Sex and the High Command Read Free Page A

but a merit badge was not a Purple Heart.
    Hansen awoke before six, dressed quietly, and eased out of the bedroom in order not to awaken Helga. In the hallway he noticed Joan Paula’s bedroom door ajar, and he went to peek at his sleeping daughter. She was not abed, although the bedclothes were rumpled. Her bathroom door was open and her bathroom empty. As of old, a teenager’s accoutrements littered her room, with the addition of a boldly stenciled sign above her bed: RESTRICTED AREA—LAUNCHING PAD.
    “Papa, is that you?”
    Her call came from the kitchen, where he found her rising from an unfinished roll and coffee to embrace him. If she had her mother’s cold, she was eager to give it to him, and he was eager to share it.
    She was the same Joan Paula, a little taller, a little fuller around the pectoral area, but still lithe, energetic, laughing, and affectionate—almost. She pushed him away and looked up at him reprovingly. “Papa, where’s my penguin?”
    “You never ordered a penguin.”
    “That’s right! That’s why it would have been real neat for you to surprise me with one. But one thing I can depend on from my dad—no surprises.”
    “Still my daughter.” He shook a dubious head.
    “Until August, Papa. Say, how about a breakfast of charred toast, half-crisp bacon, and eggs straight up? Everything’s hot off the grill because I won’t use a frying pan.”
    “Sounds good,” he said, sitting as she whirled to pour his coffee. “But why aren’t you my daughter after August?”
    “I turn eighteen in August and go up for grabs.”
    Turning to the stove, she moved with the efficiency of a fry cook, cracking eggs with her left hand as she separated bacon strips with her right, then she turned to the toaster, put in the bread, and with a minimum of effort, continued her movement downward to a cabinet from which she selected his favorite black marmalade. She had her mother’s wit, he decided, and her father’s efficiency.
    “Where were you, last night?”
    “Out bowling with my team. Big deal. We lost.”
    “It surprised me to come home to an empty house.”
    “Your telegram said two. When I came home and saw your jeep, I figured you had confused the telegraph girls again by using military time. You probably put 2000 and they dropped the last zero. I started to knock on your door but I heard you snoring.”
    As she talked, she blotted the bacon, lifted the eggs, rolled his utensils into a napkin, flipped up the toast, turned, served him, and wheeled back to the griddle, scraping it down with a spatula. “I don’t mind cooking with the griddle,” she commented, “because I don’t have to clean any greasy pans.”
    “You get a 4.0 for the meal,” he said, as she turned to sit down, “but how did you do in high school?”
    “Very good, but mother’s giving me remedial reading, anyway.”
    “Why?”
    “She took adult courses in comparative literature and got hooked. She’s been force-feeding me. I’m up to my cowlick in Cowper.”
    “What’s comparative literature?”
    “You read all that stuff—German, French, Russian—then compare it.”
    “Does your mother read Russian literature?”
    “She flipped over that book about that Russian doctor.”
    “I hope she isn’t reading Karl Marx.”
    “He’s a German, Papa.”
    He changed the subject. “Your mother was talking about a political meeting, last night.”
    “Oh, she means that FEM thing. That’s a woman’s club for freedom, equality, and motherhood. They’re against war.”
    “By heavens, is Helga putting me out of business?”
    “You could sail a copra boat. I’d be first mate.”
    “What about boys?”
    “I like electronics. Boys are dumb.”
    “Did you put that dishpan on my yardarm, young lady?”
    “That’s a disk antenna, Papa. It concentrates television waves.”
    “So, you think boys are dumb. I invited your mother and you aboard ship for lunch. Perhaps one of my young officers might say something that