568
THALIA SELZ
sCious behavior. I was still all instinct and feeling, rushing about
with my eyes tight shut and my mouth wide open-panting,
greedily swallowing. By the time (very soon) I knew enough
to take rational. action, I didn't want to act. I wanted calamity.
I hated Joshua. I stood like a fence-post and let
it
come down.
Joshua did not nibble at the first two or three "Greek girls"
either, and my father grew really worried. But I had seen a
spark light up, far back in those sweet wild eyes of his, at the
very suggestion of Greekness and
I
was worried. With my cus–
tomary self-condemnation (Daphne, you mean skinny witch,
you!), I attributed this to simple female jealousy, and I tried
to scour it out of my heart.
I
couldn't have Joshua (I still had
to go to high school and college and become famous and be–
sides, I was just
his
"little side-dream," wasn't I?) but that didn't
mean some Woman (grown up and with breasts) couldn't
gobble him up, marry him down, discharge him with babies,
and make him blissful or at least quiet in the accepted manner.
It never once occurred to me-till a little later, of course–
that I might be seismographically recording a very faint tremor
in Joshua's crust which, intensified, could split his delicate world
wide open.
That first tremor was in his eyes, but it was not, really. It
was in "Little Side-Dream." Stupid Daphne!
The girl's name was
Va:riliki
(broad "a," accent on the last
syllable). It is the feminine form of Basil: in Greek most of us
are merely afterthoughts of the male, as it were: female appen–
dages, like an extra set of nipples, on the male name. It means
"little queen."
She was. She was small and she carried herself as if she ex–
pected to have both her hands kissed. This in a seventeen-year-old
movie cashier is no minor attainment. Perhaps she was merely
modeling herself after Norma Shearer or Bette Davis, but within
the boundaries of her very limited world she succeeded. Her
hands were kissed and fondled. She received orchids for dances
at a time when few young men could afford to send orchids. She
