Let’s finish this up and you can get your things. Or: she would return home with the Hoods and this whole weekend would remain a horrible episode no one ever talked about, which left in its wake the moral carnage of a whole town full of kids. Or: they would split up visitation, one week with Sandy, one week with Mikey, and she would swap them, as her parents had swapped one another. Or: she would never see Mikey and Sandy, because they would have opposite weekends of visitation. Williams, against speaking about her mother and Mr. She would be enjoined, when in the company of her father and Mrs. Her mother and stepmother would not speak to one another. Her father and stepfather would not speak to one another. Then her stepbrothers would fight to the death for the right to seed in her a two-headed baby who spoke Greek at birth and knew the date of Jesus’ next appearance.
She would permit each of her stepbrothers to touch her. She would commit incest with a stepsibling.
Then, take it a little further, go a little further down that road, she might be stepsister with the boy she loved, and stepsister, also, with his rival, whom she had also once loved. This knowledge would circulate like her own dalliance with Debby Armitage. What if there was a sort of swap with the neighbors and it exceeded everybody’s expectation? Just to start with, Wendy was going to be sealed into a town where everyone knew her mother slept with the man up the street.
Hey, bub, Jim Williams said, your shortwave radio have any batteries in it? Think we can get news radio or something on there?Īnd the two of them rose together and in synchronous, almost choreographed movements, they wiped their mouths with the cloth napkins Elena had set on the table, set these napkins across their plates, and left the plates behind.Īnd then Wendy thought about the complications of the whole night. Wendy could see this regret playing across her face. Her mother regretted being there, in that kitchen, regretted having cooked the breakfast, regretted even having hurt Benjamin, however justified this hurt might have been. That was the way of things with adults-they trailed after ecstasy and then denied it, rationalized it, dressed it all up in talk.
Whatever stray impulse had led Wendy’s mother into the Williamses’ house-and it had been passed along to Wendy in full, just as the volatility of the O’Malleys had been passed along to her-whatever the impulse was that had led her mother from the party onto the water bed, where she had swam in Jim Williams’s arms, whatever revolution had taken place in her mother, it had been succeeded by a harsh return to her old constitution. Wendy and I will take this up on the way back to the house. Wendy had been staring at her plate, watching the eggs sink into a lukewarm and clotted state, stirring up the arrangement of toast and jam and eggs.
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