Birdy

by William Wharton

  Now, Al wants me to go out for track and throw the discus. He keeps measuring my distances. I like throwing the discus but I don’t get anywhere. I think people lose the real fun in things by measuring, scoring, wanting to win.

  Al keeps bugging me to take some girl or another to the prom. Through his girlfriend, the cheerleader, he knows about twenty girls who want to go to the prom but have nobody stupid enough to take them. My mother is getting absolutely hysterical. It’s some kind of personal insult to her that I don’t want to go out and rent a tux for five dollars, buy an orchid for a dollar and a half to pin on some girl I hardly know, and pay two dollars for prom tickets. I hate to dance and the whole thing’d be a waste of time for everybody.

  It’s three days before the prom and I think I’m home free when Al comes over to our house one evening. I’ve finished with the birds and I’m looking forward to the dream that night. Perta and I are getting very close and I miss her terribly during the day. Al tells me, right in front of my mother, how he knows a girl named Doris Robinson who asked him to ask me if I’d take her to the prom. She has the tickets and will buy her own corsage. She drives and can get her father’s car. All I have to do is rent the tux.

  Jesus, I could kill Al! My mother starts all over again about how there’s only one Junior Prom in your life and how if she’d had the chance to go to high school she would have considered it a high point in her life and how I don’t appreciate how lucky I am. My father reaches in his pocket and pulls out five dollars. He says I can have it to rent the tux. I’m cornered, what can I do? I say I’ll go. I know I’m feeling guilty about Perta. I want to tell her. I want her to know this is happening to me and how I don’t want it to. I can feel another whole non-truth area opening between us.

  The night of the prom comes at the worst time, right in the middle of things. Perta has asked me if I want to start a nest. She’s been flitting her wings when we’ve been together, so I’m not surprised. Perta in the day has been flitting her wings, too. This is a big decision for me and I want time to think it out. Instead, I have to go through all this Junior Prom thing.

  Al takes me to the tux place and tries to talk up Doris to me. He talks about what great legs she has. I’ve tried watching girls’ legs to find out what the excitement is about, but they all look the same to me. One has a bit more flesh here or there, one has more wrinkly knees than another, or the ankle bones stick out more or less, but, so what?

  And women’s asses. They’re just flesh around an asshole like everybody else. It’s only an overdevelopment of the gluteus maximus, to make it possible for people to walk on two legs, and sit down. To me, anything sitting down is ugly. A bird usually stands when it isn’t flying. It never sits except to hatch eggs. That’s beauty.

  Then, tits. What a dumb development for feeding babies. Women have to carry them around all their lives, flopping, getting in the way, right under their noses, and they’re only used for about two or three years at the most. I’ve watched lots of tits and Al has tried to show me the difference between good tits and poor tits. It’s mostly a difference in volume and pointedness. Looking in the National Geographics, I can see they’re not much different from what a goat or a cow has; just a bit more inconvenient.

  All the way back from the tux rental place, Al is raving on. He knows I can ‘make’ this girl. He means he thinks she’ll let me fuck her. He knows two guys who ‘had’ her. That’s supposed to be exciting. I know Doris Robinson. She’s an ordinary girl with regular legs, regular ass and slightly more than regular tits. Doris doesn’t look as if she could ever fly under any conditions. She’s a small to medium size reddish-colored cinnamon with freckles. My mother would like to see me going to the Junior Prom with a girl who looks like Doris. Al wants to see me go to the Prom with Doris. Al wants me to get fucked. I don’t know what my mother wants.

  Dressed up in the tux, I look like one of Mr Lincoln’s black birds. I feel like a freak taking the bus to where Doris lives. Thank God, I’m not carrying any crappy orchid. All evening long I’m going to have to dance with an orchid under my nose. Orchids smell like death to me. There’s a moldy, mushroomy, damp smell like an old coffin; and on top, there’s a soft perfumy smell. Together, it’s the smell of an embalmed corpse.

