your own mother. Most people tend to look at their own mom as beautiful until you hit seven or so, then you ignore her for a while, then you decide she’s an old hag.
I had just turned thirteen then, which would put Lydia at twenty-eight, not all that over the hill, even for a mom. And, as we hung out together most of the time, we’d developed kind of a bitchy husband-and-wife deal. I don’t mean Oedipal or anything disgusting like that. When or if she kissed me good night, I always screamed “
She hadn’t told me to go to bed or pick something off the floor in eight years—if she told me then.
But back to pretty. Nine men out of ten took one look at Lydia and were afraid of her; the other one was willing to give up wife, job, and reputation to fuck her on the spot. But this effect wasn’t from looks. I’d call the deal demeanor. Lydia had demeanor. And a fairly decent set of knockers.
“So what happened in the seventh grade today?” Lydia held her cheeseburger in one hand, peering at it suspiciously.
“Do you really want to hear?”
She turned the cheeseburger around to inspect the other side. Lord knows what she was afraid of. “Of course I want to hear. It’s my job. If I don’t want to hear, Caspar will take you to Culver Military Academy. We wouldn’t want that now, would we?”
“I wouldn’t.”
Lydia gave me a sharp glance. “Neither would I. Now tell me what happened in school today.”
“I think I fell in love.”
Lydia was back inspecting the burger. Maybe she expected something to crawl out before the first bite. “That’s nice,” she said. “How can you tell you’re in love?”
“Because there’s this girl in class and I can’t stand her.”
“That’s always a good start.”
I was eating the Tuesday blue plate—pounded steak with mashed potatoes and brown gravy. “She hates my guts, called me Ex-Lax yesterday.”
“Sounds like love to me.” Lydia finally took a bite, chewing very slowly. When she swallowed, twelve men in the room exhaled.
The pounded steak desperately cried for ketchup but, for some reason I never understood, Lydia considered ketchup plebeian. If I used a dribble, we’d go into twenty minutes on the sort of people who put ketchup on food— the sort who eat pounded steak in the White Deck if you asked me—and I’d rather try to understand conflicting emotionalism.
“I don’t like any of the kids at school because they’re all idiots, only I don’t like her the most and she’s not an idiot. Not liking the others is like not liking grits—big deal. But not liking her is like not liking a water moccasin. When she looks at me it’s like I have the flu. My stomach aches.” It’s hard to explain love at thirteen.
Lydia looked at me with interest. “Better eat fast. That gravy is turning to axle grease.”
