A Meaningful Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

the palm trees, the gravel, everything. He began to understand why some people chose to live in sin. It was so they wouldn’t have to get married and invite their parents to the wedding. He even began to wonder a little about his own parents. What did he really know about them? The last time he saw them, he wasn’t even old enough to drink. Maybe his parents had a whole life he didn’t know about, strange proclivities that would suddenly become horribly apparent now that their son was about to get married. He had a sharp, quick vision of his father whipping out a pack of pornographic photographs and passing them around during the ceremony. He wondered why it didn’t seem so implausible as it would have a couple of days ago.
    â€œA lot of Puerto Ricans are coming into it now,” Leo was saying. “I’ve been thinking of getting out. It’s the only thing I know. I guess if I got out, I’d just sit around the house and watch television. What do you think, should I get out or not? It’s hard to know what to do. All the Puerto Ricans coming in and everything. I think about it a lot. I heard on the radio the other day that Mickey Mantle broke his leg. I wonder if it’s true. You never know what to believe these days. I’ll bet if Mickey Mantle really broke his leg, you’d never hear about it. They’d hush it up, what do you think?”
    Lowell was afraid to open his mouth for fear of screaming in the little man’s face. He wasn’t even certain he was hearing any of this. He’d never heard anything like it in his life, except once when he was delirious with pneumonia and everybody seemed to be talking about fish.
    â€œLet’s elope,” he told his future wife that night when they had parked up by the lake in his blue Ford hardtop. They were sitting in the back seat with their clothes off. “Let’s run away to Nevada and live in the desert.” He was only joking, except that he really wasn’t. He really did kind of want to run off to Nevada and try his mettle among all that desolation and vast manly silence.
    â€œYou’re being silly,” said the soft warm girl in his arms. “Yum, that’s why I love you. Anyway, my parents will be gone soon, and it’ll all be over. If you think you’re having a hard time now, just remember that I had to put up with them for years and years. God, years and years. Let’s never be parents. Let’s have children but not be parents, what do you say?”
    â€œGreat,” said Lowell, noticing with a sinking feeling that her last sentence had been spoken with her father’s inflection and ended with her father’s phrase. He’d never noticed a thing like that in her voice before. He began to listen for it, and shortly his fears were confirmed. It was there, all right, coming and going like the odor of burning tires in a rose garden. He listened so hard and heard so much that soon he made himself impotent and unable to think about anything else. He held Betty from Flatbush in his arms, and it scared him.
    â€œIt’s okay,” she said cheerfully as they put their clothes back on, something they had never learned to do either gracefully or well, owing largely to the hump in the middle of the floor. “We’ve got a lot of time. Pretty soon we’ll be married and have a bed.”
    â€œHow come you’re chewing gum?” Lowell asked. “You never chewed gum before.”
    â€œWhat are you talking about? I’ve always chewed gum. I’ve chewed gum ever since I was a little girl. What kind of a question is that? Boy, this marriage thing must really be getting on your nerves. Here, fasten this, will you?” She turned her back to him, and he hooked her bra. Try as he would, he couldn’t remember ever having seen her chewing gum. Surely he would have smelled it when he kissed her.
    â€œDid you always pop it like that?” he