  I think I’m going to have that orchid under my nose all night, but that’s not the way it turns out. When I get to Doris’s address, it’s a big single house in the fancy part of Girard Hill. I walk up the driveway and knock. Her mother opens the door. I introduce myself and she lets me in. Who the hell else was she expecting to walk up the driveway in a penguin costume? Mrs Robinson is all dressed up and wearing so much perfume I think for a minute she’s the one I’m dragging to the prom.

  ‘Doris will be right down. Won’t you sit over here, please?’

  She practically pushes me into a chair just inside the living room at the bottom of the stairs and then leaves the room. I’ve been ushered into my seat for the grand entrance. I wait. I start thinking of Perta. I’d love to tell her about all this. It’s too bad this is so far from anything she knows. She’d never understand. Even if she could understand, she wouldn’t believe it.

  Then Doris comes down the stairs. It’s Gone With the Wind again. She comes down three steps, then pauses when she sees me. She looks at the chair where I’m sitting, smiles an Olivia de Havilland-Melanie smile, then comes down the rest of the stairs quickly, without bouncing, like she’s on a sliding board. I get up.

  She’s twisting her hips back and forth to make the dress stand out. It makes a stiff crackling pigeon noise. Then her mother comes back into the room. She’s carrying the box with the orchid in it. She tells me it’s been in the refrigerator to keep it fresh. That’s as good a place as any for something that smells dead. I begin to realize they probably bought this house for that staircase so Doris could come sliding down it on occasion.

  The mother is holding up the orchid for me to admire. It’s big as a pigeon and shaped like a pigeon, too, a pigeon taking a dust bath. She hands me the flower and a long pin. They’re both ice cold. I’m supposed to pin this flower on Doris.

  Right here I notice there’s no place under my nose to pin this thing. That is, if I’m not going to pin it through bare, raw, freckled flesh.

  I stand there, holding the pin in one hand and the flower in the other. I could stick it right through what looks like it might be one of her nipples but what I think is a piece of rubber. Doris has big tits but in this dress they bulge out past her elbows. There’s such a space between them, I know if I get the right angle I can see through to the floor.

  Apparently, pinning is one detail they hadn’t worked out. The mother starts giggling. Doris turns a sort of salmon color and the freckles get darker. The mother moves in and pins the flower on her waist. Now it looks as if she has a monster vine creeping up on her from behind. I wonder where I’m supposed to put my hand when we dance.

  Now, the father comes in. He’s a pale, tired-looking man. He puts a silk cape over Doris’s shoulders and gives her the keys to the car. He also gives all kinds of advice about locking, turning off the lights and not going over thirty-five. He kisses her on the cheek. Her mother kisses her on the cheek, too. The father turns around and shakes my hand.

  ‘Have a good time, son; but be sure to have her in by two o’clock.’

  Son! Holy mackerel, they’ve got me married to her already. The dance is over at twelve-thirty. What am I supposed to do with her till two o’clock? What will Perta think if I don’t come into the dream? This whole business is getting to be more of a catastrophe every minute.

  At the dance, I have to move the flower from her waist to her wrist. She wants it on her left wrist so I tie it to her wristwatch with a rubber band I have in my pocket. It sits on top of her wrist so she looks as if she’s going falconing. The hand is perched on top of my shoulders while we’re dancing so the damned orchid keeps tickling the back of my neck and ears. It sends chills up and down my spine. This way I can smel
l it without seeing it. I keep being reminded of the rotten horse meat smell at the place Joe Sagessa took us.

  This smell combined with all the sweating bodies around us and the sound of the music brings me to the very edge of what I can bear. To take my mind off it, I keep trying to think forward to the dream when I get home to my bed. Doris is saying things to me about the music or asking where I live. She knows my father works here as a janitor but she doesn’t say anything about that.

  I see my father twice. He’s acting as a sort of bouncer-janitor combined. He keeps track of those who go into the boys’ toilets. His job is to slow down the drinking and help clean up the vomit if anybody gets sick. He gets five extra dollars for the night; just enough to pay for my stupid tux. I wouldn’t go through another night like this for fifty dollars.

