Gilbert Sorrentino - Aberration of Starlight

“You are such a thoughtful man, and meanwhile darling, while I heat up these few things, just sit down and read your paper and listen to the radio in your socks. Supper will be ready before you can say Jack Robinson.”

“Jack Robinson!”

“Oh, Tony! You’re always such a kidder!”

“Boy, the traffic was really heavy tonight and on top of working late at the old grind mill no wonder I am so tardy for supper. Heck, I am sorry, sugar cake.”

“You do not have to worry, dearest, I have a special emergency supper all ready to cook for you here, see? Fruit salad and alphabet soup and roasted steak sandwiches on toast. How does that sound?”

“Wow! That is what I call a hearty meal! But if you would not mind saving it, I thought that we could all go out for supper if you do not mind eating another supper or just watching me eat while you and Billy have a hunk of bread and butter or something.”

“Go out, my lamb?”

“Yes, my dreamboat. Because today I signed the papers to become partners with a millionaire and soon we will also be millionaires! So let’s put on our duds and go out, maybe we will drive out to Nathan’s?”

“Oh Tony! It is so hard to believe! You have worked and prayed so hard for this chance to show them!”

“Yes, sugar, it has been a long haul but we are on our way to the moon!”

“Oh gosh, gosh! Let’s go! Let’s go to Nathan’s! It will be a swell treat!”

“Hi, honey! Excuse me for being so late for supper but I have been up to my ears in important meetings with a bunch of millionaires like the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts. Business, you know.”

“Darling! Maybe this is the chance you have been praying to God for.”

“I certainly hope so, angel. But I am afraid that I have to disappoint you about after supper again. Instead of staying here in our cozy living room with my slippers on and listening to some good shows, I must eat and run because I have to get back to the meetings. Those rich bozos do not watch the clock, as they say. So if you can just make me a ham or baloney and American sandwich on Bond bread with a dill pickle I will be in seventh heaven.”

“Dearest Tony! Of course! Gosh, you don’t have to explain why you have to go out after a bite of supper. I pride myself on understanding your work. I will whip up a big club sandwich for you in a jiffy! There is a mouth-watering recipe for one with crispy bacon and tasty cheese in the new Liberty. “

“Swell, sugar. And meanwhile, I will change my clothes and shave because I probably will not be home until tomorrow night late. Time waits for no man.”

“O.K., my beloved, just hurry now and I will have this scrumptious sandwich that they often serve at the White House ready for you in two shakes of a lamb’s tail!”

“You are a real princess, my darling wife.”

His mother was going to go out on a date, a real date, just like Helen Copan did with the lifeguard, but she wasn’t going out with any lifeguard, but with Tom Thebus. And they were going to go to the WigWam, just like she had said they might and like he had talked about a few days ago with Tom. His grandfather didn’t seem to like the idea, so maybe Tom was right when he said that he didn’t really like him. That was something that Billy couldn’t figure out at all. But he knew that his grandfather and mother had been arguing, his grandfather’s face got long and sour and he spent a lot of time sitting on the church steps and taking walks all by himself, sometimes as far as the Bluebird, and that was really far away. For some reason, Mrs. Schmidt talked to his grandfather a lot. She smiled like you would at a baby. Today his grandfather really had a sour puss.

His mother had gone into Hackettstown that afternoon with Dave Warren, who had come up to the farm to get some eggs for the Warren House just like he did every Saturday, and he was going to come back for supper like every Saturday too. When she came back she had a bag with her from the five-and-ten and two other bags. The five-and-ten bag had presents for him, a big white metal China Clipper, white as snow, really swell. And also his own bottle of rose oil just like Tom’s. She was smiling and happier than he ever remembered seeing her, except when he got that Certificate for Clear Speech from P.S. 170 in June. And maybe a few other times, but anyway, she was happy, that was for sure. In one of the other bags she had a pair of white summer shoes, all open on the top and with high heels and the other bag she didn’t open. She pulled off her canvas shoes and put the white shoes on and pulled her skirt around her legs so she could look down and see how the shoes looked. She almost did a kind of dance right there in her room, turning her feet different ways so she could see how the shoes looked when she moved. When she asked him how the shoes looked on her he told her that they were beautiful. They were beautiful. His mother had really small feet and these shoes made them look even smaller, maybe because they were all open on the top with only little strips of leather crisscrossed and a strap around the ankle and the heels were thin and high. It was a cinch that she would be able to dance better in them than in any of the other dress-up shoes she brought from the city, they were O.K., but they didn’t look like these and most of them, maybe all of them, were black anyway.

