Eric Puchner: Model Home

“You should give Jared the keys back,” she said now, snipping open a bag of caramel topping.

“Why?”

“Otherwise we’ll have to start charging by the hour.”

A flash of outrage crossed Shannon’s face before dissolving into a smile. As an object of male worship she could afford not to be angry, which drove Lyle crazy. Shannon picked the People off the windowsill and started to flip through it nonchalantly.

“You’re a virgin, aren’t you?”

“None of your business.”

She narrowed her eyes, smiling. “You are, aren’t you? I knew it.”

Lyle ignored her, carrying the pillow-sized bag of caramel back to the fridge. For the rest of the morning, she tended to customers while Shannon inspected her nails or browsed through magazines or whispered to friends on the phone as if she were selling nuclear secrets. ( I work with a virgin! Lyle imagined her saying.) Once two people came in at the same time and Shannon made no move to get off the phone, letting the second customer wait until Lyle was available. It was the sort of thing Lyle would have had fun complaining about to Bethany, her best friend, mocking Shannon’s urgent whispering. Besides herself, Bethany was the only Californian she knew who didn’t like the beach. It was Bethany’s idea to make T-shirts with fake slogans on them, thinking up the brilliantly inspired PLEASE BUY THIS SENTENCE. Now that she’d moved to France for eight months, because of her dad’s business, Lyle had no one to complain to but herself. She’d failed to anticipate the depth of her loneliness. Her old friends in Wisconsin had betrayed her after she left, falling in love with football players or pimple-faced tenth graders; they’d stopped writing very much, and then altogether. Now the same thing was happening with Bethany. Only a month and a half had passed, but already her letters had grown shorter: last week she’d sent a single paragraph and a picture of her “sort-of petit ami, ” a boy with large ears and Dickensian teeth.

Eventually, when she’d exhausted all sources of leisure, Shannon went out to get something from her car. Lyle knew she’d be gone for thirty minutes but didn’t care. It was a relief. She sneaked into the back room and picked up where she’d left off in Tess of the D’Urbervilles. She felt a certain affinity for Tess. Actually, she couldn’t help being a little attracted to Alec D’Urberville’s “black mustache with curled points.” Just as Tess was baptizing her dying son by candlelight, the door chimed; Lyle slipped the book back in the drawer, pained that she was too embarrassed to read it in front of Shannon.

It was the gatekeeper. Hector. He looked startling outside of his little guardhouse: a real person, rigid and wiry, his uniform ironed to a crisp. He looked like the inside of a closet. She smiled at him uncertainly, and he lifted his finger and wiggled it like a worm. She laughed.

“I was wondering if I could get some ice cream.”

“Sorry. We only sell corn dogs.”

He seemed flustered. “I mean, I’d like to get an ice cream cone.”

“Never mind. A joke.” She frowned. “What flavor do you want?”

He looked at her closely, studying her face instead of the tubs of ice cream displayed in front of him. His mustache, impossible to describe, reminded her why she only liked them in books. The word that popped into her head was “illegitimate.” If mustaches had parents, this was definitely an orphan. “I don’t know. What’s your favorite?”

Lyle shrugged. “Pistachio?”

“I’ve never tried it.”

“Here. Have a taster.”

She grabbed a spoon and handed him a fluorescent green smudge of ice cream. His face fell. He eyed the smudge suspiciously and then sucked it from the little spoon, wincing for a second before he could recover.

“I’ll have that,” he said. “A sugar cone.”

Lyle bent over the tub with her scoop, curling the ice cream from the sides and then packing it into a green snowball. By the end of the day, her arm would ache so badly she’d have trouble sleeping. She glanced up and was surprised to discover Hector looking at her breasts. She stood up straight, pressing the snowball into a cone. For the first time, it occurred to her that he hadn’t just wandered into the store by accident.

He didn’t leave, which surprised her as well. He sat at one of the plastic tables in the corner, eating his cone. He hunched on his elbows, closing his eyes to swallow. It was like watching someone eat his own shoe. Lyle took a weird delight in watching him suffer. Heroically, he licked the scoop down to an eroded-looking dune and then crunched through the cone, finishing the last bite without looking up. Lyle walked over.

“You’ve got green in your mustache,” she said, offering him a napkin.

Hector blushed. He was younger than she’d thought: nineteen or twenty, though it was hard to tell with the hair on his lip. While he wiped his face, dabbing the ice cream from his mustache, Lyle stood patiently in the sunlight from the window. It was a feeling like being onstage. She knew that if she waited long enough, something would happen. The air was filled with glit tering specks, like snow. Gravely, he asked if he could have her phone number.

“Yours,” Lyle said, surprising herself.

She wrote his number on her hand and then went to hide in the back. Her heart was pounding — not from nerves but from a cold rush of power. He was still there; the door hadn’t chimed. Lyle retraced the number in darker pen. She wanted Shannon to see it, but also wanted Hector to take off before she saw who it belonged to.

“How about the Turpitudes?” Biesty said.

“What the hell does that mean?” Tarwater asked.

“My poor coxcomb.” Biesty shook his head. “Think depravity, but times ten.”

Band practice. Sunday morning. They were standing in Dustin’s garage, trying to come up with a name that would reflect the intelligence of the band while defining its commitment to rocking one’s ass back into the womb. So far in their six-month history, the perfect one had eluded them. (They’d been happy with the Deadbeats, or at least communally okay with it, until some hippie at a party had asked them if they covered Grateful Dead songs.) Dustin shot a weary look at Biesty, his best friend, whose glasses were perched on top of his head like a tiara. Biesty was the only person he knew who could quote Heidegger while tripping on three hits of acid. As a summer project, he’d decided to read The Riverside Shakespeare in its entirety while smoking large amounts of Royal Afghani, a project that had started to affect his sanity. Now he grinned at Dustin, as if the Turpitudes was really the best name since the Sex Pistols.

Dustin sighed. The garage was cluttered with bikes and ski equipment and at least one dartboard, which Starhead — their drummer — had placed on his stool to make himself taller. One of Starhead’s tom-toms refused to screw tight and drooped from its stand like a giant flower. Then there was the issue of Tarwater’s bass, which still had Twisted Sister and Def Leppard stickers on it from his formative musical years, circa last year. Occasionally, when they were tuning up, he’d break into the bass line of “Rock of Ages.” At times like this Dustin wondered whether they were really destined to write the next chapter in punk history.

“Turpitude is singular,” Starhead said. True to his nickname, he’d shaved a star into the top of his head, which he ducked down to show people whenever he introduced himself. “You can’t just add an s to it.”

“Who says?”

“It’s like being called the Friendships. Or the Moneys.”

Biesty shrugged. “You can say that. ‘Moneys.’ If you have different kinds of currency.”