Final Vinyl Days by Jill McCorkle

Author:Jill McCorkle
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 1998-01-20T22:00:00+00:00

Dysfunction 101

My friend Mary Edna goes out every night of the week. She has a few drinks and then dances until they close the door of Roy’s Holiday Lounge. It’s on I-95, so she’s forever meeting folks passing through town. One day she dances with somebody from Dixon, Illinois, and then it’s Richmond, Virginia, and of course she has a steady batch from the army base just an hour away. Once she met somebody from Saudi Arabia (she said Saudia Arabia), and she talked about that for weeks, as if touching his dark hairy hands (her description) had linked her to lands and histories unknown, like he might be an oil sheik and come a calling again. Lord. She wears their towns like badges, remembers them better by the sorts of details that a tourist might remember than she does hair or eye color (she does always provide that information as well, though it’s clear after years of this that she is not a choosy woman). I suggested once, in a moment of sarcasm, that she get one of those big maps and start sticking pins in it, like all those richer-than-thou folks who have in mind seeing every square inch of the planet. I said, “You can get different colored pin heads—fast dancer, slow dancer, smoker, joker, poker, toker, and any of the above.” She claims that the only time she ever slept with one of her late-night acquaintances was with the one with cancer who had never had oral sex. It was on his list of things to do on earth—it was right under “see the Grand Canyon” and right above “eat snails and frogs in a French diner.” She sure can pick them.

I have tried on many occasions to adopt Mary Edna’s children; I feel I might as well, since all those nights their mama is out playing around, they are here at my house taking bubble baths and doing their homework. They stare at me with round brown eyes while we sit around my kitchen table, all three of us in footie pajamas. I rent movies like Thomasina and The Parent Trap and Old Yeller, and we eat big bowls of ice cream with Hershey’s syrup, just like I did when I was a kid—like I did with Mary Edna beside me in the house on Fourth Street, my grandmama’s house. I thought the two of us would grow up to catch the world by its tail like a comet, and now I look at us and wonder what on earth happened. I told her just the other day that this was what I was wondering, and she asked, who did I think we were, those idiots who committed suicide in hopes of riding a comet? I realized right then that we did not have the same memories and never would. We were two girls with so much in common, and yet we had walked away with such different messages; hers was find a man, any

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.