Goodbye, Columbus Read Free Page A

were preparing to watch some celestial event, the christening of a new star, the inflation to full size of a half-ballooned moon. Brenda zipped and unzipped the cover while she spoke; for the first time she seemed edgy. Her edginess coaxed mine back, and so we were ready now for what, magically, it seemed we might be able to get by without: a meeting.
    “What does your cousin Doris look like?” she asked.
    “She’s dark—”
    “Is she—”
    “No,” I said. “She has freckles and dark hair and she’s very tall.”
    “Where does she go to school?”
    “Northampton.”
    She did not answer and I don’t know how much of what I meant she had understood.
    “I guess I don’t know her,” she said after a moment. “Is she a new member?”
    “I think so. They moved to Livingston only a couple of years ago.”
    “Oh.”
    No new star appeared, at least for the next five minutes.
    “Did you remember me from holding your glasses?” I said.
    “Now I do,” she said. “Do you live in Livingston too?”
    “No. Newark.”
    “We lived in Newark when I was a baby,” she offered.
    “Would you like to go home?” I was suddenly angry.
    “No. Let’s walk though.”
    Brenda kicked a stone and walked a step ahead of me.

    “Why is it you rush the net only after dark?” I said.
    She turned to me and smiled. “You noticed? Old Simp the Simpleton doesn’t.”
    “Why do you?”
    “I don’t like to be up too close, unless I’m sure she won’t return it.”
    “Why?”
    “My nose.”
    “What?”
    “I’m afraid of my nose. I had it bobbed.”
    “What?”
    “I had my nose fixed.”
    “What was the matter with it?”
    “It was bumpy.”
    “A lot?”
    “No,” she said, “I was pretty. Now I’m prettier. My brother’s having his fixed in the fall.”
    “Does he want to be prettier?”
    She didn’t answer and walked ahead of me again.
    “I don’t mean to sound facetious. I mean why’s he doing it?”
    “He
wants
to … unless he becomes a gym teacher … but he won’t,” she said. “We all look like my father.”
    “Is he having his fixed?”
    “Why are you so nasty?”
    “I’m not. I’m sorry.” My next question was prompted by a desire to sound interested and thereby regain civility; it didn’t quite come out as I’d expected—I said it too loud. “How much does it cost?”
    Brenda waited a moment but then she answered. “A thousand dollars. Unless you go to a butcher.”
    “Let me see if you got your money’s worth.”

    She turned again; she stood next to a bench and put the racket down on it. “If I let you kiss me would you stop being nasty?”
    We had to take about two too many steps to keep the approach from being awkward, but we pursued the impulse and kissed. I felt her hand on the back of my neck and so I tugged her towards me, too violently perhaps, and slid my own hands across the side of her body and around to her back. I felt the wet spots on her shoulder blades, and beneath them, I’m sure of it, a faint fluttering, as though something stirred so deep in her breasts, so far back it could make itself felt through her shirt. It was like the fluttering of wings, tiny wings no bigger than her breasts. The smallness of the wings did not bother me—it would not take an eagle to carry me up those lousy hundred and eighty feet that make summer nights so much cooler in Short Hills than they are in Newark.

2

    The next day I held Brenda’s glasses for her once again, this time not as momentary servant but as afternoon guest; or perhaps as both, which still was an improvement. She wore a black tank suit and went barefooted, and among the other women, with their Cuban heels and boned-up breasts, their knuckle-sized rings, their straw hats, which resembled immense wicker pizza plates and had been purchased, as I heard one deeply tanned woman rasp, “from the cutest little
shvartze
when we docked at Barbados,” Brenda among them was elegantly simple, like a sailor’s dream of a