  I see Al swinging and dancing around with his cheerleader. He isn’t much of a dancer, but she’s one of those girls who could dance with a buffalo and make it look graceful. Al dances one-two-three at the same beat to any music. He doesn’t even listen to it. With the tux on, he looks like a gangster in a movie. He’s wearing a white carnation but still he could be Brian Donlevy playing Heliotrope Harry.

  Doris asks me about the birds. That’s something I don’t want to talk about. If I really thought she was interested I’d tell her. I’d stop the stupid dancing, sit down and tell her about it. I look to check; but all she’s doing is making dance conversation. Sometimes it seems humans can only play games; all kinds of complicated games. Going to the Junior Prom is another game with a whole set of rules. Talking while you’re dancing is one of the rules.

  I don’t have a watch and I can’t see Doris’s with the big orchid draped all over it, but there are clocks at each end of the gym. They have wire mesh over the face to keep them from getting broken by stray basketballs, but you can still read the time if you get the right angle. The time is crawling by. I’m pooped. It’s past eleven o’clock and I’m usually in bed by ten for the dream. My arm is tired from holding up Doris’s arm. I try letting my arm down sometimes, taking the weight off my shoulder muscle, but she doesn’t pick up the load at all, just lets both arms drop. Finally, when I can’t keep them up any longer, we leave the arms down and she snuggles in closer to me with her head tucked under my chin. Now I’ve got her hair tickling my nose, while the flower is tickling me on the back of the neck. Both my hands are occupied. Besides that, Doris’s big tits are pressed against me, they’re about the consistency of blown-up inner tubes. From all my flapping exercises, my sternum has a tendency to stick out more than most people’s, so her tits fit on both sides of it. We make a beautiful couple. We fit together like tongue-in-groove flooring.

  At last it’s over. I take Doris over to get her cape; we go outside. Everybody’s slamming car doors in the dark and laughing. I help her into her side of the car. She asks me if I want to drive. That’s wild. Nobody drives in our family; we’ve never had a car; never will. My father won’t even ride in an automobile.

  When I tell her ‘no’, she sticks the key into the ignition and turns it on. The car’s a Buick, the last model they made before the war. The motor is eight-cylinder, loaded with power, but it’s all pissed away in this car with something they call Dynaflow. This is a way you get to drive a car without knowing how to shift. My father says soon they’ll have cars you won’t have to steer. People’ll go around killing each other without knowing it.

  Doris turns to me. Her face is soft as a baby bird with just the lights from the dashboard. Her cape is pulled back and she looks almost naked. She reaches over and turns on the radio. She must’ve had the dial set beforehand, maybe even called up the radio station to have the right music played. They come on with Glenn Miller’s ‘Sunrise Serenade’. It’s one piece of music I really like; it has the inside completeness of a good canary song.

  ‘Let’s go for a little ride out to Media.’

  It doesn’t matter what I say, we’re going to Media. She’s most likely already gone out and mapped the route. I settle back to relax and let it all happen. This is probably the night I get fucked. She has to be back by two o’clock. The clock glowing green in the dark dash says quarter to one. How much can actually happen in an hour?

  Doris isn’t paying too much attention to what her father said. We’re whipping around these tight curves, on roads one car wide, through the heavy green overhanging trees of Media, at about fifty. There’s a straightaway under the high stone arched railway overpass and she gets it to almost seventy. She’s so little, she’s peering up over the edge of the dash. I scrunch down and concentrate on those tiny silver shoes pushing on the accelerator and brake. I wonder what Perta’s doing. What would happen to the dream if I wind up welded into that dashboard in front of me, with an eight-cylinder engine hot in what’s left of my lap.

  She has the place picked out. We swing off the macadam road and along a dirt road so small, the branches on both sides are scraping the edges of the car. She isn’t saying anything, just driving, peering up to avoid potholes. We’re following through. Doris is going to have her Junior Prom with all the trimmings. I feel like a candle on the cake that’s about to be blown out.

  We cross a little stream with that monster car and the road turns into nothing but rocks. Finally, she stops, turns off the motor, pulls on the emergency and puts out the lights. She turns the ignition so the dash and radio stay on. This car has everything. It gets about nine miles to the gallon but they have a Bration sticker, so what the hell.

