Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim Read Online Free PDF Page A

street and saw in the boy a younger version of himself. “He’s maybe not the best player in the world, but he and his friends, they’re a good group.”
“Fine,” I said. “Then you go sleep with them.”
I could not tell my father that boys made me anxious, and so I invented individual reasons to dislike them. The hope was that I might seem discerning rather than frightened, but instead I came off sounding like a prude.
“You’re expecting me to spend the night with someone who curses? Someone who actually throws rocks at cats?”
“You’re damned right I am,” my father said. “Now get the hell over there.”
Aside from myself, there were three other guests at Walt’s slumber party. None of them were particularly popular — they weren’t good-looking enough for that — but each could hold his own on a playing field or in a discussion about cars. The talk started the moment I walked through the door, and while pretending to listen, I wished that I could have been more honest. “What is the actual point of football?” I wanted to ask. “Is a V-8 engine related in any way to the juice?” I would have sounded like a foreign-exchange student, but the answers might have given me some sort of a foundation. As it was, they may as well have been talking backward.
There were four styles of houses on our street, and while Walt’s was different from my own, I was familiar with the layout. The slumber party took place in what the Methodists called a family room, the Catholics used as an extra bedroom, and the neighborhood’s only Jews had turned into a combination darkroom and fallout shelter. Walt’s family was Methodist, and so the room’s focal point was a large black-and-white television. Family photos hung on the wall alongside pictures of the various athletes Mr. Winters had successfully pestered for autographs. I admired them to the best of my ability but was more interested in the wedding portrait displayed above the sofa. Arm in arm with her uniformed husband, Walt’s mother looked deliriously, almost frighteningly happy. The bulging eyes and fierce, gummy smile: it was an expression bordering on hysteria, and the intervening years had done nothing to dampen it.
“What is she on?” my mother would whisper whenever we passed Mrs. Winters waving gaily from her front yard. I thought she was being too hard on her, but after ten minutes in the woman’s home I understood exactly what my mother was talking about.
“Pizza’s here!!!” she chimed when the deliveryman came to the door. “Oh, boys, how about some piping hot pizza!!!” I thought it was funny that anyone would use the words piping hot, but it wasn’t the kind of thing I felt I could actually laugh at. Neither could I laugh at Mr. Winters’s pathetic imitation of an Italian waiter. “Mamma mia. Who want anudda slice a dipizza!”
I had the idea that adults were supposed to make themselves scarce at slumber parties, but Walt’s parents were all over the place: initiating games, offering snacks and refills. When the midnight horror movie came on, Walt’s mother crept into the bathroom, leaving a ketchup-spattered knife beside the sink. An hour passed, and when none of us had yet discovered it, she started dropping little hints. “Doesn’t anyone want to wash their hands?” she asked. “Will whoever’s closest to the door go check to see if I left fresh towels in the bathroom?”
You just wanted to cry for people like her.
As corny as they were, I was sorry when the movie ended and Mr. and Mrs. Winters stood to leave. It was only two A.M. , but clearly they were done in. “I just don’t know how you boys can do it,” Walt’s mother said, yawning into the sleeve of her bathrobe. “I haven’t been up this late since Lauren came into the world.” Lauren was Walt’s sister, who was born prematurely and lived for less than two days. This had happened before the Winterses moved onto our street, but it wasn’t any kind of secret, and