Falling Angels by Barbara Gowdy Page B

into the city, right downtown, though he says it means skipping an important meeting at work. Every ethnic neighbourhood they enter he announces, letting go of the steering wheel for a second and shouting through cupped hands. “Now entering Wopville!” “Now entering Humpadonia!” The girls are glad the car windows are shut. On the way home he stops at a restaurant and buys them deluxe sundaes. “What the hell,” he laughs when he sees the bill.
    Where’s his bad temper? Lou can even swear in front of him, and if he doesn’t ignore her, all he says is something like “What a character,” or “You slay me.”
    At first Lou thinks,“This is great,” but after about a week he gets on her nerves.
    Like everybody else these days. These days everybody makes her want to throw up. With one exception—Sherry, her new friend. Sherry is from Chicago. She moved up to live with an aunt because her mother had a nervous breakdown after her father fell in love with “a piece of black tail.” Lou is the only girl in her class who knows that this isn’t an animal.
    Sherry can’t get over how innocent the girls up north are. “No girl in Chicago would be caught dead without makeup,” she says. Whenever Lou calls on her, no matter what time it is, she has on orange pancake, pink lipstick and black eyeliner. At school she always wears a tight cardigan sweater buttoned up backward. She and Lou smoke cigarettes behind the portables and talk to each other in Southern accents like Sandra Dee’s in
Tammy Tell Me True.
“I’m feeling all funny peculiar,” they say. “I’m feeling all cotched in a tree.” When a high-school boy comes along and wants Sherry to neck with him, Lou goesaround to the front of the portables to keep a lookout. “I’m feeling all pleasured for sure,” Sherry says afterward.
    Despite appearances, Lou knows that between the two of them she’s the bad influence. Sherry necks with boys, smokes the cigarettes Lou steals and dresses like a sex maniac. That’s it. Underneath she’s as nice as a Sunday-school teacher. “She’s not so bad,” she’ll say, or “She can’t help it,” when Lou gets carried away lambasting somebody. She always looks on the bright side. “Beats living with a mental mother,” is what she says about having to leave Chicago. Anyway, she says, in a few years she’s going to start marrying old, rich men, having sex with them until they die of heart attacks and then go spend all their loot.
    “Why don’t you marry rich,
young
men and murder them?” Lou suggests. Sherry tells her she has a big mean streak.
    Lou has an even bigger angry streak. Sometimes she gets so angry that she goes out after dark and throws stones at windows and streetlights. One night she writes “ FUCK OFF ” in white chalk all down the road and on people’s fences.
    In her dreams she is another person, gentle and innocent, often still a little girl. She has a recurring dream in which she and her sisters live peacefully by themselves in the white mansion where the old man died on them.
    In real life she hates living with her sisters, especially with Norma. Norma drives her crazy—eating like a pig, fat as a pig, letting boys get away with calling her names. Lou can’t stand anyone being mean to Norma. She throws a full bottle of Coke at a boy who moos at Norma when she and Norma are coming out of the smoke shop. Whenever she sees Norma from far away, at the end of the street, for instance, walking home from school (always alone), her throat tightens. She wants Norma never to hurt again. She wants to save Norma’s life! Instead, she yells at her. She can’t help it. Every time she turns around, it seems, Norma is stuffing herself with cookies. Or doing oneof Lou’s jobs. Washing the dishes. Making the lunches. “What are you trying to prove!” Lou rages, tears welling in her eyes. One day, she’s had enough. She says,“Okay, you want to do everything around here, go ahead. I quit.”
    The