Tim Sandlin - Skipped Parts

Hank loaned me Being and Nothingness. He said it would help me understand life and Lydia.

“Do you understand Lydia?” I asked.

“I’m better with life.”

I spent twenty minutes on the table of contents—“Chapter Three, Knowledge as a Type of Relationship Between the For-Itself and the In-Itself”—and decided I was still a kid after all.

“You’re getting crumbs in the sheets,” Maurey said.

“I thought we were supposed to get crumbs in the sheets. If we didn’t want to crumb the sheets, we’d be in the living room, on the couch.”

“You’re losing your sense of play, Sam.”

“What play?” Maurey was wearing the white nightie and the flashlight light made her new breasts and the undersides of her cheekbones glow while the rest of her stayed shaded.

I wanted to talk more than read. “Is your real name Maureen? Hank said Maurey is short for Maureen.”

“Merle.”

I flipped the light beam up at her face. “Merle?”

“Short for Merle Oberon. She was a movie star in the thirties or forties or sometime when Dad used to see movies all the time. He thought she was the perfect woman.”

“Was she?”

“I’ve seen photographs; she had a face like Charlotte Morris.”

I had trouble with the picture. “You’re named after a beautiful woman who looked like Chuckette?”

“Chuckette’s pretty.”

“If you like a dinner plate with eyes.”

Maurey dug in the box for another cracker. “Our TM Ranch is named for a cowboy star named Tom Mix. Dad’s his second cousin’s son or something like that. He saw Tom Mix once in San Francisco.”

This was considerably more interesting than Being and Nothingness . “What was Buddy doing in San Francisco?”

“Art school at Stanford.” Maurey reached over and with the thumb and forefinger of her left hand, she opened my pajama fly.

I ignored her, but, boy, did I have hopes. “Buddy’s a cowboy. He couldn’t be in art school.”

“Cowboys aren’t stupid, Sam. They just like being alone and outdoors.” Maurey held the graham cracker in her right hand and made a fist, then she let the crumbs sift through her fingers into my pubic area. She said, “Now there’s a sense of play.”

“I’ll show you play.” I dived on her and she shrieked. We rolled around, all tied up in each other and the blankets while I stuffed crackers down her nightgown and she crumbled into my hair. I got her a good one, right up the nose. Amid the giggling and mock screams, we rolled off the bed and crashed to the floor where I came out on top. She looked at me with crumbs in her eyelashes and smiled.

I stared into her blue eyes for a long time, then dipped in for the kiss.

“No,” Maurey said.

“No?”

“We’re having fun, Sam. Don’t spoil it.”

I sat up. “I don’t understand. You kiss Dothan Talbot all the time and he’s a jerk.”

“I kiss him because he’s a jerk. I like you. I can’t kiss you anymore.”

Cracker crumbs trickled down my balls and into my bottom crack. “I’m nice to you, we sleep in the same bed, you’re having our baby, but you can’t kiss me because you like me?”

“Right.”

“And you can kiss Dothan because you don’t like him?”

“I like him, in a different way.”

I reached over and dusted the cracker crumbs out of her eyebrows. “Do you think the fall hurt the baby?”

Maurey sat up next to me. “I hope not.” We sat shoulder to shoulder on the floor, staring at the log wall under my desk. One of the logs had a whorl knot with bark around the outside of the circle. I wondered if Lydia heard the crash. Probably not; it was after midnight.

“Sam,” Maurey said. “I’m sorry you want something that I don’t. I’d like to give you what you want, but you’re important to me now. What with the baby and things all a mess with Dad, I need you too much to risk anything more than friendship.”

She put her hand on my knee. After a while, I covered her hand with mine. We laced fingers and she gave me a little squeeze.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“I don’t either.”

“Shit.”

“I’m crumby. Want to take a shower?”

Wednesday evening as the three of us walked into the White Deck, Maurey stopped and stared off toward Kimball’s Food Market.

She said, “They’re going to Jackson to church.”

“Who?” I didn’t see anything other than a white Chevelle with the engine left running.

“That’s Mama’s car,” Maurey said.

Annabel came out of the grocery store carrying a single brown paper bag, followed by Petey in his dark suit that made him look like a miniature hit man. Annabel was wearing a purple print dress with yellow leaves on it and a hat.

Petey stopped and pointed toward us. I could hear his high-whine voice but not the words. Annabel looked at us a moment, then opened the back door and set in her sack. She said something to Petey as she moved around the Chevelle and got in the driver’s side.

“That’ll be Dad’s beer and this month’s Redbook ,” Maurey said. “She always buys that stuff on the way to church.”

The passenger door opened from the inside and I could see Annabel gesturing for Petey to get in the car. He pointed one more time, then he climbed in and they drove off away from us.

Maurey stared after them. “How does she dare show herself in church after what she’s done?”

Lydia sniffed. “How does she dare show herself in church wearing that dress?”

“So Dothan’s going to drive over here in his Ford to pick up his date and her roommate?”

“What’s the matter with that?”

“Won’t he think it squirrelly that you’re living at a guy’s house?”

“I told him the truth—Mom and I had a fight so I’m staying with you and Lydia.”

“And he didn’t think that was squirrelly?”

“I didn’t ask him if he thought that was squirrelly. I don’t care what he thinks it is.”

“Well, it’s not traditional.”

“You think I should wear this yellow sweater Lydia loaned me or the blue shirt with a white dickie?”

“The blue shirt makes your eyes look nice, but I have serious doubts about the dickie.”

The eager boy climbed the highest peak in the Tetons to ask a question of the wise, tall one.

“Sam Callahan, why is it I always want to be with one girl and I’m always with another one?”

Sam Callahan scratched his thick beard. “God planned it so everybody likes somebody but no one likes the person who likes them.”

“Why?”

“The purpose of our existence is to keep God entertained.”

Double-dating is stupid to begin with. It’s hard enough to relax with one person without having to keep track of the insecurities and innuendos of a whole other couple. With me and a girl, there’s one relationship to be paranoid over. That’s plenty. With four people, I count six connections—me and Chuckette, Dothan and Maurey, Maurey and Chuckette, Dothan and me, me and Maurey, and Dothan and Chuckette. Which would be complicated enough even if Dothan’s date and I weren’t about to have a baby.

We drove into Jackson to a Leap Year Day sock hop at the Mormon Church rec hall. The Mormons had February 29 mixed up with Sadie Hawkins Day from the Li’l Abner comic strip. I think that’s because Sadie Hawkins Day is when women can force men to marry them, and Mormons have the same superstition about leap year. Whatever the reason, almost all the kids except us were dressed in Dogpatch clothes. I wasn’t into that straw-in-the-hair stuff. Dogpatch was too close to North Carolina.