#kandee55

You come here every day,” she said. “You come every day to the gas station.”  “I like the Pepsi tallboys. What can I tell you?” he shrugged.  “That’s an awful lot of Pepsi, bub. You’ll never keep your slim figure that way.”  “What do you care?” he challenged.  “Well, I like that slim figure of yours.”  And just like that, she seduced him.

 Well, her mother had been a model, and it didn’t much hurt that she took after her mother—tall and leggy and milky-skinned. Long auburn hair with heavy bangs reminiscent of the glory days.    “What’re you, a marathon runner, drinking all that much Pepsi every damn day and coming out so leggy?” she demanded that night in his featherbed.  “I don’t drink all that much Pepsi every damn day you inquisitive hag. I only have a Pepsi tallboy one day a week and I drink some and the rest I make into barbecue sauce or Jell-O salad.”  “But you visit the gas station every day.”  “How would you know?  “I work at the Macy’s across the street.”  “Well, if it’s all the same to you, I like a Pepsi tallboy on Fridays and the rest of the time, I get coffee.”  “Oh, your father liked his coffee. I’ve researched it.”  “I don’t remember him liking coffee as such,” he countered.  “I saw a photograph of him standing next to his coffee pot,” she argued.  “Oh, that photograph. That was one of those nosy old tour-the-pop-star’s-fancy-home photo spreads for the Sunday paper where he had to pose in various rooms looking sultry, and that coffee pot was a gift from his coffee-crazed girlfriend—“  “My mother.”  “—your mother. Oh, was she your mother?”  “Uh-huh.”  “—your mother who patently refused to give him the steak knives and encyclopedia set he’d requested for Christmas and instead insisted on thrusting that coffee pot at him.”  “Well, maybe he should’ve been more grateful for such a shmancy, up-to-the-minute percolator as that. Maybe he should’ve tried tearing his enormous spooky beautiful gray eyes out of his own ass for a change and—say, your eyes sure are enormous.”  “Are they?”  “Yes, they are.” She stared into them a little rudely and he stared into hers. “A spooky and beautiful shade of gray, if you’ll permit me.”  “How could I stop you?”  They gorged on each other’s lips and eyelashes.

