Page 298 - What They Did to the Kid

286 Jack Fritscher

brewery and Louisa’s. I could have cared less that, back at Misery,
Ordination Day was coming.
In the city, I pulled myself together, hungry for adventure. I
walked the night streets of the Loop, eating up the downtown lights
of the huge marquees of the brilliant movie palaces, wanting life as
perfect and big and sweeping as a wide-screen movie, hoping history
would happen to me, doubting it would, buying front-row seats to
see Albert Finney in Tom Jones downtown and in Saturday Night
and Sunday Morning uptown, double-billed with Richard Harris in
This Sporting Life at the Bryn Mawr. The British invasion was every-
where. The Beatles were coming to the Amphitheater.
“You’re begging for it,” Louisa said. She was making me a cot-
tage-cheese salad.
“My father once told me,” I said, “that anticipation is greater
than the actual thing.”
“Then your mother must be a lousy lay.”
“Hey, Lou Lou!” I said.
“Don’t call me ‘Lou Lou.’ I was kidding.”
“Don’t insult my mother.”
“We’re all virgin saints, us mothers,” Louisa said over the refrig-
erator door. “I’m going away for two weeks.”
“By yourself?” She wouldn’t travel with Joe.
“I’m not telling where I’m going.”
“Don’t put lettuce under my pineapple.”
“Don’t get smart,” she said.
“Who’s getting smart?”
“Men. Males, whatever ages.”
Good. I warmed at her thinking me like all other men. I was
changing.
“They ought to do with men like they do with girls in China.”
“What?”
“Take ’em out and drown ’em.”
“What a waste.”
“Don’t get smart or I’ll give you your rent back.”
“Louisa.” I said her name strong as Joe. “What’s the matter?
What do you really want?” I tested only her honesty.
She licked her thumb, glancing my question away from her

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