My Life as a Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

had been so good at cheering her up and started back through the dark across that alien post —“ Yes, the red we want is the red we got in th ’ old red, white, and blue ” —he had all he could do not to scream out against the horrible injustice of his impending doom. No more Sharon. No more Sharon! NO MORE SHARON! What proportions the loss of Sharon Shatzky assumed in young Zuckerman ’ s mind. And who was she? Who was Sharon Shatzky that the thought of leaving her forever would cause him to clap a hand over his mouth to prevent himself from howling at the moon?
    Sharon was the seventeen-year-old daughter of Al “ the Zipper King ” Shatzky. With her family she had recen tly moved into Country Club Hills, the development of expensive ranch-type houses where his own parents now lived, on the outskirts of Camden, in a landscape as flat and treeless as the Dakota badlands. Zuckerman had met her in the four weeks between his graduation from Bass and his induction into the army in July. Before their meeting his mother had described Sharon as “ a perfect little lady, ” and his father had said she was “ a lovely lovely child, ” with the result that Zuckerman was not at all prepared for the rangy Amazon, red-headed and green-eyed, who arrived in short shorts that night, trailing sullenly behind Al and Minna. All four parents present fell over themselves treating her like a baby, as though that might convince the college graduate to keep his eyes from the powerful curve of haunch beneath the girl ’ s skimpy summer outfit. Mrs. Shatzky had just that day taken Sharon shopping in Philadelphia for her “ college wardrobe. ” “ Mother, please, ” Sharon said, when Minna began to describe how “ adorable ” Sharon looked in each of her new outfits. Al said (proudly) that Sharon Shatzky here now owned more pairs of shoes than he owned undershorts. “ Daddy, ” moaned Sharon, closing her jungle eyes in exasperation. Zuckerman ’ s father said that if Sharon had any questions about college life she should ask his son, who had been editor up at Bass of “ the school paper. ” It had been the literary magazine that Zuckerman had edited, but he was by now accustomed to the inac curacies that accompanied his parents ’ public celebration of his achievements. Indeed, of late, his tolerance for their failings was growing by leaps and bounds. Where only the year before he might have been incensed by some line of his mother ’ s that he knew came straight out of McCall ’ s (or by the fact that she did not know what an “ objective correlative ” was or in what century Dryden had lived), now he was hardly perturbed. He had also given up trying to educate his father about the ins and outs of the syllogism; to be sure, the man simply could not get it through his head that an argument in which the middle term was not distributed at least once was invalid—but what difference did that make to Zuckerman any more? He could afford to be generous to parents who loved him the way they did (illogical and uneducated though they were). Besides, if the truth be known, in the past four years he had become more Miss Benson ’ s student than their offspring … So he was kind and charitable to all that night, albeit “ amused ” by much of what he saw and heard; he answered the Shatzkys ’ questions about “ college life ” without a trace of sarcasm or snobbishness (none, at any rate, that he could hear), and all the while (without success) tried to keep his eyes from their daughter ’ s perky breasts beneath her shrunken polo shirt, and the tempting cage of her torso rising from that slender, mobile waist, and the panthery way she moved across the wall-to-wall carpet on the balls of her bare feet … After all: what business did a student of English letters who had taken tea and watercress sandwiches only a few weeks earlier in the garden of Caroline Benson have with the pampered middle-class daughter of Al “ the