Boys and Girls Together Read Free Page A

tell girls from boys, but she comes right back and says she’s a girl and not a boy, so where’s hers and she starts squawking because she hasn’t got hers. Them damn books.’
    â€˜You could tell her girls have them because they’re pretty and because boys like girls to have them, couldn’t you?’ Charley said.
    â€˜All right, wise guy, so if I said that, wouldn’t she still come right back and say she wanted hers
now
? What good would it do to say that? That doesn’t make her any happier than what I told her.’
    â€˜Ah, you could have told her girls have them because boys like to see them and take hold of them, couldn’t you?’
    â€˜You just shut up. And don’t stare at mine like a damn calf.’
    â€˜You
think
they’re yours,’ Charley said. ‘They’re mine, little woman. You just carry them around for me. And all the rest of it, too. Am I right, Dick? Just because I run a four-chair barber shop that’s all paid for don’t necessarily mean I don’t have a kind of half-assed philosophy of my own, you know. I gave a lot of time to thinking once I got out of high school, and I came to a lot of pretty good conclusions. I may be wrong in a few of them, but only a little wrong. I didn’t stand on my feet cutting hair for fifteen years for nothing, you know. I learned a thing or two on my own without any help from any books, and what did it finally boil down to? Them two things.’ Charley roared with laughter. ‘Them two, and the two on the other side, and the depot out front, and all of it together in one small package that gets bigger and bigger the more you try to think it isn’t anything. Sure you get kids out of it, and headaches, and bills to pay, but so what? It’s worth it.’
    Now Ellen burst out laughing because she was so thrilled about the things her husband had said and the impression he had made on the writer, and because he never seemed to come alive so boldly as when they were visiting the writer and his wife.
    â€˜You just shut up,’ she giggled.
    â€˜You know you love it,’ Charley said, controlling his voice so that he would not be giggling, too. ‘Youknow damn well what it does to you. The thing Gable used to do to you when you were a little girl going to the movies with a half-dozen other little girls.’
    â€˜Hey!’ Daisy called from the bathroom. ‘Wait for me. I want to get in on the fun, too.’
    â€˜Don’t worry,’ the writer called to her. ‘There’s plenty more where that came from. Am I right, Charley?’
    â€˜
Pa
lenty,’ the barber said.
    â€˜I’ll go get you another.’ He took the barber’s empty glass.
    â€˜Small, though. At least
smaller
. I start out fast but I can’t keep it up for long.’
    The man went to get the barber another drink.

Chapter 5
    By the time Daisy came out of the bedroom, where she had her fixing-up table and her junk, the barber and his wife were singing a favourite song of the barber’s, the one about Maggie, when she had been young, and the old man who’d got her for his wife had been young, too. Daisy was really fixed up, she wasn’t going to let the arrival of the barber and his wife spoil anything for her, not even if they didn’t have sense enoughto get up and go until one or two in the morning. She was fixed up and knew it, and the man knew it, and the barber had to stop singing a second to whistle his admiration, but he went right on singing after the whistle. Daisy and Ellen met one another as girls like to do and touched cheeks, and then Daisy said, ‘Well, what about
me
, where’s my drink?’
    â€˜Go and get it,’ the man said, because he wanted her to know he knew all about how fixed-up she was. He wanted her not to get too important because she knew how good it made him feel to see her so fresh and young and pretty and eager about the