  At first, she sits there holding onto the wheel of the car, like a kid pretending to drive while the car’s sitting in a driveway. I unscrunch myself and sit up. I turn toward her and pull my inside leg bent up on the seat. Anything can happen. I know it’s going to be embarrassing.

  Doris climbs up onto her knees. In the darkness I see she’s left her shoes down there by the accelerator. She holds out her wrist with the orchid on it for me to take off.

  ‘I’d like to keep it as a souvenir.’

  She says this as I try to untwist the rubber band in the dark. She’s wiggling the end of her hand at the wrist like a snake. When I get it off, she takes it from me and puts it on the shelf over the dash. In the dark with the magnified reflection from the curved windshield, it’s frightening. The whole car is filled with the smell.

  I’m expecting we’re going to have one of those great conversations which start with ‘Don’t you like me?’ or ‘Why is it you don’t like me?’ I’ve already had several of those. There’s practically no answer you can give that isn’t either insulting or a lie. I’m all ready to lie for the illusion of the great Junior Prom but I don’t have to. Doris starts humming to the music and somehow she’s leaning on me, rocking back and forth as if we’re dancing; dancing in a Buick Dynaflow! I put my arms around her and try to keep up my end. Maybe if I fuck Doris it’ll help the dream with Perta. The dream is made out of things I know.

  Doris lifts her face and we start kissing. We get to kissing along and I’m having a hard time keeping my nose out of the way. Then, she starts opening her lips so I open mine too. I’m doing my best. Next, she’s breathing into my mouth and sucking in! I feel the air being pulled in through my nostrils! Holy God! Is this kissing or is good old Doris Robinson some kind of vampire who gets you by stealing your breath. I’m thinking this when, suddenly, she sticks her whole tongue into my mouth! It’s like sucking a bubble gum wad in. I can’t breathe at all except through my nose. And, I can’t believe it; I’m getting a hard-on! All this crazy stuff and it goes straight to the old dong. I try to cross my legs, to hide it, maybe to crank it down, but there’s no fooling Doris. She’s shoving her stomach right into it! She moans and pushes her tongue in deeper. She takes her arms from around me and I think maybe we’ve done our share for the Prom and it’s all over, but she’s pulling down the top of that dress and those tits pop out. They stick more to the outside now that they’re loose. They look better than the ones in the National Geographic.

  She leans
back and I stare at them. There aren’t any freckles on them, at least not by the dash light.

  It’s then I know I could do it. I not only could, I want to do it. I want to fuck Doris. At the same time, I start thinking of Perta. I want to do it the first time with Perta. I want to do it the first time with my wife, not with Doris. Doris could never be a wife to me, all I’d be doing is fucking Doris’s tits, her tongue, her cunt.

  Doris keeps trying but I’m finished. I go on kissing her and I hold her tits in my hands, and stroke them a bit. Doris breathes hard and cries but we don’t say anything. At last, she sits up, and tucks the tits back into her dress. It’s getting on to two o’clock. We’ve been kissing away for almost an hour.

  We have one hell of a time turning that car around. I get out to direct her. There’s no room, and Doris isn’t much good at backing up. We get stuck twice before we get out. We drive up her driveway at two-thirty. Was that pale, gray man going to shoot me for almost fucking his daughter and keeping her out late? The car is probably all scratched up from brambles and branches, too.

  We kiss an ordinary non-vampire good-night kiss before we get out of the car. Doris asks ‘if she’ll see me again’. I say, ‘Sure. I’ll see you at school.’ I see her every day there. We’re in the same geometry class.

  She has a key and lets herself in. Her mother is still up and says she’ll drive me home. All the streetcars and buses are shut down. I tell her I don’t live far and I’ll walk home. She doesn’t insist too much. She wants to get all the details from Doris. I wonder how much Doris tells her. You never know with rich people like that.

  I’m glad to have the four-mile walk. It gives me time to think. I hope I didn’t hurt Doris’s feelings, but I’m glad I didn’t fuck her. I want to get into my dream with Perta. I sneak up the back stairs without waking anybody. It’s four o’clock when I last look at the clock by my bed.