Page 34 - Some Dance to Remember

4 Jack Fritscher

The stoned chicken looked deep into Ryan’s eyes. “Mister Man,” he
said, “I don’t know who lives here.” He moved his hand to grope Ryan’s
jeans. “But I’ll go back upstairs with you.”
“Thanks.” Ryan pushed the boy’s hand away and pointed the kid
down the stairs. “Later,” he said.
Ryan found his sister lounging in a white Queen Anne ball-and-claw
bathtub. Boys tumbled up and down the hallway. “Hi, Ry,” she said, and
she raised her legs straight up in the air, something like the 1940s’ pop art
of the bathing beauty with her fanny in a champagne glass and her feet in
high heels thrust up higher than the rim.
“Hi, yourself,” he said. “How high are you?”
“High enough.” She sat up in the tub. Ryan was astonished at the
full-blown size of his eighteen-year-old sister’s breasts. “Ain’t they a pair?”
she said. She put her finger coyly to her mouth. “But dare I forget,” she
said. “You don’t have a taste for milk shakes.”
“Don’t be a bitch. It hardly becomes you.”
“Don’t be a prig. It’s unbelievable in you.”
Margaret Mary morphed into Kweenie, rising from the tub elegantly
as Venus on the half shell. Rivulets of water streamed down her leggy
frame. Ryan reached for her grape-colored chenille robe. “You look good,”
he said. He was proud of her dancer’s body.
“But not good enough for you to do it with me, huh?” When she was
four, and he was twenty, she had asked him to kiss her the way he kissed
his girlfriends. She hadn’t known then what she knew now. “If you ever
change your mind,” she said. She folded her arms across her breasts and
placed her delicate hands on her shoulders. “Who am I?” she asked. Years
before, Ryan had taught her how to pose. The game endured between
them. Somehow Margaret Mary’s talent for becoming Kweenasheba who
could become Bette Midler or Mae West or anyone on stage had started
way back home in Kansas with this charade.
“Too easy,” Ryan said. “Vanessa Redgrave. Blow-Up.”
Two naked gay boys, both blond, chased each other down the hall.
“You like them, Ry?” she asked. “I know your thing for blonds.”
“No,” he said. “Too young. You live in a chicken coop.”
The phone in the hallway rang. Kweenie hopped naked and dripping
from the tub and raced for the phone, bumping past Ryan holding her
robe. She slid in and snatched the receiver right out from under the grasp
of one of her roommates.
“Cunt,” the twinkie blond said.
Kweenie held the phone between her wet breasts. “A star,” she said

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