The idea of his mother and Tom going dancing at the WigWam fascinated him. He had imagined the WigWam a hundred times, but he only knew what it was like from the outside and he had only seen it at night once. But he remembered it perfectly. There was a sign in neon lights in the shape of a wigwam and written over it in script it said, also in neon lights, the wigwam. Under the wigwam sign and a little to the right of it, and also in neon lights, a smaller sign said, dance dine cocktails.The night he passed by, one time that they’d gone last summer with Eleanor and Dave to the amusement park at Lake Hopatcong, there were cars outside, a lot of cars, and the signs were really bright in the dark, and he could see men and women going in and coming out, laughing, and he saw one man kiss a woman he was walking with. From inside came music and you could tell it was a real band from the way it sounded. He’d heard a band at the Warren House but this was a different kind of band, you could hear that they really could play real songs, like “Maria Elena.” With trumpets. It wasn’t a dutchie polka band. He didn’t know what it was like inside but he thought that it was probably really big with tables behind a little low wall and a big shiny dance floor and the band had fancy suits on, the kind with the black bow ties. If people weren’t on the dance floor dancing they would be sitting at the tables, laughing and chatting and smoking cigarettes and drinking terrific cocktails. Really fancy drinks in all kinds of colors in those glasses with stems on them. The bartender was wearing a short white coat and shook these drinks up in a solid silver shaker while the band played. Once in a while when two people could really dance great, everybody else stopped and got off the dance floor and watched them. The bandleader probably had a moustache and a skinny stick that he waved to tell the band how to play all the songs. And also he knew that the place was all white, floor, walls, and tables. The works. He would go there every night in the summer when he got to be a man.

As soon as his mother got back from Hackettstown, his grandfather seemed to get more and more mad. Really sore. He came right into his mother’s room without even knocking when she was showing Billy the new shoes and told him to go out and play but he went into the bathroom just down the hall and tried to hear what they were saying. But his grandfather closed the door and the bathroom door was also closed, so he couldn’t hear much, just once he heard his grandfather say “a patch on a man’s ass,” and he also heard his mother say “ some life,” and something like “cook and bottle washer,” and he knew that had something to do with his grandmother being sick in bed so long. He left the bathroom and ran down the stairs and out, then crossed the road and went into the churchyard where it was shady and cool under the big elm trees. He figured that his grandfather must be mad because he thought that maybe Tom Thebus and his mother were doing something bad like his father and Margie did. The bad had something to do, he was sure, with what was fucking. But his mother would never do that. He felt funny and sad even thinking about that word when he thought of his mother. And he didn’t think that Tom would ever do that either. It was different with his father and Margie, if that was the bad that they did, because his father was married to his mother when he was going out to see Margie and dancing with her or going out on dates or visiting, and Margie was a tramp which was the same as a hooer and Kickie told him a year ago that all hooers did was fucking. If you were married to a person, whether you were a man or a woman, and you danced and visited and went on dates with another person who was not married or who was married to some other person themselves then that was doing something bad, that was probably about fucking. But if you weren’t married, like his mother and Tom, what was bad? They were going on a date, like Helen Copan. Nobody thought that she was being bad when she went out with the lifeguard. Everybody thought it was cute. Mrs. Sapurty even said, “Aren’t they darling?” on the porch one night when they were going to the movies. So what was his grandfather so mad about? Tom was a great guy. It was easy to see why his mother wanted to go dancing with him. Billy wanted her to go and he’d tell his grandfather that if he asked him. His mother was pretty and should go dancing with a guy like Tom Thebus, who liked everybody and was always making everybody laugh. And maybe Tom would come and see them in the city and take him to a football game. And maybe sometime he would really be his father. Maybe his mother would get married to him. Once you were married you couldn’t do anything bad with the person you were married to, priests married you, you wouldn’t have to worry about fucking. If his mother and Tom got married his grandfather would have to stop.