Tim Sandlin - Skipped Parts

She’d be coming over later to do things which the letter jacket implied were off-base, but I couldn’t very well ask her about it for fear of causing her to feel bad. Maurey might get in a bad mood and stop practice if I said something she didn’t want to hear.

In the midst of this daydreaming, I wandered down the hall, stopped to listen at Lydia’s door, and, not hearing a sound, I went into the bathroom. Lydia and Hank were in the tub, together, naked.

“Hi, honey bunny,” she said.

“Hi, Lydia.” Why is it that whenever something interesting happens to my mother it so often revolves around the can? Hank was behind her with his back up against the end of the claw-legged tub and his hands on her hips. Lydia had the toes of her left foot propped on the faucet.

“Hank got the water going,” she said. “Give me a sip.”

I handed her the Dr Pepper. “What?”

Hank looked embarrassed no end. I think the family weirdness had just crossed his acceptable-level line.

“Hank crawled under the house with a torch and thawed the pipes. Wasn’t that nice of him?” Lydia’s breasts were a lot bigger than Maurey’s but not as big as the girls in Playboy. They kind of pointed down and the nipples were dark. Her stomach had creases where she was bent forward. Casual as I kept it for the purpose of not coming off squirrelly in front of Hank, I wasn’t in the habit of nude conversation.

Lydia offered Hank a hit off the pop, but he shook his head without looking at either of us. She handed the bottle back to me. “There’s a letter from Caspar on top of the end table.”

“What’s it say?”

“I wouldn’t open mail from him. I may be your mother, but I respect your privacy.”

“Right.” I took my pop and left.

Sigmund Freud sucked deeply on the opium hookah, raised one eyebrow petulantly, then nodded toward his young friend. He spoke without exhaling. “After careful analysis, Sam Callahan, I find you the most balanced, sane person I’ve ever had the pleasure to converse with.”

“You’re drooling, sir. Have a Kleenex.”

“The part I cannot fathom is how someone as emotionally relaxed as yourself could have survived a chaotic background filled with mixed signals and backward relationships, not to mention Miss Neurotic America for a mother-image.”

“Everyone must survive their mother, Sig.”

Sigmund Freud blew an opium smoke ring into the air and turned into the Cheshire cat. “You are a colossus of will over environment, son. Want a hit of this? It will turn the world into ice cream.”

“None for me thanks. Fresh air is plenty enough drug for me.”

Samuel—

The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them. Think carbon paper, Samuel.

Caspar Callahan

As I read the letter a second time, Lydia came from the bathroom barefoot in her white terrycloth robe. She didn’t look any older than I felt.

“What’s dear Daddy got to say?” she asked.

“He’s been reading again.”

“God, I hate it when he does that.”

“Well, are you going to kiss me or not?”

Chuckette had asked an interesting question. Whenever you can kiss a girl, you should. I knew that. I’d be a fool to pass, but on the screen a horde of girls in bathing suits were running across the sand and although I knew the movies would never let an entire tit pop all the way out, I could always imagine that might happen, and the flesh they showed was interesting—a lot more breast than I was likely to see anytime soon in real life. So it was a question of taking the tangible kiss from a drab girl who couldn’t stop playing with her retainer, or waiting on a possible visual tit that I knew would never happen.

The picture was Gidget Goes Hawaiian and I was king-hell lost because this was the first sequel I’d ever seen where the main character is somebody else. When I saw Gidget in Greensboro, she’d been Sandra Dee, now she was Deborah Walley. I had no idea movies could do that. I’d thought movie people becoming someone else was as impossible—or at least as illegal—as real people turning into someone else. Shows what I knew.

The plot was that Gidget and Moondoggie have a fight and she flies to Hawaii with her parents where, even though she’s an outsider, Gidget instantly becomes popular on the local scene.

“Are you?” Chuckette asked again.

“You’ll have to take out your gum.”

“If I can touch your tongue you can touch my gum.” It was Chicklets, three pieces. Her mouth hadn’t stopped snapping and popping since we hit Dothan’s ’59 Ford. I can’t stand girls who chew gum; never could. Makes them look stupid.

“I’m not kissing a wad of gum.”

“I’m sorry I came with you. You don’t give a whit about my feelings.” Which was true.

And to make it a whole lot worse, down the end of our row, against the wall, Maurey and Dothan weren’t watching Gidget at all. He had his greasy pinhead right in her face. I could see her hand on the back of his neck.

All the way from GroVont Maurey sat in the middle of the front seat up against Dothan. He drove with only his left hand on the wheel, which made me think he was touching her. Chuckette and I sat up against opposite doors in the backseat. I refused to speak more than a grunt. With no explanation, Maurey hadn’t come over for practice that afternoon. Left me sitting home like a goofball. I’d been looking forward to it. A boy needs some sex to relax him before a date.

“You win,” Chuckette said, “but it’ll cost you another Black Whip.”

“Win what?”

She made a big deal out of taking out the Chicklet mess and finding a candy wrapper to stick it in. Then she kind of sighed, put both hands in her lap, and turned to me with her flat face tilted up like she was an Episcopalian taking communion against her will.

On the other side of Chuckette, both Maurey’s hands showed on Dothan’s hair. What could she see in that Southern turd? He had no redeeming qualities at all—just a mean oily rural kid whose teeth would be bad before he turned nineteen.

He would hit her someday. I could feel it.

I leaned sideways and kissed Chuckette, but I didn’t touch her with my hands.

“You forget how the French kiss?” she asked.

“I thought you didn’t like it that way.”

“Once you get used to the spit, it’s okay. Besides, it proves you love me.”

I thought about denying I loved her, but what was the use. She wouldn’t believe me. Gidget and the happy, well-adjusted kids were dancing around a bonfire on the beach. We’d done that once on Ocracoke Island down on the Outer Banks. Lydia had been with a captain or something from the Coast Guard. The jerk patted me on the head and gave me pinball money. There’d been a girl with red braids named Ursula that I watched for hours but never got up the gall to talk to. She’d had on a yellow two-piece bathing suit and if you stared at the fire awhile, then looked quickly at her, she seemed naked. Sort of. I decided to pretend Chuckette was really Ursula. Maybe she’d had a disfiguring accident or something and had plastic surgery only down inside she was still Ursula just as Gidget was still Sandra Dee.

The fantasy worked me up enough to do the tongue deal and even to touch Chuckette’s one shoulder. But midway through the kiss I went into a short story and lost track.

Dear Sam Callahan,

You don’t know me but my name is Ursula Dee, daughter of Sandra Dee. I caught sight of you a single time at a cast party on the Outer Banks. I didn’t have the courage to speak to you then and that has been a regret I will always have to live with.