20140807 Thursday night,
Weeds
Thursday,
August 7, 2014, 5:55 PM Keith is out at R'dale cutting weeds. I just downloaded my Psion.
Friday,
August 8, 2014, 5:53 PM I am out on my second walk of the day. The first walkw as with K to Village
and now I am heading to Jo-Anne Fabrics in search of barrettes because I lost
one of the only regular pair I had left.
I ordered some from Amazon and they came today and were both too small
and too crappy and flimsy.
The
walk will delay our dinner. I
spent the day, almost all of it, writing that story about the woman swimmer I
saw yesterday. And, then, finally,
I posted it with the one picture I took on Cowbird. I may post it, also, to my blog.
The
Jo-Anne fabrics store is probably more than 15 minutes away. And I already walked more than 15
minutes. I really like the idea of
accomplishing three things at once, my walk, getting barrettes, hopefully, and
doing my journaling and maybe working on my novel. (Four things?)
The downside is that I will delay dinner and Keith is probably very
hungry (he's having a beer). And I
had no lunch, so I too am quite hungry, but I prefer the option of being able
to relax after dinner, rather than having to dread going out and walking.
I
hear myself using the dread.
Walking is (*or used to be) one of my favorite things to do, but when I
am tired, and I am tired, it's not so much fun. And I have fibro pains. At this point, they are fairly mild, but the ligaments are
tight.
I
slept a little better last night.
Not great, but somewhat better than the previous nights, although the
itching was as bad or worse and I took two doses of Benadryl, which didn't
really help much. I didn't get
enough sleep, because we had sex and then talked and were up past midnight.
I
did NOT want to get up this morning, but I also don't want to get in the habit
of sleeping later and later.
* * * * EJ end journal *
* * * * TUB Taming Uncle Beast.
Dear Mrs. Dietrich,
A
funny thing happened on the way to the forum. I got your latest and greatest group of words when we passed
Elbow. Must be cell towers or
wi-fi there, even though it’s a one-horse town. The “elbow” (or bend) in the
river that it’s named for was pretty cool, and has the biggest rapids we’ve
been through on Jake’s raft, but the raft held up well. The tiller got a bit beat
up on the rocks, but we pulled over and Harmon, Trey and Jake jerry-rigged it
and plan to fix it better next time we stop.
So
I read the words on your new list, guessed at their meanings, and looked them
up. As usual, most of them were
words I've run across somewhere in literature, but don't hear
"normal" people using, especially not kids my age.
Like
peccadillo. I'm thinking to myself, who
says peccadillo? Duh.
So
meanwhile, Suze (Betty Sue) (I know you said not to change characters names
midstream in a narrative, but she keeps changing her own name. I can't help that. Yeah, if for some reason these words
are ever published, I suppose I could delete or alter the truth.)
Anyway,
. . .
Suze
fawns all over Harmon, shameful really, embarrassing to watch. Harmon discreetly tries to fend her
off. He's half-hearted about it,
which doesn't convince her he means it.
She
strokes his arm. His arm, which I
look for the first time, I mean really look at, is monstrous. It’s four or five times as big around
as Jake's arm, and solid. It's
brown from the sun and has curling black hairs.
I
look at Trey's arm. It, too, is
brown from the sun, a deep rich deep tan.
But Harmon's arm almost looks like the arm of an African American
person. It is so dark. Trey's arm is lean and strong and very
much like Jake's. Only smoother
and less bunged up. Jake has
scars. Big scars. Shrapnel. Each man has a slightly
different color tan. I look at my
own arm—it look faintly greenish, olive, I guess they call it.
I
look at Harmon's legs. He's wear
cargo shorts. His legs are huge,
and hairy and dark,, like his arms. But they aren't fat. He's big, but he's not fat.
I
look at Trey's legs. Like his
arms, they are lean and golden born, deep golden brown. Similar to Jake's, but less
scarred.
I
never think much about Jake's scars.
They horrified me when he first got home, but I've totally gotten used
to them. If Trey looked like
that, it wouldn't stop me from wanting to kiss him. I worried that no one would want to love Jake with his
scars, and now I hardly notice that they're there. that gives me hope, for
Jake. For me. For everyone.
