Page 100 - Sweet Embraceable You: Coffee-House Stories

88 Jack Fritscher

fingers with quarters and Kennedy half-dollars he won in less than
an hour playing the slots at a filling station somewhere in Nevada.
“I hope you’re not in a hurry,” Floyd repeated.
Robert remembered his appointment book on the front seat
of his unlocked car. Never had he ever left his car unlocked. He
peered through Floyd’s gilt-lettered window. At the parking meter
he had forgotten to feed, a white-helmeted metermaid ticketed his
windshield. She turned slowly from the Chevy toward Robert as if
she could feel him watching her every move. The noon sun glinted
from her helmet. Robert could not see her face. He did not want to.
He did not need to. Back home he could drop a deer at a hundred
yards. She was a dead bitch in his book.
“No,” he said, “I’m in no hurry. I was late for the last appoint-
ments I made four days ago. I sell, I mean, I used to sell Fuller
Brushes door to door.” He was warming up, trying to feel like
himself again. “I can tell you more than you’d ever want to know
about natural bristle brushes for your hair and your bottles and your
carpets and your drapes and your dog and your cat.”
“That a fact?” Floyd said. More than once he’d been told his
droll roll of a phrase reminded the teller of W. C. Fields, which only
encouraged him, despite his efforts to speak naturally.
“And the women!” Robert presumed that Floyd, same as all
barbers, liked to talk about women, when he should have known
only most of them like to talk about women, but they all love to
talk about sex, except the Seventh Day Adventist ones who were
always closed on a Saturday when a man was most likely to get his
hair barbered. “Let me tell you,” Robert said, “about those little
housewives. Those lonely ladies sure do want to talk, talk, talk. Al-
ways saying, ‘Well, Robert, enough me talking about me. What do
you think about me?’ Do you believe the utter conceit of women?”
“Much, much less than I believe,” Floyd said, “in the unutter-
able conceits of men.”
“Those girls were always giving me coffee till I thought I was
going to drown. Always asking me if the coffee was sweet enough

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOK