Very spicy stuff; more reckless than made him comfortable (Al Shatzky hadn’t risen to the top of the zipper industry by being a gentle or forgiving fellow), but irresistible. At the suggestion of the adults, they would go off to the kitchen late at night and there like good little children eat oversized syrup-covered portions of ice cream out of soup bowls. Out on the terrace the adults would laugh about the appetite on those two kids-yes, those were his father’s very words-while beneath the table where they sat, Zuckerman would be bringing Sharon to orgasm with his big toe.
Best of all were “the shows.” For Zuckerman’s pleasure and at his instigation, Sharon would stand in the bathroom with the door open and the overhead light on, performing for him as though she were on a stage, while he would be seated in the dark living room at the other end of the corridor, seemingly looking in the direction of the television set. A “show” consisted of Sharon unfastening her clothes (very slowly, deftly, very much the teasing pro) and then, with the little underthings at her feet, introducing various objects into herself. Transfixed (by the Phillies game, it would appear), Zuckerman would stare down the hallway at the nude girl writhing, just as he had directed her to, upon the plastic handle of her hairbrush, or her vaginal jelly applicator, or once, upon a zucchini purchased for that purpose earlier in the day. The sight of that long green gourd (uncooked, of course) entering into and emerging from her body, the sight of the Zipper King’s daughter sitting on the edge of the bathtub with her legs flung apart, wantonly surrendering all five feet nine inches of herself to a vegetable, was as mysterious and compelling a vision as any Zuckerman had ever seen in his (admittedly) secular life. Almost as stirring as when she crawled to him across the length of her parents’ living room that night, her eyes leveled on his exposed member and her tongue out and moving. “I want to be your whore,” she whispered to him (without prompting too), while on the back terrace her Mother told his mother how adorable Sharon looked in the winter coat they’d bought for her that afternoon.
It was not, it turned out, a complicated sort of rebellion Sharon was engaged in, but then she wasn’t a complicated girl. If her behavior continued to exceed understanding it was now because it seemed so pathetically transparent. Sharon hated her father. One reason she hated him-so she said-was because of that ugly name of theirs which he refused to do anything about. Years and years ago, when she was still an infant in the crib, all five brothers on the Shatzky side had gotten together to decide to change the family name, “for business reasons.” They had decided on Shadley. Only her father, of the five, refused to make the improvement. “I ain’t ashamed,” he told the other four-and went on from there, he informed his daughter, to become the biggest success of them all. As if, Sharon protested to Zuckerman, that proved anything! What about the sheer ugliness of that name? What about the way it sounded to people? Especially for a girl! Her cousin Cindy was Cindy Shadley, her cousin Ruthie was Ruthie Shadley-she alone of the girls in the family was still Shatzky! “Come on, will you please-I’m a trademark,” her father told her, “I’m known nationwide. What am I supposed to become all of a sudden, Al ‘the Zipper King’ Shadley? Who’s he, honey?” Well, the truth was that by the time she was fifteen she couldn’t bear that he called himself “the Zipper King” either. “The Zipper King” was as awful as Shatzky-in ways it was worse. She wanted a father with a name that wasn’t either a joke or an outright lie; she wanted a real name; and she warned him, some day when she was old enough, she would hire a lawyer and go down to the county courthouse and get one. “You’ll get one, all right-and you know how? The way all the other nice girls do. You’ll get married, and why I’ll cry at the wedding is out of happiness that I won’t have to hear any more of this name business-“ and so on, in this vein, for the five tedious years of Sharon’s adolescence. Which wasn’t quite over yet. “What is Shatzky,” she cried sorrowfully to Zuckerman, “but the past tense of Shitzky? Oh why won’t he change it! How stubborn can a person be!”
In her denunciations of the family name, Sharon was as witty as she would ever be-not that the wit was intentional. The truth was that when she was not putting on a three-ring circus for him, Sharon was pretty much of a bore to Zuckerman. She didn’t know anything about anything. She did not pronounce the g in “length,” nor did she aspirate the h in “when” or “why,” nor would she have in “whale” had the conversation ever turned to Melville. And she had the most Cockney Philadelphia o he had ever heard on anyone other than a cabdriver. If and when she did get a joke of his, she would sigh and roll her eyes toward heaven, as though his subtleties were on a par with her father’s-Zuckerman, who had been the H. L. Mencken of Bass College! whose editorials (on the shortcomings of the administration and the student body) Miss Benson had likened in their savage wit to Jonathan Swift! How could he ever take Sharon up to Bass with him to visit Miss Benson? What if she started telling Miss Benson those pointless and interminable anecdotes about herself and her high-school friends? Oh, when she started talking, she could bury you in boredom! Rarely in conversation did Sharon finish a sentence, but rather, to Zuckerman’s disgust, glued her words together by a gummy mixture of “you knows” and “I means,” and with such expressions of enthusiasm as “really great,” “really terrific,” and “really neat”…the last usually to describe the gang of kids she had traveled with at Atlantic City when she was fifteen, which, to be sure, had only been the summer before last.
Coarse, childish, ignorant, utterly lacking in that exquisiteness of feeling and refinement of spirit that he had come to admire so in the novels-in the person-of Virginia Woolf, whose photograph had been tacked above his desk during his last semester at Bass. He entered the army after their feverish, daredevil month together secretly relieved at having left behind him (seemingly as he had found her) Al and Minna’s five-foot nine-inch baby girl; she was a tantalizing slave and an extraordinary lay, but hardly a soul mate for someone who felt as he did about great writers and great books. Or so it seemed, until that day they issued him his Mi rifle, and he found he needed everyone he had.
“I love your prick,” the girl wept into the phone. “I miss your prick so much. Oh, Nathan, I’m touching my cunt, I’m touching my cunt and making believe it’s you. Oh, Nathan, should I make myself come on the phone? Nathan-?”
In tears, in terror, he went reeling from the phone booth: think of it, both he and his genitals would shortly be extinct! Oh what if just the genitals went, and he lived on-suppose a land mine were to explode beneath his boots, and he was returned to a girl like Sharon Shatzky, a blank between the legs. “No!” he told himself. “Stop having such thoughts! Lay off! Use your brains! That is only irrational guilt over Sharon and the zucchini -it is only fear of punishment for buggering the daughter right under the father’s nose! Casebook fantasies of retribution! No such thing can happen!” To him, was what he meant, because of course in warfare such things do happen, they happen every day.