Diane Williams - Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty

I should have first stooped over.

The lemonade girl hadn’t mentioned the gumdrop cookies they had hoisted for sale.

Just the mention of cookies brings back memories of Spritz and Springerle and Cinnamon Stars — party favors — attractive, deliciously rich, beautiful colors, very well liked, extra special that I made a struggle to run from.

I ate everything I had and had cramps that somehow fitted together. PIE was on the sign. This was well beyond where the poor people live in their hamlet. PIES VEGETABLES. A woman who took orders there popped a lozenge the color of bixbite into her mouth.

She wore a hat, tasseled magnificently.

In the style of a train trip, we take other trips or a car trip or we go away in a fictitious form.

We’re not sure how many parts or places can be put past us — but all this I slyly enjoy.

I think of intimate friends from days gone by and how exquisitely my pie has been traveled.

I am a disappointment, so I drank the milk. I finished the milk quickly, and then took a low dosage of the tea. I lit a lamp — nearly blushed in the company of myself.

With this sort of blow, I am very unpleasant. Delmore and Constantine know how unpleasant I am.

On such a night, I normally display figurines on the table — a bear holding a staff; a man holding a house; a man holding a house standing on another man — you know, how birds sit on each other.

Constantine — one of the finest men I’ll ever know — walked in my direction like a duck who’s wrung himself out. My recommendation to the duck would have been — don’t fly alone and why fly so high. Do the other ducks know you’re out here on your own? Do you even know where the other fucks are? Are you looking for the other fucks?

Marg Foo had been flirtatious with me once. Now she sits in her Avenger as if it were an upright chair and tells me, “What could you do so that I would forgive you?”

So, now it’s show time. In the best of times we are nibbling. Fix your mind on the sweep of the action — on the swish, on the smash, and the bang.

Marg left, perhaps for the rest of her life.

Tim kept to himself. Gertrude married again.

I am going to pick up Mr. Reed in the basement.

Vera Quilt knows the princes she says. There was some big event — a horse with plumes, and soldiers with ruby buttons, shiny helmets, and swords — when she met them.

If there had been any doubt about my feelings for Vera, now there was not. I looked at her warmly.

The air was cold and I mention this because this is a miniature world with levels of experience where people may starve to death.

At some distance from us there was a mob of people — they’re wonderful people — and broad-leaved evergreens, and a flock of birds behaving normally.

“Hoo! — hoo!” Vera began again.

“Now, what do you want, Vera?” I said. Vera and I — we resolve everything in under an hour. She said, “I talked to my husband. It is too hard for me. I come home and it’s late and I am tired and he is tired.”

And, truly, it’s as if people put big branches out on the ground so that Vera can practice climbing on them. You should know that her mind bubbles up in her brain, showing movement, lift! It comes about this way — her confidence, all of it that goes to make a woman.

A large vein showing on her hand curves around her knuckle. She had a cuticle nippers in her hand. Her breath smelt of nothing. Her skull was quite large, but her coat and her skirt were short and there was, pinned to her lapel, a generously sized gemstone flower basket that most people are assuming is a gift from the crown.

“I’d rather not go any farther with you,” she said. “I am very tired.”

“Exactly,” I said.

However, Vera and I had resolved everything in order to push on. She’s the best living woman. It was six o’clock, end of the day, as we smoothed farther into the unknown, which is sometimes described as a plot of evil — cliffs and or swamps overshadowing one another, hideous plateaus, and phosphorescent glimmers. Vera protected, pocketed her nippers, and there are the conquests of happiness to be considered that must be produced in the future, and in a series.

At the level of the street, we looked through the plate glass of the department store, a department store erected on the foundation of a princely court.

Vera is young and she still has her woman’s flow and we take a glance at something to watch out for in Macy’s window that has bulk. This is no drop in the bucket. You must have heard of the expression— the apple of my eye? — And we know how to cry— Help!

You’d have thought her burden was worthy of her, although she shouldn’t keep trying to prove she has common sense.

She’s Vicky Swanky. She addressed an envelope and wrote her name and address on it also. She is my ideal, my old friend.

The letters of her script are medium sized with slim loops. Her ovals are clear. There were nicely turned heads.

She is still going through a divorce and her children were running around there.

“I forgot to take a shower,” she said. “Do you want to take one with me?”

Since I didn’t want to do it, I said no, because I’d get confused, and this is too important.

To repeat — I met up with Vicky Swanky whom I hadn’t seen in years — who said, “Why don’t you come over? I’ve had systemic lupus erythematosus and when you get through that—”

In connection with sex, we lightened up a little then and we dumped some of it off the edge at a minimum. We could be put through a few strokes like everyone else amid the overall circulation of water.

Human bodies are just not good enough! — and in this way we represented two weak powers.

She has adult-sized fist-sized hands with smooth joints. She has smaller than normal hands. Her hands are not smaller than my hands.

I brought Lee over in the late afternoon, the dog. He has the disposition to avoid conflict, is good-natured, and sets a fine example.

It was getting busy concerning the basic meaning, the degree, and the quality. And by late afternoon, the snow was staying on the surface. No one knows that any better.

Cruelly, I’ve seen nothing in the book I am reading — about me. I need to see specifically my life with pointers in the book.

May I suddenly drop in on Vicky Swanky and ask for favors?

Years ago Vicky Swanky was a beauty.

Now, here, there were vases of blanket flowers, pancakes. I am so confused here.

She served us pancakes and syrup and coffee and milk and butter. Her breasts were flat. Her hips were flat. She looked older than her forty years and she plays with all of us.

She has a strange way of showing it. There was a skirmish. The plumber arrived and he said he’d have to remove everything from the nipple in the wall to the toilet. Vicky Swanky said, “Is it true? One would think perhaps you might. I thought so. You were right to tell me. I won’t enjoy it very much. Naturally enough I can find that out for myself,” she said.

Doubtless, early on, in the ultra-fine beginning of the day, others were spectators as I withdrew into Carnegie Nail and I showed the coarseness of my nature in a new sense, for I kept my hands forever forward until at Mrs. Oh’s behest, Dee took them.