Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [39]
There were always fights about money. Her mother's argument was that he was just plain stingy about the family and spent his money on hunting rifles or drinking with his Army buddies. Still, Nicole could remember when she was 10, and her daddy was in Vietnam and her mother was worried that he was going to get killed. They would hear her cry sometimes late at night.
When Gary said he would like to meet her mother, Nicole didn't tell him about her last conversation with Kathryne. Her mother had said this new boy friend was a little old, she'd heard. And then there was his having been in prison. That had to be a very good influence.
"I'll go," said Nicole, "with whom I goddamn well please."
Yet when the meeting took place, nothing did happen. Gary was polite and stood at the cupboard holding Jeremy in his arms, and looked at everybody and drank it in and didn't say a thing. It was like he'd been wound up to stay in position and send light out of his eyes. "Nice to meet you," he said to Kathryne when he left, and Nicole knew that an uncomfortable feeling stayed behind.
She cared more because of the things people could do to him. He was stiff as a 4-year-old boy with the wrong people. She understood. She knew what it was like to be in prison. Felt as if she had lived there too. Prison was wanting to breathe when somebody else had a finger up your nose. Soon as they took it out, the air got you crazy. Prison was being married too young and having kids.
She didn't always remember which story she had told him. Just as well. Some of the stories were pretty bad. Still she usually felt as if her thoughts passed over to his head with only a couple of words to help them along. Before she knew it, she was telling him more and more. He listened without getting upset. That was real important.
When she was 8 or 9, she was still ugly in her own mind, a gawky little bird. Then, suddenly, she blossomed. She had the biggest boobs in the sixth grade. In fact, there was a time when she had the biggest boobs in the elementary school. Didn't have to go looking for attention. It came to her. They called her Foam Rubber.
Before she was 11, she wouldn't let anybody put it in. Still, she liked to take her clothes off, and have them look. Then she would let the boys touch her. She liked getting attention from the best-looking boys. That was because she never thought of herself as popular. They didn't ask her out much to parties. The girls from the good Mormon families who went to Sunday School used to spite her a lot.
By junior high, she was making friends with the worst kids. Some were the biggest troublemakers and some were just the ugliest looking. She was stealing a lot, particularly out of other kids' lockers. Even when she didn't get caught, people were always suspecting her, and disgusted with her. Yet nobody was interested enough to want her to be something better. She had the feeling that if she was a good girl and went to church and got good grades, who would acknowledge it?
Then they put her into the nuthouse at 13. There was a far-out lady they sent her to for counseling, and the lady talked her into going. They told her she would only be there for a couple of weeks but after she spilled the beans about Uncle Lee, she stayed for seven months.
Right from when she started school, there was an Army friend of her father's who lived with them. His buddy, her father called him. The kids called him Uncle Lee even though he was no real uncle or any kind of relative, but her dad looked on him as a lot closer than his own brothers. He even looked something like Charley Baker. When they were out together, it was as if Elvis Presley was walking down the street with Elvis Presley.
Uncle Lee was dead now, but he had lived off and on with them from the time she was 6, and Nicole always blamed her mother and dad for Uncle Lee, because he had sure fucked her up. She even thought she became a slut because of him.
When her father would work on the Base at night, and her mother would also work late, and her brother be asleep, Lee would start.