Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore (9780385538398) Read Free Page B

It rang five times before it stopped and Lana piped, “Hello?”
    She talked intermittently. I could make out random words but not the sentences they formed.
    I finished dressing, put my father’s gift into a big blue purse, and headed for the kitchen.
    I don’t know why I decided to take my father’s pistol; maybe my meditations on death resonated with the hardware the way Professor Abraham’s books echoed through history.
    On the way out I passed my full-length mirror. The dress served its purpose, so I didn’t pay any attentionfrom the neck down. What caught my eye was the head and face.
    I’ve been told many times that I am beautiful. My father, a small-time hood, said it every day that he and I shared this earth. There was a temporary white-stain tattoo under my left eye. It was a perfect circle, two inches across with a dime-size white dot off-center inside. That was my signature. Even Theon didn’t know it was a stain. He wanted to mark me, to deform me, but I never could go with that.
    My straightened, bleached-white hair came down way past my shoulders. Sometime during the night I had taken out the deep-sea-blue contact lenses, so my eyes were their natural dark brown color.
    I took a pair of chrome-plated scissors from the dresser and began to hack away at the hair that so many men had yanked on and women had caressed while penetrating my sex and rectum, slapping a black ass that would swell but never blush.
    â€œI like your hair, Deb,” Lana said when I finally made it to the kitchen. She was still naked.
    â€œReally? I left most of it on the bedroom floor. You can hardly tell it from the white shag but I suppose you could pull it up with a vacuum cleaner.”
    â€œI mean I like it short, silly. It’s so cool how uneven it is. You turned from Marilyn Monroe to punk-slut with just a few snips.”
    â€œWho was on the phone?” I asked.
    â€œRichard Ness.”
    â€œWhat did that fool want?”
    â€œTheon. I told him what happened and he hung up.”
    Just then the kettle began to whistle and Lana turned her attention to the French-press pots. She’d prepared them with the Italian roast coffee I loved.
    There was low-fat turkey bacon sizzling on the grill and egg-white omelets cooking in their special Teflon pans. Lana gestured at the breakfast nook, which was nestled in between three mostly glass walls that looked out on Theon’s pride and joy: a lawn of Kentucky bluegrass.
    He’d look forward to every late spring when the green grass bore its blue flowers.
    â€œI love that grass as much as your ass,” he used to tell me.
    The memory of those words almost pierced the veil and brought Theon back from the dead, so much so I feared that my mind could conjure him and lose something that was waiting for the girl in the ugly dress and down-at-the-heels blue tennis shoes.
    â€œI made a decision last night,” Lana said, breaking through my fears.
    â€œOh? What’s that?”
    The breakfast had been served while I fought off the dead. I had juice and coffee, turkey bacon, a grilled slice of tomato, and an Egg Beaters omelet on an oblong plate.
    â€œI know this is your moment, Deb,” she said, “that you lost your husband and all. But when I saw him and that girl in the bathtub I realized how awful what we do is. It was like everything in there had a meaning. His half-harddick and her draped over him like that—the camera in the water and the house all shorted out. I realized that I had to quit this business and break away from Linda.”
    â€œWhat would you do?” I asked. I really wanted to know.
    â€œGet a straight job and maybe a boyfriend or something.”
    â€œIs Leer really your last name?”
    â€œNo. It’s Koski. Kristin Koski. Linda gave me the name Lana Leer. She said that it sounded better and that you should never use your real name in the credits of a film.”
    â€œWere you