Pin Read Free Page A

left, I opened his room and brought him out. I guess we really didn’t need Mrs. Martin to come in and clean. It was just something I felt my mother would have wanted us to do.
    Anyhow, Mrs. Martin thought Ursula had a “wisp of a body.” That was because she was long legged and small waisted. She had thin arms and nearly no shoulders, but she was not small breasted. She was very deceptive that way. She insisted on giving that impression to people by wearing these awfully tight bras that squeezed her bosom against her.
    â€œYour sister oughta eat something substantial,” Mrs. Martin told me once. “It ain’t healthy for someone to be so close to their own bones like that.”
    I could understand why she felt that way. Ursula’s face was lean too. Her skin was wrapped tightly around the sharp chin bone. She had thin lips andher cheeks were as taut as the skin on a drum. The cheekbones protruded a little. The wideness of her forehead made her eyes appear small and deep, but when you stood next to her, you saw that they weren’t small eyes. Ursula thought she was ugly and she was always very critical of her appearance. I did a lot to build up her ego. Too much, if you ask me. However, if she asked me what Pin thought of her, I would say, “Ask him yourself. I don’t speak for Pin.”
    People called me “baby-faced.” My hair was such a light brown it could almost be called blonde, which I thought was a genetic mistake. But my father, or rather, Pin, explained it was by no means a “mistake.” “Your grandfather on your mother’s side was very light haired and had the same kind of milky white skin with tiny freckles in his cheeks and along the sides of his nose. In fact you have your mother’s nose and a somewhat soft, feminine mouth.”
    â€œFeminine?” I didn’t like the way he said that. I was broad shouldered and two inches taller than Ursula. When I was a teenager, I was accused of having a “Van Johnson look,” so I didn’t really take to this “feminine mouth” thing. I suppose I got too defensive because I said, “Well, you know, you don’t have much of a masculine face. Your nose is too straight and too pretty. Your ears are too perfect. And your penis is too small.” I thought that would hurt him.
    â€œPenis size has nothing to do with sexual potency,” he said. Smugly, of course. I told Ursula what he said and she said size doesn’t even have anything to do with sexual gratification. She said she told her girl friends that, but most of them refused to believe it.
    The three of us lived here in my parents’ old house about a quarter of a mile up Hassens Hill in Woodridge, New York. Woodridge is a small village in the Catskills, a little to the left of center of the heart of the Borscht Belt. I like to get anatomical when I describe where it’s located. Everyone’s always using that expression—“The heart of the Borscht Belt.” I suppose they mean center. I don’t know where they get that idea from. It’s certainly not true geographically.
    I have lived here all my life and I had borscht only once. I wasn’t crazy about it. Ursula likes it, but doesn’t like what it does to her. She says it repeats; so she doesn’t eat it. Pin says he could take it or leave it. My father felt the same way about it and my mother didn’t like the way it could stain her tablecloths.
    The house is a two-story building with an attached garage. The garage was added on years after the house was built. On the bottom level, once you come in, we have our rather large living room with an adjoining dining room. To the left of the dining room is the kitchen. On the right side of the kitchen is a door that leads out to the pantry and from there out to our backyard, a small clearing surrounded by a heavily wooded area with a pond behind it. Ursula and I have walked out to it