The Complete Collection. William Wharton

looks at me.

      ‘How did you know my name? I did not tell you.’

      Perta in the dream-dream had a name and it was Perta. She did not tell me; I made it up. How could I know her name? I have to lie again.

      ‘You told me the first night when we were flying.’

      Perta ruffles her feathers and takes half a minute before answering.

      ‘No. I did not tell you. Why do you lie to me? There is no reason for us to lie to each other. Each time we cannot be true, it is something between us. There must be truth or there is nothing.’

      ‘I do not know what is true, Perta. I know your name by ways I cannot tell you about. That is not a lie.’

      ‘It is not the truth either. When one knows and one does not tell, that is not truth.’

      Perta flies down and eats some seed. I fly down beside her. We eat together for a while. I am very much in love with her. It is so strange to find such a hard stone of purity in so much softness. It is like the pit in the center of a peach.

      During the days, I can think of nothing but Perta. It is spring and I’m in my junior year in high school. Everybody’s all excited about the Junior Prom. My mother asks me who I’m taking. I’m not taking anybody. The girls at the school all look like overgrown, awkward cows to me. They move as if their feet grow right into the ground. My eyes are tuned to the fine, delicate movements of birds.

      Al is taking one of the cheerleaders. He has his letters in football and wrestling. He’ll probably take another letter in track for throwing the discus. These are all varsity letters. He’s going to be the only junior three-letter man in the school.

      Al practices with the discus out in center field just over our fence. I go out sometimes and throw the discus back to him. It’s one thing I can do as a boy which isn’t completely boring and doesn’t have to do with my birds. Making a discus go a long way is as much a matter of getting it off at the right angle to catch the air under it, with the least air resistance, as it is strength. Throwing it back to Al, I keep experimenting and once in a while I throw it farther than Al does himself. Of course, I have a strange strength advantage. I’m unnaturally strong in the deltoids, triceps, and latissimus dorsii muscles from all the wing-flapping.

      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