American Genius: A Comedy by Lynne Tillman

Author:Lynne Tillman
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2009-05-09T00:39:00+00:00

My vanity isn't merely useless when it makes me glad, though it does gladly waste my days. The circumspect widow's vanity mostly didn't make her glad, since it allowed her to marry a man who humiliated her and about which she said nothing, so she also cohabited with heartbreak and worry, believing that it's better not to say anything. Leslie Van Houten vainly insisted during the penalty phase of her trial that LSD did not make her follow Manson's orders to murder, to helter skelter, to stab Mrs. LaBianca, or to wipe off her own fingerprints, which, if she hadn't done, might have earned her a lighter sentence, because destroying any evidence, erasing traces of venal acts, though Mrs. LaBianca might have already been dead when she stabbed her, indicated Leslie knew what she was doing was wrong, and that alone distinguishes a person who is legally sane from one who is not. It wasn't LSD, Leslie avowed, "it was the war in Vietnam and TV." Leslie Van Houten's history includes mine, the town's is also mine, since I'm an American, and outside, the kitchen helper's bicycle lies on the ground in front of the cafe, so I could discover what makes him tick, young, gawky, full of piss, longing, and very pretty, and he might be interesting no matter what he says, but I never used to think that everyone young was pretty, but lately I do, and so was I, once. After JFK was assassinated, hippies appeared, and young myself, I observed them, startled, since they came out of nowhere, kids on the street, run aways, they'd left newly broken homes, colleges, jobs, the girls with long, straggling hair, flowers in it, who wore long, cotton dresses, boys with thin, wavy hair, in blue jeans and sprouting ragged tufts of beard, everyone like rag dolls, and I was so very young and pretty then, too, unaware and untouched, bewildered and removed. The girls let hair grow on their legs and carried flowers some days, daffodils, the boys appeared stretched to their limits, so long and skinny, new to sex and redfaced under their uncertain facial hair, awkward, they all were, dumb and eager about life, and everyone was pretty in an insipid, unmenacing way, the way the kitchen helper is now, as youth seems now, when years ago, at that age, I would have noticed their imperfections, and mine, the way I still do. But their flaws don't matter, because like kittens and puppies, the young are adorable, which can protect them from predators, though children and their predators is a vast subject, and also it's debatable what a child is. Kennedy's was the common death of the common father, and after it, the cortege snaking its way home to a national graveyard, the children went wild, loose and suddenly orphaned, wandered around the streets, talking about peace and love, or, in squalid, urban tenements that their parents had fled years before, they stirred tasteless, watery soup in

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