Little Sister by Barbara Gowdy

Author:Barbara Gowdy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tin House Books

She swore off men. Who needed them? Who had the time? Victor was a blind date, and she agreed to go out with him only because she hadn’t dated anyone in five years, and his father had died a few months earlier.

They met for lunch. Like a certain type of intelligent man he imparted facts as a way of holding up his side of the conversation. But his facts were entertaining and always related to whatever they’d been talking about. Neither she nor her mother could bring herself to kill an ant, she said, and he said an ant dragging a moth through a lawn was equivalent, in terms of strength, to a man lifting a light aircraft through a bamboo grove. They both noticed how white their server’s teeth were, and he said that ancient Romans cleaned their teeth with urine. She learned that a shoreline is infinite because it is infinitely jagged, and that Graham Greene wouldn’t have written The Power and the Glory if he hadn’t escaped to Mexico after publishing a review in which he accused Shirley Temple’s most ardent admirers of being licentious clergymen.

By dessert Victor’s wandering eye seemed less an endearing affliction than a consequence of such wide-ranging interests. They were discussing the illegitimate progeny of movie stars, and Rose, knowing she would see him again, confessed to being infertile. “It was a deal breaker with my last boyfriend,” she said.

“The composer?” Victor said, evidently having heard of him through their mutual friend. “Well, it would be a deal maker with me.”

“You don’t like kids?”

“Drooling, incontinent lunatics. Not really.”

She laughed, relieved but a bit disturbed. It wasn’t that she didn’t like children.

“Most of them grow into passable humans,” he said. “Eventually. Unless they’re male.”

He was only trying to separate himself from Marlin Lau, she told herself. “Some males grow out of it,” she said and smiled at him. “I hope.”

He smiled back. “A few of us do.”

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