Maggie Cassidy by Jack Kerouac Page B

show sweet knees, no stockings, the well-formed calf below, the hint of snowy legs, the little dress pathetically draping off this ladylike arrangement of herself. Her hair hangs, black and heavy, soft, smooth, curly, to her back—the white flesh and the sullen unbelieving river eyes more beautiful than the eyes of all the sun-eyed blondes of MGM, Scandinavia and the western world—The milk of the brow, the pear of the face, the solid silky proud erect neck of the young girl—I take her all in for the hundredth time that night.
    â€œOh Tommy —stop fooling with it and let’s see the trick!” she cries, turning exasperated away.
    â€œYes!” cries Bessy Jones, and little Janie and the mother Cassidy seated with us partly reading the paper and Maggie’s brother Roy the railroad brakeman like his father is standing in the door with a loose smile, eating a sandwich, his hands black-in with grime of his job, his teeth pearly white, in his dark eyes the some Irish contemptuous disbelief of tricks and games and yet the same greedy avid interest—so that he too yelled out now “Ah Tom you bull thrower do that red handkerchief one again—This one’s bull, I seen what you did—”
    I smile to show that I’m interested in everything but in the brown wallpapered parlor of eternity my heart only beats for her so sweet just a pace away, my life.
    â€œHey,” turning to me the drowning devouring scrutinizing coverage of black merry sad eyes in their incredible snow cameo skin, “you didnt see him that time, you were lookin at the floor.”
    â€œLookin at the floor?” laughed the comedian magician. “All my work is going for fraught! Watch this Roy!”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œDo it!” screeched Maggie.
    â€œMaggie!”—the mother—“dont yell so! Ye’ll have the neighbors think we drown cats in here, Luke McGarrity and his upsidedown clay pipe if ever I saw him in this picture in this magazine!” and her matronly big body shaking slowly with laughter. In my bleakness I even accepted the fact Maggie might look like her mother some day, big and fat.
    â€œCome on, you J-a-c-k! You missed it again! Let me show you a trick I did last year for Bessy’s uncle the night he walked out and tripped on the milk can and Ma’s chair that was painted was on the porch and he fell on it and broke it—Lookout!” jumping up from the pose so sweet, to run around the room chasing her cousin, like a little eager flushed girl now, a minute ago a portrait of a lady in a cameo ring, with crucifix.
    Later—on the porch alone—before going in—necking furiously because Bessy was still inside giggling with Jimmy McFee—“Oh go home! Go home! Go home!” she pulled at me angrily as I held her laughing in my arms, I’d said something that irritated her—her flashes of indignation, poutings, rougeings in nature, of cheek, the lovely frown and forewarning and return of her white smile—
    â€œOkay I’ll go”—but I come back again, start kidding her and kissing her again, overdo everything, and she gets mad again but really mad this time and that makes me sore and we pout and look away—“I’ll see ya Monday afternoon, ah?”
    â€œHmf—” (she’d wanted me to see her Saturday night but that was the track meet night and I’d end up at midnight with my Pop in some soda fountain downtown talking with all the guys about the meet and who the high scorer was—big eager-teeth guys with newspapers in cafeterias of the night, Lowell style, a small city well famed for its great cafeteria and soda-fountain devotees, as evidenced and publicized extensively in the local paper in a column written by James G. Santos who’d once worked with my Pa in small newspaper days and was a distant cousin also to G.J.)—Maggie would have to reason me out of a Rex Ballroom