A girl he noticed before, she came here with some big redfaced clod who actually wore a coat and tie to this brawl, comes and sits on the floor beside Nelson under Ilie Nastase and takes the beer from between his ankles to sip from it. Her smiling pale round face looks a little lost here but willing to please. "Where do you live?" she asks, as if picking up with him a conversation begun with someone else.
"In Mt. Judge?" He thinks that's the answer.
"In an apartment?"
"With my parents and my grandmother."
"Why is that?" Her face shines amiably with sweat. She has been drinking too. But there is a calm about her he is grateful for. Her legs stretch out beside his in white pants that look radiant where that jellyfish of strangeness moves across them.
"It's cheaper." He softens this. "We thought no point in looking for a place until the baby comes."
"You have a wife?"
"There she is." He gestures toward Pru.
The girl drinks her in. "She's terrific."
"You could say that."
"What does that tone of voice mean?"
"It means she's bugging the shit out of me."
"Should she be bouncing like that? I mean, the baby."
"Well, they say exercise. Where do you live?"
"Not far. On Youngquist. Our apartment isn't near as grand as this, we're on the first floor back, overlooking a little yard where all the cats come. They say our building might be going condo."
"That good or bad?"
"Good if you have the money, bad if you don't I guess. We just started working in town and my – my man wants to go to college when we get our stake."
"Tell him, Forget it. I've been to college and it's absolute horse poop." She has a pleasant puffy look to her upper lip and he's sorry to see, from the way she holds her mouth, that he's left her nothing to say. "What do you work at?" he asks her.
"I'm a nurses' aide in an old people's home. I doubt if you know it, Sunnyside out toward the old fairgrounds."
"Isn't it depressing?"
"People say that but I don't mind it. They talk to me, that's mostly what people want, company."
"You and this man aren't married?"
"Not yet. He wants to get further along in life. I think it's good. We might want to change our minds."
"Smart. That chick in green out there got herself knocked up and I had no choice." Not much answer to this either. Yet the girl doesn't show boredom, like so many people do with him. At the lot he watches Jake and Rudy prattle away and he envies how they do it without feeling idiotic. This strange face hangs opposite his calmly, mildly attentive, the eyes a blue paler than you almost ever see and her skin milky and her nose slightly tipped up and her gingery hair loosely bundled to the back. Her ears are exposed and pierced but unadorned. In his stoned condition the squarish white folds of these ears seem very vivid. "You say you just moved to town," Nelson says. "Where'd you move from?"
"Near Galilee. Know where that is?"
"More or less. When I was a kid we went down there to the drag race strip a couple times."
"You can hear the engines from our place, on a quiet night. My room is on the side and I used to always hear them."
"Where we live there's always traffic going by. My room used to be out in back but now it's up front." Dear little ears, small like his, though nothing else about her is small, especially. Her thighs really fill those bright white pants. "What does your father do, he a farmer?"
"My father's dead."
"Oh. Sorry."
"No, it was hard, but he was getting along. He was a farmer, you're right, and he had the school bus contract for the township."
"Still, that's too bad."
"I have a wonderful mother though."
"What's wonderful about her?"
In his stupidity he keeps sounding combative. But she doesn't seem to mind. "Oh. She's just very understanding. And can be very funny. I have these two brothers -"
"You do?"
"Yes, and she's never tried to make me feel I should back down or anything because I'm a girl."
"Well why would she?" He feels jealous.
"Some mothers would. They think girls should be quiet and smart. Mine says women get more out of life. With men, it's if you don't win every time, you're nothing."
"Some momma. She has it all figured."
"And she's fatter than I am and I love her for that."
You're not fat, you're just nice, he wants to tell her. Instead he says, "Finish up the beer. I'll get us another."
"No thanks – what's your name?"
"Nelson." He should ask her hers but the words stick.
"Nelson. No thanks, I just wanted a sip. I should go see what Jamie's doing. He's in the kitchen with some girl -"
"Who's showing her tits."
"That's right."
"My theory on that is, those that got real tits to show don't." He glances down. The vertical ribs of her russet knit sweater are pushed slightly apart as they pass over the soft ample shelf there. Below that the white cloth of her slacks, taut in wrinkles where belly meets thighs in a triangle, has a radiance that manifests the diagonal run of the threads, the way the cloth was woven and cut. Below that her feet are bare, with a pinkness along the outer edge of each big toe fresh from the pressure of her discarded shoes.
The girl has been made to blush by this survey of her body. "What do you do since college, Nelson?"
"I just veg out. No, actually, I sell cars. Not your ordinary tacky cars but special old convertibles, that nobody makes anymore. Their value is going to go up and up, it has to."
"Sounds exciting."
"It is. Jesus, the other day in the middle of town I saw this white Thunderbird parked, with red leather seats, the guy still had the top down though it's getting pretty cold, and I nearly flipped. It looked like a yacht. When they turned out those things there wasn't all this penny-pinching."
"Jamie and I just bought a Corolla. It's in his name but I'm the one that uses it, there isn't any bus that goes out to the fairgrounds anymore and Jamie has a job he can walk to, in this place that makes bug-killers, you know, those electric grids with a purple light that people put outdoors by their pools or barbecues."
"Sounds groovy. Must be a slack season for him though."
"You'd think so but it's not, they're busy making them for next year, and they ship all over the South."
"Huh." Maybe they've had enough of this conversation. He doesn't want to hear any more about Jamie's bug-killers.
But the girl keeps going, she's relaxed with him now, and so young everything is new to her. Nelson guesses she's three or four years younger than he is. Pru is over a year older, and that irritates him right now, along with her defiant dancing and her pregnancy and all these blacks and queers she's not afraid of. "So I really should put in my half," she is explaining, "even though he makes twice what I do. His parents and my mother loaned us the down payment equally though I know she couldn't afford it. Next year if I can get a part-time job somewhere I want to begin nurse's training. Those RNs make a fortune doing just what I'm doing now, except they're allowed to give injections."
"Jesus, you want to spend your whole life around sick people?"
"I like taking care of things. On the farm until my father died there were always chickens and animals. I used to shear my own sheep even."
"Huh." Nelson has always been allergic to animals.
"Do you dance, Nelson?" she asks him.
"No. I sit and drink beer and feel sorry for myself." Pru is bouncing around now with a Puerto Rican or something. Manny has a couple of them working for him in the shop now. He doesn't know what disease they get as kids, but their cheeks have worse than pocks – like little hollow cuts all over.