We
drift past the end of a dock where a boy stands, blowing bubbles. The bubbles float over the raft, and we
all look up and smile. The boy has
long curls. The wind lifts the
tendrils of hair and the boy lifts his arm and smiles and blows another long
stream of bubbles. We wave back.
The
bubbles follow us downriver.
Suze
kind of pets Harmon’s hair. She
runs her fingers through it. His
hair is long, curly and black. His
face looks contented, like a cat being petted. I almost think I can hear him purring. Then catches himself, and brushes her
hand away, very gently.
“Suze,”
he says, "Suze, listen, you don't want me. I am full of pecaadillos."
I
start laughing.
"Huh?
Pecadillos? Does that have
anything to do . . ." she blushes a deep crimson, "with
peckers?"
Everybody
guffaws, more at her discomfort than at her joke, although it was kind of cute.
Suze
is no dummy. As I mentioned
before, she was in some of my honors classes. But apparently, she didn't get the same word list I did, or
she's distracted by her desire for Harmon.
I'm
about define peccadillo, since unbelievably, I've just Googled it, when Trey
says, "Peccadilloes are half-breeds between those horny marsupials that
are smashed along the Texas roads and dark-haired, bristly wild pigs." It
takes me a second to process what he's just alluded to, armadillos and
peccaries, and I am beat later than Harmon and Jake with my laughter. Suze is half a beat behind me. Then we all groan simultaneously, and
laugh again.
Trey
says, "They really are small faults, silly inconsequential faults."
I
am totally grinning. Trey
rocks! (Wait, did I just say that because he used a word I said no
one ever used? You are having a
bad influence on me, Mrs. Dietrich!)
Trey
has a sometimes great and sometimes overly subtle sense of humor, and he loves
to hear me laugh, because, as you know, I have a very loud and hearty
laugh. So do Jake and Harmon. Sometimes, we tell jokes and laugh
until tears run down our faces. Unfortunately,
I'm better at laughing than I am at telling jokes. Their jobs are to entertain me, mine is to provide the laugh
track.
Jake,
who is sitting at the tiller, looks up and makes a face. "Harmon," he says, "what
you have are not peccadilloes, they are elephantillos. You have humungous
seismic faults, the kind that produce earthquakes and tidal waves." Again,
everyone laughs.
Then
Harmon looks serious. "He's
right, Suze," he says, soberly.
“I am not a good candidate for a . . . a hook-up." Then he looks embarrassed.
Suze
holds up her two hands, palms flat, and raises them alternately up and down
like a scale. "Hmm,” she
says, “man who chases me down the aisle of a church brandishing a knife,"
she sinks one hand, "verses minister." She raises the first hand and
sinks the other and then leans over and gives Harmon a kiss on the cheek. Jake rolls his eyes.
"What,"
Harmon says, "if I told you, like you told Shannon, that I didn't want you?"
I laugh, because he looks a little worried.
"I
wouldn't believe you," Suze said, laughing. She sounds totally confident, so I look closely at her for a
shred of doubt, and see none. Then
I look at Harmon. He has a half
frown partly broken by a sort of shit-eating grin. He's smitten.
I
don't believe in love at first sight and it annoys me that neither of them
knows much about the other, but they seem to be careening in a collision course
toward each other. I
have a sudden premonition that they will find some way to have sex with each
other in the next twenty-four hours.
The vision that fills my mind unbidden is a little bit gross (okay,
disgusting) and at the same time titillating because the next image is one of
Trey and me, and that one is much more interesting and definitely less disgusting.
Kissing
is sort of gross, I mean, sharing spit, and sex must be even grosser, sharing
semen and other bodily fluids. But
for some reason, when I look sideways at Trey who is sitting cross-legged with
his knee just touching mine, I don't feel grossed out, I feel . . . excited.
And
hey, if Harmon and Suze can get laid, why not Trey and me? I reach out and stroke my finger along
Trey's inner thigh toward the edge of his shorts and then slightly under the
edge. Then, suddenly mortified, I
pull my hand away and look down at my own legs. I am shivering, and it isn't
with cold.
* * * *
No comments:
Post a Comment