Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [43]
Her mother gave her a black dress to be married in. It was short and slit at the sides. That really affected Nicole. She didn't feel it was appropriate to get married in a black dress at 15. She didn't say anything to her mother, but it bothered Nicole that no one would even take a picture of them. She kept thinking, they must have a camera in the place somewhere, they might want a picture of us getting married. Nobody would take a snap. A couple of weeks later her family disappeared on her. Charley and Kathryne took off with the kids for his new station on Midway.
Living with Barrett, sex was pretty much the same as with Hampton. She was a novice in those days. Wouldn't feel nearly so good as she would make believe. Like she never got her rocks off until a month after she was married. Of course, she would no more start with Barrett than she would flash to that first time with Uncle Lee. In fact, whenever sex went on too long with Jim and she felt sore and burning, or her breasts were tender from a mauling, it would feel the same as when she'd been a child. Still, she was crazy about Barrett. He was a sweet and kindred soul. They swore to be poor but happy all their married lives.
At the onset, however, they just couldn't get that happy. Barrett had one big worry leaning over him. He finally came in with this heavy rap to his father, real dramatic, like a television series. Barrett's father, being an ex-cop, tended to buy it. "Look," Jim told him, "some guys fronted me a little dope, and I blew it all. Now, I can't pay. They're coming down on me and I gotta get out of town." With that, he talked his father into getting a used van, put a mattress in back, and took off. Only a long time later did Nicole decide Barrett had run a line on his father and wasn't in that kind of trouble at all.
They ended up in San Diego in an old wooden hotel called the Commodore, and she found a plump black kitten about to get run over in the middle of the road and went out and got it, only it wasn't a kitten but a little pregnant cat, and had kittens itself in a couple of weeks. She thought that was pretty neat.
It was a funny time. They were happy and miserable at once. She had started to come with Barrett and he started to play with the idea of selling her. It wasn't her so much as that he was a born salesman and needed something to sell. He liked to experiment. So did she. It opened her to a lot of crazy feelings that she couldn't get around to telling Gary about. They were too rough somehow, and besides, she never did get into selling herself. On consideration, she decided she better not mess with Barrett's ego. He was such a jealous person.
Then they gave the cats away and drove back to Utah. When they reached Orem, they left the car parked right near an entrance to the Interstate. Barrett didn't even stop at his folks' house, just mailed them a card telling where he'd hid the keys to the van, and apologized for being unable to keep up the payments. He felt funny, he kept telling Nicole, that his folks would get their card postmarked Orem when they thought their son was in California.
Then they hitchhiked up to Modesto where a weird guy with one eye all screwed up rented them a $50-a-month tiny cabin. It had cockroaches. They would turn off the lights, then turn them on, and kill the cockroaches. She discovered she was pregnant there.
They had a fight about the baby to come. It wouldn't work, he argued. Later, back in Utah, Nicole decided it was a fork in the river. Because she had wanted him to get a job, and he kept promising he would. Saying it and doing it hadn't worked out equal, however. Barrett showed his true talents and talked a woman who was selling a thirteen-room house into renting to them for $80 a month, because that way, she could show it to buyers when she wanted. After