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“Cunts were made for penises. What you do with yours is your business, but those are the facts. Nothing else was ever made for penises. Never slowed me down. It’s a free country.” He lit up a Tareyton and blew a smoke ring that nearly crossed the room. Peggy was inexperienced, but a feeling of unease told her things were
Her hubby, VA 1960’s.
· Flag
Ralf
The next year, Karen was four years old going on five and still blond. Nonetheless, registering her for first grade as a black six-year-old was easy as pie. Maybe you have to be from the South to get your head around blond black people. Virginia was settled before slavery began, and it was diverse. There were tawny black people with hazel eyes. Black people with auburn hair, skin like butter, and eyes of deep blue green. Blond, blue-eyed black people resembling a recent chairman of the NAACP. The only way to tell white from colored for purposes of segregation was the one-drop rule: if one of
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Their passing as black is ludicrous, regardless of one drop rule.
Noah’s son Ham—so were you. Meg felt very clever as she handed over the birth certificate. The races of the child’s parents were marked right on it: colored and colored. When the clerk saw on the slip of paper that that Mrs. Brown was colored, she glanced up in surprise. But a close look revealed that it was true. Meg’s coarse curls and knobby heel bones were dead giveaways to the connoisseur. The daughter was one of those pallid, yellow-haired black kids you sometimes see. Frog-belly white, no trace of pink, curly tendrils all around her hairline. Probably anemic and undernourished—a lot of
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Give me a break.
Meg said that she had never applied for public assistance in any form, not even the free school lunch, and Lomax nodded.
Hiding Lee from his daughter was different. It solved a future problem: the problem she would have if she stopped hiding him. Karen was not going to be happy. She might be happy to hear that her father was alive and well. But she would not be happy with Meg. Here a person might ask: Was Meg self-centered or what? Meg was self-centered.
No joke!
What is a poem, if not a toy mouse viewed from an angle that makes it appear to take over the world?
The pretty day student became known as his girlfriend almost before he’d exchanged a word with her. They ate lunch together every day, or certainly at the same table. And in fact she was charming, pretty, and very smart. They were in AP calculus together. They attended basketball games and formal dances. But she didn’t pounce, and Byrdie knew a woman worth fucking would make the first move in spite of herself. She would know what she wanted and coax it out of him, absolving him of all responsibility and bathing him in a flame of eternal femininity that would make sex so unlike masturbation
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over clever BS
She rose to their disappointment by adding, “I mean, he’s right about women, because women fall in love with individuals. But won’t guys fuck anything that doesn’t fuck them first?”
She introduced Temple to Samuel Beckett. As he and Karen stood out in the weeds, rehearsing his travesty Waiting for Dogot with Cha Cha, she felt so proud her heart would break. Not of Karen. Her daughter lacked stage presence. Her reedy voice reached the kitchen window without a trace of projection or resonance. To see an actress in Karen, you had to be charitable and use your imagination. It was the larger-than-life presence of Temple that moved Meg as she watched him arrange props on a cable spool, rolled two hundred yards down the shoulder
from the Centerville construction site’s impromptu dump, to furnish his set for Crap’s Last Tapeworm.
ha ha ha. I quit reading the book about 40% thru. Zink might write good short stories with a few quirky characters and aphorisms in each.
