The Collected Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

beautiful together. You looked like twin stars in the summer sky. Now I realize I don’t like your looks much. Who’s your mother and father? I never even heard much about them. For all I know, you got an uncle in Alcatraz. And your teeth are in terrible shape. I thought the army takes care of things like that. You just don’t look so hot to me.”
    â€œNo reason to be personal, Marvine.”
    â€œBut she’s a baby. What if she becomes pregnant and bubbles up her entire constitution? This isn’t India. Did you ever read what happened to the insides of those Indian child brides?”
    â€œOh, he’s very gentle, Mother.”
    â€œWhat?” she said, construing the worst.
    That conference persisted for about two hours. We drank a couple of pitcherfuls of raspberry Kool-Aid we’d been saving for Joanna’s twelfth birthday party the next day. No one had a dime, and we couldn’t find Grandma.
    Later on, decently before midnight. Lizzy showed up. She had a lieutenant (j.g.) with her and she introduced him around as Sid. She didn’t introduce him to Browny, because she has stated time and time again that officers and enlisted men ought not to mix socially. As soon as the lieutenant took Mother’s hand in greeting, I could see he was astonished. He began to perspire visibly in long welts down his back and in the gabardine armpits of his summer uniform. Mother was in one of those sullen, indolent moods which really put a fire under some men. She was just beady to think of my stubborn decision and how my life contained the roots of excitement.
    â€œFrance is where I belong,” she murmured to him. “Paris, Marseilles, places like that, where men like women and don’t chase little girls.”
    â€œI have a lot of sympathy with the Gallic temperament and I do like a real woman,” he said hopefully.
    â€œSympathy is not enough.” Her voice rose to the requirements of her natural disposition. “Empathy is what I need. The empathy of a true friend is what I have lived without for years.”
    â€œOh yes, I feel all that, empathy too.” He fell deeply into his heart, from which he could scarcely be heard … “I like a woman who’s had some contact with life, cradled little ones, felt the pangs of birth, known the death of loved ones …”
    â€œâ€¦ and of love,” she added sadly. “That’s unusual in a young good-looking man.”
    â€œYet that’s my particular preference.”
    Lizzy, Browny, and I borrowed a dollar from him while he sat in idyllic stupor and we wandered out for some ice cream. We took Joanna because we were sorry to have drunk up her whole party. When we returned with a bottle of black-raspberry soda, no one was in sight. “I’m beginning to feel like a procurer,” said Lizzy.
    That’s how come Mother finally said yes. Her moral turpitude took such a lively turn that she gave us money for a Wassermann. She called Dr. Gilmar and told him to be gentle with the needles. “It’s my own little girl, Doctor. Little Josie that you pulled right out of me yourself. She’s so headstrong. Oh, Doctor, remember me and Charles? She’s a rough little customer, just like me.”
    Due to the results of this test, which is a law, and despite Browny’s disbelief, we could not get married. Grandma, always philosophical with the advantage of years, said that young men sowing wild oats were often nipped in the bud, so to speak, and that modern science would soon unite us. Ha-ha-ha, I laugh in recollection.
    Mother never even noticed. It passed her by completely, because of large events in her own life. When Browny left for camp drowned in penicillin and damp with chagrin, she gave him a giant jar of Loft’s Sour Balls and a can of walnut rum tobacco.
    Then she went ahead with her own life. Without any of the disenchantment Browny and I had suffered, the lieutenant and