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and a sort of bratty younger brother. It was the same basic
house as ours but with lots more things in it, lots nicer: and
her mother was always cheerful and upright and never up dying
in bed, which was as pleasant as anything could be. We
weren’t real close friends but there was some wild streak that
matched: she had it by being real funny, crazy funny, and I
had it some other way, I don’t know how I had it or how she
knew I had it, but she always liked me so she must have.
One regular Saturday afternoon H ’s mother went away and
her father was working and she and her bratty brother were
being baby-sitted and I went there to visit. The baby-sitter was
some gray gray teenager with pimples and a ponytail, and we
just got wilder and wilder until we ended up on top of her
holding her down and punching her and hitting her and
taunting her and tormenting her and calling her names and
telling her how ugly she was: and then the bratty brother came
down and we got scared for a minute that he was going to tell
or she was going to get up because we were getting pretty tired
but he came right over and sat right on top of her and we kept
hitting her and laughing like mad and having so much fun
making jokes about hitting her and calling her names and then
making jokes about that. H was at her head holding her down
by pulling her hair and sitting on her hair and slapping her in
the face and hitting her breasts. The bratty brother was sitting
sort of over her stomach and kept hitting her there and tickling
her there and grinding his knees into her sides. I was at her
feet, sitting on top of them and digging my nails into her legs
and punching her legs and hitting her between her legs. We
kept her there for hours, at least two, and we never stopped
laughing at our jokes and at how stupid and pathetic she was:
and when we let her up she ran out and left us: and when H’s
mother came home we said the baby-sitter had just left us
there to go see her boyfriend: and H’s mother was furious with
the baby-sitter for leaving us alone because we were just
children and she called to complain and call her down and got
some hysterical story of how we had tortured her: and we
said, what does that mean? what is that? what is torture? she
left to see her boyfriend, that’s what she said to us: and the
baby-sitter said we beat her up and tortured her and we said
no no we don’t know what she means: and no one ever believed
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her. She wasn’t Jewish was the thing. It was incredible fun was
the thing. She was dumber and weaker than we were was the
thing. Especially: it was incredible fun was the thing. I never
laughed so much in my life. She wept but I’m sure she didn’t
