Too Jewish: The Next Generation by Patty Friedmann

Author:Patty Friedmann [Friedmann, Patty]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Patty Friedmann, Too Jewish, Exact Image of Mother, Jewish fiction, southern fiction, New Orleans, literary fiction, women’s fiction
ISBN: 9780990454304
Publisher: booksBnimble.com
Published: 2014-07-11T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

I considered not bathing, leaving the ripe smell of sex on me. I knew a boy in college who swore he could smell if a girl was horny, and I often thought about whether that was true. Sexuality was probably out of Sister Roberta’s range, dog-whistle pitch, an infrasmell, ultrasmell, bloodhound scent. My clothes were loose, and the faint odor came up through the middle trough, around my belly and up out the cleavage. I didn’t want to spend the rest of the day thinking about it, so I took a bath, the soapy water ebbing between my legs, semen leaking out onto the washcloth. Valuable stuff at one time. I wondered if men measured potency by volume. Women had no such gauge; so what if an orgasm lasted half a minute, producing nothing?

I reached the staff parking lot at five to five. The campus was no bigger than the one where I attended high school; I could make it to the convent by five. I scanned the parking lot the way Parker scanned his, only he was always checking the periphery for people hiding, while I was looking for Charlotte right there in the lot. Her car was still there. I thought she’d be gone, on a slack day when she didn’t have to deal with me. I cut across to the green, taking a vector as far from the path between the library and her car as possible. She was sitting on the back steps of the administration building as I passed. I tried to pretend I didn’t see her, even though I was protected by the excuse of my five-o’clock appointment with Sister. I kept my eyes down, my brow furrowed, as if I could avoid seeing a woman with pale hair and paler eyes sitting alone on that dark campus.

“You stop, Darby,” she said when I was almost past her. I told her I had an appointment with Sister at five o’clock; I looked at my watch. “Why do you think I’m sitting here?” she said. I told her I didn’t know. Maybe I was going to be fired, and she was there to watch. She shook her head no. “I’ll be here when you get out,” she said. I looked at the sky. We hadn’t gone off Daylight Savings Time yet, and it was going to be dark by six-thirty. I wasn’t counting on Sister letting me out before dark. Though Sister was a fast one with words, and she had a regimented life. Maybe if you missed dinner at the convent you got nothing to eat; I didn’t know. I thought firing me might take some time, since I planned to argue in my own behalf. “It’ll be dark,” I told Charlotte.

“Then I’ll wait in our office.” It didn’t occur to me not to show up.

Considering they were people set apart from the secular world, most of the sisters sure were schizzy, a persona for every occasion. One afternoon Sister Roberta had been shrilling at a workman who’d dropped his Barq’s can into an excavation site behind the library.

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.