Inflating a Dog (The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy) by Eric Kraft (novels to read for beginners .txt) 📗

“To tell you the honest truth,” she said, “I — Ella, you know, when I’m being Ella — I like that feeling.”

“Mm.”

“I like the feeling a lot. I like the feeling more than I like him.”

“Ah.”

“But liking the feeling is enough, I think. Enough to make me — me, Ella — want to go back and see him again. And I might go further than taking my blouse and bra off next time, too. I might. Because I want to be grown-up, and do what grownups do.”

She drank the last bit of the milk shake, and then, almost reluctantly, she said, “I learned something about myself, too. I think it was something I already knew, but I wasn’t fully aware of it, if that makes sense. I’ll tell it to you. It might come in handy to you someday. You can use it to get girls. Some girls, anyway.”

“What is it?”

“Girls like to hear guys say, ‘I love you’ — ”

“I think I knew that.”

“Patience, jackass.”

“Sorry.”

“We like to hear, ‘I love you,’ but it doesn’t take long before we begin to understand that the words usually mean something else.”

“Oh.”

“But there is something that a girl — some girls — this girl — might rather hear, or would find more beguiling — ”

“Beguiling.”

“Yes. That’s exactly the word I want. Beguiling. I would have said seductive, but seductive sounds as if sex is the only motive, and it might not be. Love could be. Even companionship.”

“I’m lost.”

“Sorry. I’m kind of wandering among my thoughts. What I want to say is that I discovered that I could become a hopelessly giddy gasbag for a man who said, ‘I want to take you away from all this.’ Do you know what I mean at all? I mean somebody who could — who could and would — take me away from my house and my family and the dark hallway that runs down the middle of that house, with the torn carpet the color of peas, and the smell in the morning when my little brother wets his bed, and the heavy way my mother falls against the other side of the wall beside my bed on nights when my father decides that a good smack will help her sleep, and the way she wheezes in the mornings when she lights her cigarette, and the way she asks me if I want one, with a smile that is an invitation to join her in regretting everything I just listed for you. I’m not saying that Ella felt the same things I do — I just mean that she might have felt the way I do — but for a different set of reasons. I could be very attracted to a man who would take me away from all that, or who seemed as if he would, even if he just seemed as if he might possibly take me away from all that, and I could imagine that Dudley might.”

I am embarrassed to record my response to what she said, and I confess that I thought of including here something different from what I said, but I found my attempts at improvement more embarrassing than the original. At least the original was honest in a way, the way that our thoughtless responses to people are, and mine was as thoughtless — may I say guileless — as a reflex.

Here it is.

“My dear,” I said, in Dudley’s manner, reaching across the table to take her hands in mine, “won’t you let me take you — ”

“Don’t make a joke out of it,” she said, pulling away, getting up, scraping her chair on the floor as she did.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and I was.

“I’m going home,” she said. She walked to the door. At the door, she turned, and, indicating with a sweep of her arm the malt shop and everything that had transpired there, said, “Peter, why don’t you let me take you away from all this?” and I did let her take me away from it, and along the way to her house I tried to convince her that I was better than I seemed, and I explained to her that making a joke was my way of clearing the air, blowing the smell of her brother’s piss away, and she laughed at that, and when I said good-bye at her house she turned her face up to be kissed, and I kissed her and for a moment she took me very far away, but then the kiss ended and we were still standing on the unpaved road in front of her house and it was time for me to go.

Chapter 26

Traveling by Balloon

THE DESIRE to be “taken away from all this,” to be lifted up and out of the life one currently found oneself leading and transported to some other, a desire that was actually a set of more specific desires arising from the particular set of disappointments that fate had chosen from the myriad disappointments offered to the young, became a general yearning of Babbingtonians of my generation, a yearning encapsulated in one handy package in our desire to be blown up, as in, “Aw, man, I am so bored in this town. Nothing ever happens here. I just wish somebody would come along and blow me up, you know what I mean?”

Yes. I knew. We all knew. Implicit in that desire was the understanding that the life we were leading was not the life we would have chosen to lead, the belief that fate, the ill wind that had blown our parents to this dull burg, seeking shelter, perhaps, from a sudden storm, had moored us in this limp life, this empty bladder of a town. It was a cri de coeur that we heard often, and I admit that my own heart cried it sometimes, begging fate to send me a wind from another direction, a plea familiar to every sailor.

(I hear in this cry an anticipation of the use of blow for