*&. MILK CARTON ANGEL

SOMEWHERE UP AHEAD OF YOU your sister has pulled to the side of the road and she is waiting for you with a lug wrench clutched in her greasy fist. Oh how she loves you, darling girl. Oh how, like always, she invents the monsters underneath the bed to get you to sleep next to her, chest to chest or chest to back, the covers drawn around you in an act of faith against the night. 

So a while back I wrote a post quoting some text from Lolita that focused on the darker parts of the novel where it was easy to see that it’s not a love story, and Dolores is not the “nymphet” Humbert fantasized about, but an abuse victim. It got quite a few notes with people adding some more quotes to expand on the point, but I also started to get messages, and comments were getting added saying things like “Of course it’s a love story” “You can pick out bad points from any book and make it seem worse than it is” (which is true, but not all books are about pedophilia and child abuse) and “But he loved her” so I decided to make a part 2 :)) see part 1 here  

From the thought that around 1950 I would have to get rid somehow of a difficult adolescent whose magic nymphage had evaporated- to the thought that with patience and luck I might have her produce eventually a nymphet with my blood in her exquisite veins, a Lolita the Second, who would be eight or nine around 1960, when I would still be dans la force de l'âge; indeed, the telescopy of my mind, or un-mind, was strong enough to distinguish in the remoteness of a time vieillard encore vert- or was it green rot?- bizarre, tender, salivating Dr Humbert, practicing on supremely lovely Lolita the Third the art of being a grandad.    

I knew of course, it was but an innocent game on her part, a bit of backfisch foolery in imitation of some simulacrum of fake romance

I would park at a strategic point, with my vagrant schoolgirl beside me in the car, to watch the children leave school- always a pretty sight. This sort of thing soon began to bore my so easily bored Lolita,and, having a childish lack of sympathy for other people’s whims, she would insult me and my desire to have her caress me while blue-eyed little brunettes in blue shorts, copperheads in green boleros, and blurred boyish blondes in faded slacks passed by in the sun.

Never did she vibrate under my touch, and a strident “What do you think you are doing?” was all I got for my pains.

I remember the operation was over, all over, and she was weeping in my arms; a salutory storm of sobs after one of the fits of moodiness that had become so frequent within the course of that otherwise admirable year!

Lo treated me to one of those furious harangues of hers where entreaty and insult, self-assertion, and double talk, vicious vulgarity and childish despair, were interwoven in an exasperating semblance of logic which prompted a semblance of explanation from me.

(swell chance…I’d be a sap if I took your opinion seriously…Stinker…You can’t boss me… I despise you…and so forth)

I now think it was a great mistake to move east again and have her go to that private school in Beardsley, instead of somehow scrambling across the Mexican border while the scrambling was good so as to lie low for a couple of years in subtropical bliss until I could safely marry my little Creole.

 I did not mind where to dwell provided I could lock my Lolita up somewhere.

Apart from the psychological comfort this general arrangement should afford me by keeping Dolly’s day adjacent to mine, I immediately foresaw the pleasure I would have in distinguishing from my study-bedroom, by means of powerful binoculars, the statistically inevitable percentage of nymphets among the other girl children playing around Dolly during recess.

That kindly and harmless woman had, thank God, a rather bleary eye that missed details, and I had become a great expert in bedmaking; but still I was continuously obsessed by the feeling that some fatal stain had been left somewhere, or that on the rare occasions where Holigan’s presence happened to coincide with Lo’s, simple Lo might succumb to buxom sympathy in the course of a cozy kitchen chat.

You would give me one look- a furry, grey question mark of a look: “Oh no, not again,”

“She seems quite happy and normal to me,” I said (disaster coming at last? was I found out? had they got some hypnotist?)

‘Can you remember,’ she said, ‘what was the name of that hotel, you know [nose puckered], come on, you know- [noisy exhalation of breath]- the hotel where you raped me.’ 

She kept her wide-set eyes, clouded-glass gray and slightly bloodshot, fixed upon me, and I saw the stealthy thought showing through them that perhaps after all Mona was right, and she, orphan Lo, could expose me without getting penalized herself.

I held her by her knobbly wrist and she kept turning and twisting it this way and that, surreptitiously trying to find a weak point so as to wrench herself free at a favorable moment, but I held her quite hard and in fact hurt her rather badly.

All the while she stared at me with those unforgettable eyes where cold anger and hot tears struggled.

”Foolishly, I asked her what’s the matter. ‘Nothing, you brute’, she replied. ‘You what?’ I asked. She was silent.

An ominous hysterical note rang through her silly words. Presently, making  a  sizzling  sound  with  her  lips,  she  started complaining  of  pains,  said  she  could not sit, said I had torn something inside her.

Sometimes if you let people do things to you, you’re really doing it to them. Know what I mean? If someone wants to do fucked-up things to you, and you let them, you’re making them more fucked up. Then you have the control. As long as you don’t go crazy.  ||  adelyn belrose  &  dolores haze