Gilbert Sorrentino - Aberration of Starlight

I’m telling you, Bridget, and there’s no two ways about it, I’m going to talk to Tony this afternoon.

You goddamned pigheaded fool! You can’t talk to a greaseball. All he knows is his spaghetti and olive oil. Oh, Momma!

I’m buying out Acme-Guarino Stevedoring, Marie. In a year, I’ll have half the work in Erie Basin. The sky’s the limit! Tony! Can we …?

That vacation in Miami? I’ve got the Pullman tickets right here. Tony, Tony … and I thought I’d lost you. Let’s not talk about that jane anymore, darling, it’s a closed book. You need some new clothes for the golden sands, by the way, don’t you?

On the golden sands

Of old Miami shore …

While Dave Warren delivered the eggs to the Warren House where she said she would meet him in two hours, Marie walked around Hackettstown, thinking to buy a new dress — or a new something! In the window of Jerry’s Variety Shoes she saw exactly what it was she would buy for the evening: a beautiful white openwork sandal with a high heel and a cunning little strap around the ankle, perfectly stunning. When the clerk told her that her foot was the smallest he’d ever seen on a woman, she was pleased, as she was always pleased when shoe clerks said this, as they almost invariably did. She was vain about her feet and ankles, and her legs as well, although she didn’t often think about her legs. Her feet were beautiful in the new shoes, the clerk didn’t have to tell her that. She tried both shoes on, walking the length of the store and back, stopping to look at her feet in the floor mirror, holding her skirt around her legs to see the line that they made with her feet, then letting it hang free, turning this way and that. The clerk was looking at her legs and she flushed. She bought the shoes and then walked to the five-and-ten, where she sat at the counter and had a root beer. There was plenty of time to kill and she tried to pretend that she had nothing to do that night except sit on the porch, as usual, or go to the Warren House for steamers and beer with her father, the Sapurtys, and the Stellkamps. As usual. It was useless, of course, there was no way that she could pretend not to think of Tom and dancing with Tom, alone with Tom, alone together at the Wig-Wam. She hoped that … she didn’t exactly know what she hoped, but since the other night when she had walked with Tom, that beautiful beautiful night …

She hadn’t been to the WigWam in years and years and thought of

it, all that time, as a place to which she would never go again. When Tom mentioned going there, and asked her about it, she had told him, oh, how blasé she had tried to be, that she used to go there and that it was a nice place. It was, my God! the place, well, one of the places, that had served to convince her that she was really married and could do what she wanted — what Tony wanted anyway. Anyway, not what Momma wanted — or Poppa either, damn it! Tony had taken her there the summer after they were married, a year before Billy was born. She was with Tony! They stayed as long as they wanted, they had the car — the old Packard — and returned to the Stellkamps’ when they wanted, and whoever didn’t like it, he could look out for the horns, Tony would say, using a phrase she had taught him, and thumbing his nose. Grown up. She was finally all grown up. In subsequent summers it had not been so easy, after Billy was born, the summer after the next, yes, because the very next summer she was really expecting and didn’t do any dancing. But then the summer after Momma and Poppa had to baby-sit and they acted like it was the end of the world if they came home even a minute after eleven. But that first summer of their marriage! And when they came home, no matter what time it was, they had their room to go to, they weren’t beholden to anyone for anything. Momma didn’t like it much but Tony told Marie she was his wife and he didn’t marry her mother and if the old lady didn’t like it she could lump it. And still, Marie was nervous when they got home after midnight.

Dave Warren looked over at her with his mouth half-open like the damn fool of a gawm he was when she said that she wasn’t going to the Warren House that night, but that Mr. Thebus was taking her to the WigWam to hear Red Nichols and His Five Pennies. Not that it was any of his business but she had nothing to be ashamed of. She held her packages tight on her lap, the white shoes, an aeroplane for Billy and a bottle of that hair oil that Tom used and that Billy had been asking and asking for ever since Tom had given him a little bit for himself in ajar. And oh! how pleased she was, a new bathing suit, that old rag would be in the garbage can tomorrow. Vera’s Fine Fashions had it in the window on sale, a navy-blue flat-knit suit without any skirt to flap around and make her look like something the cat dragged in. She didn’t want to be in this old tin-can Ford, listening to Dave go on and on about the new Hackettstown High gym! God help us! She wanted to lock her door and try on her suit. God knows she knew what Poppa would say, the first thing out of his mouth would be something about Tom this or Tom that and he’d look at her in it like she was some kind of chippy. She knew the suit would be tight and show her, but women her age wore them, wore them all over the beach, she’d be damned if she was going to walk around anymore looking like Whistler’s mother! She was a grown woman and had always hated that flowered thing. How many years? She didn’t even want to think how many. There was no way she’d be able to see all of her but she could stand on the bed and get a pretty good idea of how the suit looked. Dave said that he heard that Red Nichols was a good orchestra and she said that she and Mr. Thebus both liked to dance and thought they’d just go and enjoy themselves for an hour or two and Dave said they could always dance at the Warren House. The damn fool! Jumping around to those polkas with the farmers and their wives in their Sears, Roebuck outfits wasn’t dancing. And their clodhopper shoes, my God almighty. God knows who he thought she was! She squeezed the shoebox in its paper bag.

Billy didn’t know whether to go outside and play with the new aeroplane first or put some rose oil on his hair, and when Marie told him he was running around like a chicken with his head cut off, and imitated him, they both laughed, and Billy sat down on her bed and bounced on it, holding the plane out at arm’s length. She took her shoes out of the box and tried them on, turning her feet and admiring how she looked. Billy said he thought they really looked swell and asked her if she was going to wear them dancing with Tom. Before she could compose her face to give him an answer, in came Poppa like a bat out of hell, and he told Billy to go out and play, he wanted to speak to his mother. Here it comes, she knew it. The usual sarcasms, Tom this and Tom that and Tom the other thing, just what did she think she was doing, the man was nothing but a little cock of the walk with his moustache and his big talk, talk is cheap, butter wouldn’t melt, bejesus, in the man’s mouth, nothing but a patch on a man’s ass. Oh, how he carried on. Marie had had enough of all this, somehow the shoes — and the bathing suit, the bathing suit — gave her the courage to tell him that she’d spent years, years, and well he knew it, as the chief cook and bottle washer, the pot walloper, waiting on Momma hand and foot and cleaning and scrubbing and doing laundry, ironing so he’d, he’d look presentable to go to the office, a slave and he damn well knew it, and bringing up a fatherless boy into the bargain with never a bit of help and never a word of complaint out of her. And it was time she was entitled to a little life.