THE EDUCATION OF A QUEEN
561
this time next to "Juanita." I want to play it for Marianne,
whom I admire and who, together with her boyfriend, Dr.
Digger, is having Sunday dinner with us. I don't admire Dr.
Digger one bit and he has just tumbled himself into limbo by
drunkenly catching me behind the bathroom door, screwing his
satyr's grin up to
his
eyebrows, ecstatically touching his tongue
to the tip of
his
long nose, and whimpering,
((Oh
what cute little boobies! Jus' like inverted tea-cups–
makes a fella wanna drink out of 'em, I tell
you!"
I am disgusted and indignant with the outrage that only
an adolescent can muster, but I am also strangely flattered. In
addition, my mother is bringing me up to be a lady, and I am
damn well going to make it up to Marianne.
At just this moment, as I am leaning down to wind the
Victrola, I am sent catapulting against it with a stupendous
WHAM! on the back that slams the breath through my lips, and
my father strides by, bellowing jovially,
"Stop slumping! Stick 'em out and show us what you've
got! It may not be much now, but you'll get more someday...."
Dr. Digger snickers.
I try to smile. I could set a tiger on my father.
I really didn't love my father in those days. I adored him, :
which meant that I fervently hated him too. But I loved Joshua.
I loved him, insufficient body and puerile soul. I loved him
tenderly-and hopelessly, except in raging fantasies when he
would rescue me from the brink of Niagara or from a burning
hotel and press his clean, hard, all-American lips to mine. He
really had a wide, thick-lipped mouth-out of place in that
otherwise delicate landscape. His face was square, but the pale
skin was stretched so tightly over it that the bones looked ready
to tear right through. Indeed, the teeth had already burst it and
his lips were the swollen flanks of the wound. I used to fancy
that
in
the night they bled of their own accord. ' .
A horrid notion. My periods had come on almost two years.
before, and though I was used to them I was much taken up with
