I Smell Esther Williams Read Online Free PDF

night, I was coerced into cooking linguini verde. As they passed my steamy kettle, the girls winked at me, some hiked their skirts and blew kisses. I just kept cooking. The wonderful thing about what I was doing was that I deeply felt a dedication to my job. I remember thinking of my mother and how I must have annoyed her as she’d concoct mouthwatering dishes in a seeming jiffy. To digress for a second, and I truly mean this and don’t hesitate to nail my colors to the mast; the United States is the greatest country in the world. I think people should want to join the Army. Why shouldn’t the Army overtake the university in popularity? Shouldn’t the G.I., the martyred moral-frontiersman, soon supplant the teaching assistant, the canting troglodytic don, as varsity champion? The purple heart displace the diploma? I think of beautiful America as a tall and lean woman in a crowded pedestrian mall. A breathtakingly stunning woman.
    “Want to eat cock and pussy with a friend of mine?”
    “No,” she’d say, “Your friend should join a service organization or a bowling league. Meeting compatible members of the opposite sex right on the job is often the most natural and stress-free way to rekindle one’s social life.”
    And she’d walk on with that majestic bearing.
    A woman like that: I salute her.
    The next day, oil was discovered in my study; I was meditating when a black geyser shot up into my ass from a crack in the floorboards—it was an enema fraught with success, I thought. “Mark! Mark! We’re rich!” Mom came caterwauling and wiped me and taped the lucrative tissues to the refrigerator, for everyone to see what her son had done. When the accountant showed up, he said, “He’s made a million.” But the money didn’t last—Mom absconded with the bundle and, after a few nights of sturm and drang, I urged the cops to bust her ass.
    So I’d sit in a drugstore waiting for the little magazines to discover me … shot after shot of the wet stuff … and every somatic glyph, each pharmaceutical dish, each smooth veined pestle, each terrific thing, reminded me of you.
    I think of your snappy haircut, your shoes, and of wanting to paint the Eiffel Tower ofay with the cold cream from your face.

HE HAD ONE OF THOSE
AROOOOOOGA HORNS
ON HIS CAR
    for Elizabeth Ross
    Arooooooga! Arooooooga!
    “Carla, he’s here!”
    “I’ll be right down!”
    “What did you do with the laundry tickets—I’ve got to go by there later?”
    Arooooooga! Arooooooga!
    “What were you reading about Vilas?”
    “What about Vilas?” she says, leafing through the paper.
    The kitchen looks nice. It’s suffused with the cheerful sunlight.
    “The thing about Vilas … you just read it to me.”
    Arooooooga! Arooooooga!
    “Oh, oh … ‘At last Vilas lunches on the clubhouse terrace’?”
    “No.” he says, wiping soft-boiled egg from his chin.
    “This, ‘Vilas passes jogging. He has planes to catch and notime for conversation. He must be in Copenhagen tonight, and in Tokyo a few hours after that’?”
    “Yeah … yeah.”
    Arooooooga! Arooooooga!
    “Carla!!”
    “I’ve got …” The rest of her sentence can’t be heard because of the dishwasher.
    “What’s wrong with the dishwasher?”
    “I think something’s caught in the blade.”
    “What blade?”
    “If you’d come over here and look you’d see what blade.”
    “What’s caught?”
    “Probably one of those idiotic ceramic handled hors d’oeuvre knives I’ve told you a million times not to put in the dishwasher.”
    Arooooooga! Arooooooga!
    “Does Carla know he’s here?”
    “You heard me screaming at her.”
    “Maybe she doesn’t know he’s here.”
    “I’ve been screaming at the top of my lungs.”
    “Maybe she didn’t hear you.”
    “She answered … she said she’d be right down.”
    “Maybe she just meant that in a routine way.”
    Arooooooga! Arooooooga!
    He almost knocks the salt and pepper shakers and the bottle of vitamins over,