 The following Monday she ambushed him at the coffee machine inside his pet haunt, the Gas ‘n Fly.  “Come here often?” he asked her.  “Frightfully.” Hers was the diet Orange Crush and a chocolate-pudding hand pie.  “Oh, that’s a real snazzy breakfast,” he chided. “You’ll be in the pits by ten-fifteen.”  “What do you know,” she back-sassed. “Chocolate and orange go well together, and these two products have a proven chemical symbiosis that keeps a Macy’s girl right on her feet.” He stared at her. Went to creaming up his coffee.   She gave him a contemptuous glare for that.   "Oh that's it, huh? A man shouldn't cream up his coffee? Whatever you say, babe. Brings a certain joy to the whisky, though."   "One of those, are you?" Her smirk took on a tatty veil of admiration.     That night they smoked cherry cigarettes under the front lights of the Gas 'n Fly and contemplated their parents' seven-year relationship.   "Dad met your mom in 'sixty-five on the set of Shindig!" he reported.   "Oh, did he?" She couldn't help licking the flavor-sprayed cigarette filter. "Wonder what Mother was doing out in California," she mused.   “Shindig!-dancing,” he replied in a cloud of cherry smoke. “God, don’t you even know your own mother?” He went inside for one of his special coffees and brought her a bag of Cheetos, instinctively.   “How did you know?” She stared at the bag, snatched it, tore it open with her teeth. He watched, half-smiling, revealing a number of his own teeth, gleaming and crowded like his father’s. Pearlies vying for real estate.     "They were a thing seven years, our folks," he pondered aloud. "So what the hell happened there?"   "What I'd do to know," she grumbled. "I obsess over it when the moon is right. Often wondering how life would've been different had they married." She swung around, looked at him, rested her cigarette hand along her ear. "Was he a nice dad, yours?"   "Sure. 'N yours?"   "Oh, he was fine, if passionless. Distant, quiet. Passionless. Professorial. He seemed so passionate, your dad."   "Oh, he was that."   Sucking cigarette hands-free, she dug in the Cheeto bag. "A swinger, huh?" she mumbled, cigarette bouncing triumphantly.   "Yup."   "Mother probably objected to that," she nodded.         He took a swig of coffee. "Ahhh. The cream." He grinned with all his might. "Makes the whisky dance!"   "You're a damn poet," she declared. "Your dad's lousy songwriting becomes kind of mystifying in the dazzling light of your word skills."   He grinned some more. "Your mother, I once overheard him say, was a shrewish, brooding little coquette who refused to bless him whenever he sneezed."   "Oh, come off it. She blessed him fine.” “Nope. Not him, she didn’t. He’s very honest when drunk.” “Well perhaps he was disarming about it," she said. "All broad-shouldered … gray-eyed, floppy-haired and disarming. Or maybe he sneezed too frequently and she ran out of wherewithal. If he was one of those people who’d sneeze twenty times in a row, I can see her getting bored with that."   "A frail flower, was she?"   "Naw, just easily bored." She slouched on the curb, elbows on her knees, gawking around at the night traffic and smoking. “I mean, you know. Once she turned thirty and the modeling jobs dried up.”  “Oh, well, sounds like she got a lot of miles out of the modeling career,” he coddled.  “Hell yeah,” she agreed. “Rainwear. Shoe ads. Penney’s catalog, Seventeen magazine’s big back-to-school issue, twice. A psychedelic Vogue cover. She was the Honeysilk Shampoo girl. Magazine ads, billboards, drugstore displays. Television commercials. Harper’s Bazaar… Plenty of international travel.”  “Go get ‘em, Charlotte!” he cheered softly.  She laughed without a sound, elbowed him. “Charlotte. Your mother’s name.”  “And your mother’s.”  “What … the hell—“ she implored the heavens, smiling wide— “causes a pair of lovers to carry on for seven years in the giddy sixties no less—lovers for seven heady years—“ She shook her head, floored, unable to continue.  “What the crap went down in Catalunya, babycakes?”  “No one knows. It was all hushed up and we’ll never know why.”  “He bought a motorcycle afterward.”  “Oh. It must’ve been Mother’s idea to end it, then.”   “You think so?”  “Wouldn’t you buy a motorcycle in his place if that were the situation?”  He rolled and rolled a cigarette between finger and thumb until finally: “Yes.” Smoking, contemplative. “If I were him and I had ended it, I would’ve felt like punishing myself, not treating myself to a new hog.”  “A swinger. A coquette,” she began to calculate. “A romantic trip from London to Catalunya in a stylish blue convertible…”  “Then silence,” he dropped in. “And a new motorcycle.”  “What did Mother do to him?” She shook her head.  “Then, less than a year later, he marries a much younger woman—also named Charlotte—because she is pregnant with me.”  “And my mother, in the same fashion, ups and marries some terribly bookish Classics professor named Joe—“  “Joe again! Same as Dad!”  “Joe and Charlotte.”  “Charlotte and Joe.”  “Lord-a-mercy, kid. What’s the story there?”

