Diane Williams - Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty

He would end up with knives or shears that were so sharp they just had to come near something and it would cut itself. It’s the kind of sharpening that goes beyond comprehension. You just lean the knife against a piece of paper.

Tommy used to use him. Ernie’d do his chain saws.

So, I take my knives under my arm and I drive off to Ernie’s and he and I became friends and we’d talk about everything.

“I don’t sharpen things right away. You leave it — and see that white box over there?” he’d said. That was his office. It was a little white box attached to the house with a lid you could open and inside there were a couple of ballpoint pens. There was a glass jar with change. There were tags with rubber bands and there was an order form that you filled out in case he wasn’t there.

He wasn’t there the first time I came back, at least I didn’t see him.

I went up to the box and those knives were transformed.

As I was closing the lid, he came up through the basement door that was right there and we started to chat and he has to show me something in the garden, so he takes me to where he has his plantings. It’s as if the dirt was all sorted and arranged, and then, when I said he had cut his lawn so nice, he was shining like a plug bayonet.

All the little straws and grass were pointing in one direction.

“I don’t mow like my neighbor,” he said.

Oh, and then he also had a nice touch — for every packet he had completed there was a Band-Aid included. Just a man after my own heart. He died.

I was sad because whenever I got there I was very happy.

I felt, off the start, right at home with him in this gorgeous New England spread-out home with a fantastic lawn and a pond with an island on it where Olivia de Havilland had gotten married and a tennis court and vegetable garden and a rose garden and what time of the year was it? Hmmm. Must have been summer because he introduced me to sweet corn and he had Platt, who lived to be twenty-two years of age and who died shortly after I got married — a cat.

He was sitting in front of the fire going through his briefcase that was filled with office business and now and then he’d toss pages and pages into the fire and then he would stop, he’d pet Platt and say— The poor pussy, such a bad life for a cat!

One day after he had gone through a large amount of papers to be tossed and when he had chucked them into the fire — there was a lesson for us. We were chased out of the house by a rough sound and we looked up at the chimney and saw a violet broom of fire sticking out of the chimney. It just burned itself out and nothing was hurt, but that’s how a lot of his houses burned down.

Some people speak of an energy stream in a village site or sacred place.

I put my arms around him, released him.

Such business as his! A corner of his stair hall was covered by old dry leaves that yield all by themselves.

He looked like a man whose leader has failed him time after time, as he asked the seller awkward questions — not hostile. He was looking for a better belt buckle.

The seller said, You ought to buy yourself something beautiful! Why not this?

He paid for the buckle, which he felt was brighter and stronger than he was. His sense of sight and smell were diminishing.

He could only crudely draw something on his life and just fill it in — say a horse.

“Can I see that?” he said, “What is that?”

It was a baby porringer.

At the close of the day, the seller counted her money, went to the bank — the next step. She hates to push items she doesn’t approve of, especially in this small town, five days a week, where everything she says contains the mystery of health and salvation that preserves her customers from hurt or peril.

That much was settled, as the customer entered his home, approached his wife, and considered his chances. Hadn’t his wife been daily smacked across the mouth with lipstick and cut above the eyes with mascara?

She had an enormous bosom that anyone could feel leaping forward to afford pleasure. She was gabbing and her husband — the customer — was like a whole horse who’d fallen out of its stall — a horse that could not ever get out of its neck-high stall on its own, but then his front legs — their whole length — went over the top edge of the gate, and the customer made a suitable adjustment to get his equilibrium well outside of the stall.

“It’s so cute,” he said to his wife, “when you saw me, how excited you got.”

His wife liked him so much and she had a sweet face and the customer thought he was being perfectly insincere.

He went on talking — it was a mixed type of thing — he was lonely and he was trying to get his sheer delight out of the way.

To a ludicrous degree I could have been in a very good mood looking forward. I am going to be married — followed by dessert, fruit, and bonbons in dishes.

And my furniture cheers me up. We sat in side chairs, packed with springs or foam, accompanied by a moth, who lounged.

It turned out Wayne had been missing me. He was depressed and had, therefore, come to my enclosure after many months.

So Wayne and I now loitered at the edge of the room, ahead of my marriage to Jim.

Over across the — how can I make this wonderful? — the large turf bog! — the sky showed fewer than a hundred birds and at its near top, zero.

Wayne said caringly —It hurts me that I can’t stay because I was unfaithful once or twice.

Wayne! Stay! Jim said.

I was too restless to save time. I leaned against dear Hallam, and Ardolph — isn’t he wise? — a divine spear? — a linden on a hill! — a man from the east who has come to the west. He is well born, noble, a home-loving wolf.

Wayne said, Lady, you owe me up the wazoo! He resumed his departure which is such a gloomy tradition.

Another one of my boyfriends said helpfully there is a great difference between love, hatred, and desire, but nothing compels us to maintain these differences.

“I was a lucky person. I was a very successful person,” said the woman. She was not entirely busy with her work. She took cups and tumblers from her cupboard to prepare a coffee or a tea. She thought, We have some smaller or even smaller.

Her Uncle Bill said, “Have you been able to have sexual intercourse?”

She said, “Yes! And I had a climax too!”

This idea is compact and stained and strained to the limit.

Her sex worries will be discussed when people worry what happened to her at the end of her life when her chin droops and when her eyes are hooded. Not yet.

Her fervor and her youth irritate her for they provide a sort of permanent entry into a shop. She lifts a bouquet of broccoli rabe. Oh, how awful it is!

“I don’t know how to cook these. Do you cook the leaves?”

The man says, “You chop off the ends and chop them up — look!”

She’s got some pent-up gem on her finger. (Those colored stones, they’re all cooked, you know.)

Didn’t she used to appreciate its rays of light? And she used to appreciate the man.

Ask yourself sincerely at odd moments, “Am I prone to deep feeling?” for it is less than necessary — that very small, bright, enlarging thing. The passions do not knock one out, but they may permit you to have carnal complaints before proceeding further. Let’s visit another woman — Deirdre — and then Donna. What’s more — Doris grew up exhausted by shock and word of mouth. She hadn’t been married long, it was a spring day, and she was uninterested still in her own love story.