The End of the World as We Know It Read Online Free PDF

humid smell of the caladium and mimosa. As we sat and moved slowly back and forth on a glider, the grownups had grease cutters, which is what some Virginia people call what normal people call nightcaps. They drank Tom Collinses from five o’clock until time to go to bed.
    Dodo was in love with Frank Sinatra. She had seen him in movie magazines and then on the big screen. My grandmothertook her, took us all, to grownup movies like
Advise and Consent
, scandalous movies with sex and violence, and Dodo had developed a passion for him in
From Here to Eternity
that was unstoppable. She believed that Frank would love her, too, and so she wrote to him nearly every day. She couldn’t write, of course, but she had developed a scribble that resembled what her handwriting would look like if she could actually write. It was an elegant scrawl, broken in word-length bits, and divided into paragraphs, and started with what would have been “Dear Frank,” except that it was just scribblescrabble. Gibberish.
    She would write these letters, working at them for hours at the dining room table, and she would address an envelope in her scribble, and put a stamp on it, and ask Warren to mail it. He would pocket the letters and throw them away when he got to work. Every day she worked on her scrapbook filled with pictures of Frank Sinatra, and every day she asked if she’d gotten a letter from Frank, and the fact that she didn’t never lessened her assurance or her affection for the star of her dreams.
    She also wanted to go to Mary Washington College, so she wrote them letter after letter, but they never answered either. It mystified her and eventually enraged her that they wouldn’t let her enroll. There was a building there named after her uncle.
    So Warren, one day, sat down at the office and wrote her a reply. He carefully copied the style of her gibberish, wrote her a long letter, and put it in an envelope and addressed it in scribblescrabble and put a stamp on it. He brought it home that night, and proudly told Dodo that the letter from Mary Washington had finally come.
    She looked at the envelope suspiciously, opened the letter,and said, “This is just scribblescrabble,” and started crying. She was inconsolable for days, and she never wrote to Mary Washington again, appalled that they would play such a foolish game with her.
    She also read the funnies every day. She couldn’t read, of course, but she would look at the pictures and make up elaborate stories about Judge Parker or Steve Canyon and Poteet, who was always getting caught in Communist concentration camps where rats crawled all over her and the women wore skintight leather fetish outfits. We would sit at her feet and howl. Sometimes we were laughing with her, but a lot of the time we were laughing at her.
    When I was fourteen, my grandmother died. She was old and she just died, in a nursing home she loathed. The night of her funeral, the grownups all went to the country club for dinner, and I was left to babysit for the children, which included Dodo. We ate sandwiches at my aunt’s house while Dodo drank sauterne, and then we all watched Ernie Kovacs or somebody on television, and then I put the little ones to bed while Dodo smoked and drank and stared at the TV.
    Later, when Dodo was going to the bathroom, I sneaked a cigarette out of her pack. I told her I was going to sit outside for awhile, and I sat on the steps of the back porch and smoked a menthol cigarette. Just as I was finishing, Dodo came out on the porch and I flicked the cigarette into the hard, spiky grass that grows there.
    I was afraid she would catch me smoking and tell my parents. But she didn’t say a word.
    Dodo sat down next to me and pulled her cigarettes out ofher pocket and lit one with the little lighter she could operate with one hand. She smoked with a voluptuousness and an ecstasy that was very glamorous, savoring every puff as though it were good