to the street, which was another department of the penal system and vice versa, and they'd go back and do what they'd always done, they told her. They'd deal, steal, get the edge, carry the piece and pursue the conduct of the war.
The book fits the hand, it fits the individual. The way you hold a book and turn the pages, hand and eye, the rote motions of raking gravel on a hot country road, the marks on the page, the way one page is like the next but also totally different, the lives in books, the hills going green, old rolling hills that made you feel you were becoming someone else.
Dr. Lindblad tried to work my soul. She believed in my salvation. She probed all the forces in my history and she gave me books to read, and I read them, and she advanced ideas about what had happened, and I thought about them. But I didn't know if I accepted the idea that I had a history. She used that word a lot and it was hard for me to imagine that all the scuffle and boredom of those years, the crisscross boredom and good times and flare-ups and sameshit nights-I didn't understand how the streaky blur in my nighttime mind could have some sort of form and coherence. Maybe there was a history in her files but the thing I felt about myself was that I'd leaned against a wall in a narrow street serving out some years of mostly aimless waiting.
But you felt some things, didn't you? You felt the strange fascination of his dying fall, so crazy-armed and unmade-up that you didn't know how to look at it.
She told me that my father was the third person in the room the day I shot George Manza. This was frankly news to me and I sort of half laughed-you know the way you snicker a nervous draft of air down your nostrils. She told me that one way or another the two events were connected, meaning that six years after Jimmy disappeared I shot a guy who didn't know my father, or barely knew him, or saw him on the street a few times, and this was a link she wanted to probe.
'You have a history,' she said, 'that you are responsible to.'
'What do you mean by responsible to?'
'You're responsible to it. You're answerable. You're required to try to make sense of it.
She kept talking about history in her tight blouse. But all I saw was the crazy-armed man, his body spinning one way, the chair going another. And all I saw was the rough slur of those narrow streets, the streets going narrower all the time, collapsing in on themselves, and the dumb sad sameness of the days.
Then they came and told me I'd be getting an early release, unexpectedly, one summer day. I wasn't sure how I felt about this. They told me they were sending me to the Jesuits, at the wintry end of the world, somewhere near a lake in Minnesota.
2
The Demings were home this afternoon, busy at various tasks in their split-level suburban house, a long low two-tone colonial with a picture window, a breezeway and bright siding.
Erica was in the kitchen making Jell-O chicken mousse for dinner. Three cups chicken broth or three chicken bouillon cubes dissolved in three cups boiling water. Two packages Jell-O lemon gelatin. One teaspoon salt. One- eighth teaspoon cayenne. Three tablespoons vinegar. One and a third cups whipped topping mix. Two-thirds cup mayonnaise. Two cups finely diced cooked chicken. Two cups finely chopped celery. Two tablespoons chopped pimiento.
Then boil and pour and stir and blend. Fold spiced and chilled gelatin into chicken thing. Spoon into 9x5-inch loaf pan. Chill until firm. Unmold. Garnish with crisp lettuce and stuffed olives (if desired). Makes six entree salads.
Do not reuse this bottle for storing liquids.
Erica did things with Jell-O that took people's breath away. Even now, as she prepared the chicken mousse for final chilling, there were nine parfait glasses in the two-tone Kelvinator. This was dessert for the next three evenings. Each glass was tilted at a forty-five-degree angle either against the wall of the refrigerator or against another object. This tilting method, handed down from her grandmother and her mother, allowed Erica to do Jell-O desserts in a number of colorful diagonal stripes, working the combinations among half a dozen flavors. She might put black raspberry Jell-O, slightly thickened, into a parfait glass. She puts the glass in the fridge, tilting it at forty-five degrees. After the gelatin chills and fully thickens she folds in a swathe of lime Jell-O, and then maybe orange, and then strawberry or strawberry-banana. At the end of the process she has nine multistriped desserts, all different, all so vividly attractive.
Doing things with Jell-O was just about the best way to improve her mood, which was oddly gloomy today-she couldn't figure out why
From the kitchen window she could see the lawn, neat and trimmed, low-hedged, open and approachable. The trees at the edge of the lawn were new, like everything else in the area. All up and down the curving streets there were young trees and small new box shrubs and a sense of openness, a sense of seeing everything there is to see at a single glance, with nothing shrouded or walled or protected from the glare.
Nothing shrouded or secret except for young Eric, who sat in his room, behind drawn fiberglass curtains, jerking off into a condom. He liked using a condom because it had a sleek metallic shimmer, like his favorite weapons system, the Honest John, a surface-to-surface missile with a warhead that carried yields of up to forty kilotons.
Avoid contact with eyes, open cuts or running sores.
He sat sprawled in a butterfly chair and thought nobody could ever guess what he was doing, specially the condom part. Nobody could ever guess it, know it, imagine it or associate him with it. But what happens, he thought, if you die some day and it turns out that everything you've ever done in private becomes general knowledge in the hereafter. Everybody automatically knows everything you ever did when you thought you were totally and sneakingly and safely unseen.
Prolonged exposure to sun may cause bursting.
They put thermal pads on the Honest John to heat the solid fuel in preparation for firing. Then they remove the pads and launch the missile from a girderlike launch rail in a grassy field somewhere in the Free World. And the missile's infallible flight, the way it sweeps out precise volumes of mathematical space, it's so saintly and sun- tipped, swinging out of its apex to dive to earth, and the way the fireball haloes out above its column of smoke and roar, like some nameless faceless whatever. It made him want to be a Catholic.
Plus she'd have three chicken mousse salads for leftovers later in the week.
Out in the breezeway husband Rick was simonizing their two-tone Ford Fairlane convertible, brand-new, like the houses and the trees, with whitewall tires and stripes of jetstreak chrome that fairly crackled when the car was in motion.
Erica kept her Jell-O molds in the seashell beige cabinet over the range. She had fluted molds, ring molds, crown molds in a number of sizes, she had notes and diagrams, mold techniques, offer forms for special decorative molds that she intended to fill out and mail at her earliest convenience.
If swallowed, induce vomiting at once.
Eric stroked his dick in a conscientious manner, somber and methodical. The condom was feely in a way he'd had to get used to, rubbery dumb and disaffecting. On the floor between his feet was a photo of Jayne Mansfield with her knockers coming out of a sequined gown. He wanted to sandwich his dick between her breasts until it went
There was one mold Erica had never used, sort of guided missile-like, because it made her feel uneasy somehow.
The face in the picture was all painted mouth and smudgy lashes and at a certain point in the furtherance of his business Eric deflected his attention from the swooping breasts and focused on the facial Jayne, on her eyebrows and lashes and puckered lips. The breasts were real, the face was put together out of a thousand thermoplastic things. And in the evolving scan of his eros, it was the masking waxes, liners, glosses and creams