*  "He called her a coquette, huh?" She revisited the subject from the burnt-sienna chenille couch in her living room. "What a nice way to say it. Much nicer than, say, 'floozy.' A shame he didn't apply that kind of word-weaving to his lousy-ass songwriting."   "Yeah. 'Fall Creek Floozy' never did make a splash. Not a dent in the charts."   "Well, for whatever THAT's worth," she scoffed. "Still and all, maybe he should've tried a little songwriting while tipsy."   "I've thought so, too. But it's not his style. He thinks that's cheating,"   "Wow, and he lived through the 'sixties? What a square."   He bit his lower lip at her and smirked with his eyes.   "Except for his bitchin' sense of fashion, I mean." She consulted her wristwatch.   He sneezed five times in quick succession, gulping for air in the middle.   "Bless you. Bless--ble--" She failed to keep up with him. "Are you okay? Good Lord, is that the way your dad would do it? Sounds like you're drowning!"   "Maybe a little." He'd already resumed his cool.   "Well, you might have mentioned that. Mother was terrified of drowning."   "Really?"   "Yes, she was. She lived in a houseboat for a time."   "You don't say.."   "It's true. A leaky old houseboat along the shores of the Old Muddy."   "Not even."   "Bet me. She was eight years old. Once the anchor slipped in a midnight storm--carried 'em seventeen miles down river 'til they ran aground in Herculaneum, Missouri and took on water."   "Oh, man..."   "Yeah. Then came the water snakes."   "Uh-oh."   "Mm-hmm. Shelter from the storm and all. Saw their chance and they took it."   "Jeez."   "Yep. And-then ... the family dog drowned then and there. Fighting off water snakes. In a fit of sneezing."   He choked abruptly, caught himself, met her eyes.   "Yes, it is sort of a hilarious image. You can laugh if you need to."   He did so, quietly.   "Pretty rugged," he conceded, wiping his eyes.   "Yes, your dad never should have sneezed at her in that manner."   She took another gander at her wristwatch. "Well. 'Godzilla' starts on Channel Six in ten minutes. So what about dinner?"   "Let's slap together a banquet from the Gas ' N Fly," he suggested.   "Of course you'd say that."   "Well. Any sort of delivery would interrupt the show."   "True. That's true. Let's go."  

  "They heat-roller a mean frank in this joint," he proclaimed, the pair of them hypnotized by glistening hot dogs turning over and over on the mechanism.   "Hmmm. I'd envisioned only packaged items and slush drinks. I'm not sure Joe Oswald handed me down the right type of constitution for them there wieners."   "Oh, that's rough, darlin'," he sympathized. "Joe Porth, on the other hand, always excelled at digesting questionable meats."   "Oh, I know. He was always wowing his bandmates with his enthusiasm for eastern food," she recalled. "I guess that was a big deal in those days."   "Must've been, all right. Say, what about these egg-salad sandwiches here? All packaged up nice."   "Sorry to be a bore, but I don't trust mayonnaise that's been out of my sight for any length of time."   "Oh. Okay. Then...follow me to the Slim Jims and Cheetos, if you please?"   "Now you're talkin'." She fell in beside him. "And after that, the Hostess cakes and slush drinks."     As they stood in line to pay, something occurred to her:   "'Fall Creek Floozy'--what year was that song released?"   "'Seventy-five."   "Really."   "Yep. Not a dent in the charts, coconut." His eyes hung on the coconut-coated Sno-Ball cakes she held.   "But..." She held up one finger like an antenna for brainwaves and let her eyes glaze a moment. "Don't you see? Joe and Charlotte split up in 'seventy-two but she stayed on his mind. Like that Windsong perfume she once helped to sell with her devil-may-care poses and her camera-wooing smiles."   "That man carried a laminated Summer-of-Love Honeysilk shampoo ad in his shaving case on tours and travels for--well, it might still be in there for all I know."   She pursed her lips, sorting the cakes and jerked beef cradled in her arm. "She used to sing me to sleep with that lousy song of his. 'Cat on a Tin Roof Sunday.' You know. When Joe Oswald was off being professorial."   It struck him terribly funny for two or three seconds, winding down with a weary sigh.   "What tragic voodoo polluted the Catalunyan skies that fateful night, el meu petit esmorzar?" she asked.   "Only the stars and lovers know for sure, la meva estimada pequen."   A bag of Cheetos and five Slim Jims hit the floor. The little breakfast stared at the beloved pecan and the beloved pecan gasped.   Both had been learning to speak Catalan on the sly.