Amazons by Cleo Birdwell & Don Delillo

Author:Cleo Birdwell & Don Delillo [Birdwell, Cleo & Delillo, Don]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0030554268
Google: Z_awAAAAIAAJ
Publisher: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston
Published: 1980-05-15T04:00:00+00:00

Two conversations in Badger.

1. My mother sat on the porch, gliding. She didn’t usually sit on the glider. It was strange to see her there. A small thing, but strange, off-key, askew. Just that little element of motion made things kind of inappropriate and giddy. It was like seeing your mother dancing or wearing a sweat shirt. One of those slightly off-key moments when a mother or father seems to step out of the skin of strict parenthood. You see them as independent people, and this can be shocking. They aren’t supposed to be people. They’re supposed to stick to the rules.

Anyway, we were alone on the porch and she was gliding. It was a hot, still night. I’d just come back from summer hockey school in Aspen, Colorado, and I was trying to figure out how to fix a zipper on my equipment bag. We listened to the insects. As we’ve seen earlier. Badger was very geared to smells, flowers, insects, trees, and holidays.

“Thought about college, Cleo?”

“Nope. That’s a long way off.”

“That Schlagel boy. Your off-and-on friend.”

“Georgie, we call him.”

“Has he thought about college?”

“He’s too dumb.”

“We agree on something. What you need is a hairpin.”

“Zippers are impossible. Who invented zippers?”

“Baron von Zipper.”

“That’s a daddy joke. You’ll have to do better.”

“Daddy would have said Warren Gamaliel Zipper.”

“That’s true. I forgot about old Warren Gamaliel everything.”

“You’ve been spending a fair amount of time with young Mr. Schlagel.”

Glide, glide, glide.

“I’ve been back two days, Mom. How much time?”

“If you think he’s too dumb to go to college, is he the right kind of company to be keeping?”

“He’s a hockey nut. There aren’t that many in Badger. We talk hockey. The kid knows everything. He knows players’ stats that have been dead twenty years.”

“Lovely syntax. Stats. Is that a word I’ve heard before?”

“Come on, about eight hundred times. Kenny keeps stats on UFOs “

“Do you know Georgie’s father?”

“I’ve met him.”

“The absolute antithesis.”

“The what?”

“Antithesis.”

“Is that from the Latin, I bet?”

“That’s from the Greek.”

“It means you don’t think he’s such a swell guy.”

“I haven’t seen the Forrester boy lately. Or Bobby Eichenlaub.”

“I get the idea. You’re banning Georgie for life.”

“I’ll settle for twenty years if you agree to stop biting that metal. It makes my teeth shiver.”

“Is it because his father’s a sex therapist?”

“The man doesn’t practice in Badger. Let’s be thankful for small favors.”

Glide.

“Michigan Tech has a pretty good hockey program,” I said.

“I thought you weren’t thinking about college.”

“I’ve been thinking hockeywise. Wait, I know I’m not supposed to say that. In hockey terms. There’s North Dakota, too. And Minnesota-Duluth.”

“You’ll go to a good college. You’ll play hockey, but you’ll do it at a good school.”

“How do you know those aren’t good schools?”

“I don’t know, but we’ll make it our business to find out.”

“They don’t sound very good, do they?”

“Not very.”

“They sound awful,” I said.

Glide, glide.

“Have you met Georgie’s mother?”

“Nobody’s met Georgie’s mother. She goes to the garage and drinks. She sits in the Ford wagon inside the garage, drinking Seagram’s V.O.”

“Does he seem upset by this? What are you saying, Dorothy? Of course he’s upset.

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