Adios, Scheherazade

I also, because I was around her house all the time, got to know her family. Her father wears railroad engineer overalls, and is small and wiry and sour-looking, and is one of those people with so much grime encased in his skin if he stands still you feel like planting rows of beans up and down him. Her mother is fat, and wears flowered dresses that I believe she buys already faded. Pre-shrunk and pre-faded. She’s fat in the mind, too, being one of the dullest women on earth, who talks in a very slow monotone about things she saw on the television. What she talked about before television is anybody’s guess, but these days one hundred per cent of her conversation is what she saw yesterday or last Sunday or Tuesday afternoon on the television. Not on television, on the television. That’s how she speaks of it, the television. Like the Bronx.

I suppose, come to think of it, before television she used to talk about what she’d heard on the radio. But what would she have done if she’d been born a hundred years ago?

Anyway, besides those two there’s Birge and Johnny. Birge is eight years older than Betsy, and Johnny is five years older than Betsy, and they’re both big and ugly and rangy and mean-looking, and they hunt a lot, and they wear the kind of clothes worn by people who hunt a lot. They have both of them always intimidated me, Birge mostly but Johnny too. They stopped in here once last Christmastime, the middle of December. They drove the truck out from the city after delivering a load of Christmas trees, and they sat around and drank beer and we tried to find something we could talk about. We managed to talk about pro football for a while, but naturally Birge used to play semi-pro ball in Canada and all he wanted to talk about was ripping people’s nostrils, and against that my talk about watching the Giants screw up the game with the Packers on television last Sunday was pretty damn tame. As a matter of fact, I always have the feeling with Birge and Johnny that sooner or later they are going to get exasperated and then they’ll come over and stomp me to death with their boots because I’m soft. They make me nervous, and I’m glad they only came by that one time.

But I was talking about fucking Betsy. After that first night, we both of us got this terrible letch for each other, we’d stand around with our hands shaking waiting for a chance to get at each other again, we screwed and screwed and screwed, we tried every position I’d ever heard of, and Betsy was so hot she actually began to grab hold of me. In places like standing on line in the cafeteria. She’s in front of me, we’re holding our trays, and subtly she backs up, slips a hand behind her, gives me a squeeze. I jump, and look embarrassed, and she giggles at me with sidelong looks, and we rush through lunch and go over to the dorm and I sneak her in and lock the door so Rod won’t break in on us, and we hump all over the room.

Rod. Of course, I was reporting all this to Rod. Betsy doesn’t know it, naturally, but I told Rod everything. I told him how she liked it, what she did when she came, how many times I made her come, how she tasted the first time I went down on her, I told him everything. I was making up for all those times I had nothing to tell, of course, so I was overdoing it a little. In fact, I even lied a few times, exaggerated this and that. Like, I told him she was blowing me months before she was.

Then all of a sudden I was marrying her, and I wished I’d kept my big mouth shut.

But I am, as we writers say, leaping ahead of my story. First I have to leave Betsy forever, then we get married.

I graduated from college in June of 1964. My mother and Hannah came up. Hester was supposed to, but she disappeared that day. She disappeared frequently, so my mother didn’t worry about it, she just took it for granted Hester didn’t want to go see her big half-brother graduated. For which I don’t blame her, particularly since that was also the year Hannah and Hester had their own graduation, from high school. It was two weeks after mine, and I suppose Hester figured one graduation a June was sufficient evil unto the year thereof, or whatever.

Anyway, I introduced Mom and Hannah to Betsy, and Hannah and Betsy hit it off right away. They started talking about making your own clothes, and if that wasn’t enough to alert me to start running I don’t know what would have done it. Hester’s the only one in my family with the sense to disappear when the disappearing’s good.

I’d like to call Hester, but I don’t know exactly where she is. Somewhere in San Francisco, last I heard. If she has a phone, she’s probably pawned it.