too, was now thinking about Mozart reincarnated, but telling herself to get a hold of herself.
Did
you
ever see a cow with a green eyebrow
were the lyrics in the back of her mind. “I don’t believe it!” she said. Unintentionally and at that weirdly jubilant pitch of hers. And everything, everyone stopped, even the usherette.
Even Joan, who twisted around and looked with her usual attentiveness.
“Keep going, Sweetie,” Doris said, trying to sound normal.
Joan then did two more unprecedented things. First she pushed her sunglasses up onto her head. And then she smiled. With her bare eyes, looking straight at Doris, she smiled.
“Sweetie?” Doris whispered.
Joan chirped and turned back to the piano, back to playing “In the Mood.”
Eleven
I n the spring of 1927 when Gordon was twelve, he and his friend Tony went down to the creek one warm Saturday and collected snakes coming sluggishly out of hibernation. Garter snakes, milk snakes, green snakes, rat snakes, lots of little deKays the colour of golden-brown sugar. A good thirty snakes all told. Is that possible? Snakes in every spill of sun, on rocks and in the mouths of their pits. Most of them solitary but some in groups of four or more, a haphazard tossing and mortally still like an aftermath.
They threw them into Tony’s wagon. There were so many they didn’t bother about the ones that poured like tributaries over the sides of the wagon as Tony pulled and Gordon pushed it home.
And is it possible that Tony’s mother let them unload the snakes on her front porch? This is how Gordon remembers it. He and Tony sitting on the porch rail, herding the snakes with sticks and dropping bait worms on them, but the snakes wouldn’t eat, so the worms dried and the next day their fishhook shapes were all over the porch as if to illustrate the manner of death they’d been braced for.
By then the snakes were gone. Gordon and Tony had kept them only a few hours before hauling them back to the creek and tipping them out of the wagon. In every direction and stunningly fast they burst into the undergrowth. Quicksilver vanishing down the cracks of a floor.
The next time the two of them went snake collecting all they found were a garter snake and a deKay. They decided to keepthem in a cardboard box at Tony’s, and here again, considering that the snakes would have been too traumatized to eat and would have died pretty quickly, Gordon questions what he remembers, which is days and days of going around bare-chested with a snake wrapped around his neck, him and Tony pretending to be Tarzan.
At that age Gordon’s chest was as hairless as the palm of his hand. It was tubular and soft and a source of horror to him because his nipples were growing. Every night, to fend off breasts, he slept prone on a plywood board, inserting it under his chest before lying down. His snake, the garter, was long enough and docile enough that when he wore it around his neck its ends covered his tender, pink nipples, and he didn’t feel so self-conscious around Tony, who had nipples like pennies, and a compressed chest, heroically muscled.
Tony’s snake didn’t really go around his neck. It was only about eight inches long and he had to grasp its head and tail to keep it on. Gordon had offered him the garter, but the garter always seemed to nose toward Tony’s groin, and Tony was afraid of it biting him. A snake bite there, he said, even from a non-venomous snake, and you could be paralyzed for life.
Gordon had read two books about snakes and there was nothing about groin bites. He didn’t challenge Tony, though, because he believed that Tony knew more than he did about sex and sex organs. Way more. Tony had whiskers and underarm hair and from his navel to the waist of his trousers a stripe of black hair that affected Gordon as if it were an award. As if it were evidence, like a singe or a shadow, that there had been a lot of erections in that vicinity, all of them more adult (bigger,
Did
you
ever see a cow with a green eyebrow
were the lyrics in the back of her mind. “I don’t believe it!” she said. Unintentionally and at that weirdly jubilant pitch of hers. And everything, everyone stopped, even the usherette.
Even Joan, who twisted around and looked with her usual attentiveness.
“Keep going, Sweetie,” Doris said, trying to sound normal.
Joan then did two more unprecedented things. First she pushed her sunglasses up onto her head. And then she smiled. With her bare eyes, looking straight at Doris, she smiled.
“Sweetie?” Doris whispered.
Joan chirped and turned back to the piano, back to playing “In the Mood.”
Eleven
I n the spring of 1927 when Gordon was twelve, he and his friend Tony went down to the creek one warm Saturday and collected snakes coming sluggishly out of hibernation. Garter snakes, milk snakes, green snakes, rat snakes, lots of little deKays the colour of golden-brown sugar. A good thirty snakes all told. Is that possible? Snakes in every spill of sun, on rocks and in the mouths of their pits. Most of them solitary but some in groups of four or more, a haphazard tossing and mortally still like an aftermath.
They threw them into Tony’s wagon. There were so many they didn’t bother about the ones that poured like tributaries over the sides of the wagon as Tony pulled and Gordon pushed it home.
And is it possible that Tony’s mother let them unload the snakes on her front porch? This is how Gordon remembers it. He and Tony sitting on the porch rail, herding the snakes with sticks and dropping bait worms on them, but the snakes wouldn’t eat, so the worms dried and the next day their fishhook shapes were all over the porch as if to illustrate the manner of death they’d been braced for.
By then the snakes were gone. Gordon and Tony had kept them only a few hours before hauling them back to the creek and tipping them out of the wagon. In every direction and stunningly fast they burst into the undergrowth. Quicksilver vanishing down the cracks of a floor.
The next time the two of them went snake collecting all they found were a garter snake and a deKay. They decided to keepthem in a cardboard box at Tony’s, and here again, considering that the snakes would have been too traumatized to eat and would have died pretty quickly, Gordon questions what he remembers, which is days and days of going around bare-chested with a snake wrapped around his neck, him and Tony pretending to be Tarzan.
At that age Gordon’s chest was as hairless as the palm of his hand. It was tubular and soft and a source of horror to him because his nipples were growing. Every night, to fend off breasts, he slept prone on a plywood board, inserting it under his chest before lying down. His snake, the garter, was long enough and docile enough that when he wore it around his neck its ends covered his tender, pink nipples, and he didn’t feel so self-conscious around Tony, who had nipples like pennies, and a compressed chest, heroically muscled.
Tony’s snake didn’t really go around his neck. It was only about eight inches long and he had to grasp its head and tail to keep it on. Gordon had offered him the garter, but the garter always seemed to nose toward Tony’s groin, and Tony was afraid of it biting him. A snake bite there, he said, even from a non-venomous snake, and you could be paralyzed for life.
Gordon had read two books about snakes and there was nothing about groin bites. He didn’t challenge Tony, though, because he believed that Tony knew more than he did about sex and sex organs. Way more. Tony had whiskers and underarm hair and from his navel to the waist of his trousers a stripe of black hair that affected Gordon as if it were an award. As if it were evidence, like a singe or a shadow, that there had been a lot of erections in that vicinity, all of them more adult (bigger,
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