The Complete Collection. William Wharton

taking a dust bath. She hands me the flower and a long pin. They’re both ice cold. I’m supposed to pin this flower on Doris.

      Right here I notice there’s no place under my nose to pin this thing. That is, if I’m not going to pin it through bare, raw, freckled flesh.

      I stand there, holding the pin in one hand and the flower in the other. I could stick it right through what looks like it might be one of her nipples but what I think is a piece of rubber. Doris has big tits but in this dress they bulge out past her elbows. There’s such a space between them, I know if I get the right angle I can see through to the floor.

      Apparently, pinning is one detail they hadn’t worked out. The mother starts giggling. Doris turns a sort of salmon color and the freckles get darker. The mother moves in and pins the flower on her waist. Now it looks as if she has a monster vine creeping up on her from behind. I wonder where I’m supposed to put my hand when we dance.

      Now, the father comes in. He’s a pale, tired-looking man. He puts a silk cape over Doris’s shoulders and gives her the keys to the car. He also gives all kinds of advice about locking, turning off the lights and not going over thirty-five. He kisses her on the cheek. Her mother kisses her on the cheek, too. The father turns around and shakes my hand.

      ‘Have a good time, son; but be sure to have her in by two o’clock.’

      Son! Holy mackerel, they’ve got me married to her already. The dance is over at twelve-thirty. What am I supposed to do with her till two o’clock? What will Perta think if I don’t come into the dream? This whole business is getting to be more of a catastrophe every minute.

      At the dance, I have to move the flower from her waist to her wrist. She wants it on her left wrist so I tie it to her wristwatch with a rubber band I have in my pocket. It sits on top of her wrist so she looks as if she’s going falconing. The hand is perched on top of my shoulders while we’re dancing so the damned orchid keeps tickling the back of my neck and ears. It sends chills up and down my spine. This way I can smell it without seeing it. I keep being reminded of the rotten horse meat smell at the place Joe Sagessa took us.

      This smell combined with all the sweating bodies around us and the sound of the music brings me to the very edge of what I can bear. To take my mind off it, I keep trying to think forward to the dream when I get home to my bed. Doris is saying things to me about the music or asking where I live. She knows my father works here as a janitor but she doesn’t say anything about that.

      I see my father twice. He’s acting as a sort of bouncer-janitor combined. He keeps track of those who go into the boys’ toilets. His job is to slow down the drinking and help clean up the vomit if anybody gets sick. He gets five extra dollars for the night; just enough to pay for my stupid tux. I wouldn’t go through another night like this for fifty dollars.

      I see Al swinging and dancing around with his cheerleader. He isn’t much of a dancer, but she’s one of those girls who could dance with a buffalo and make it look graceful. Al dances one-two-three at the same beat to any music. He doesn’t even listen to it. With the tux on, he looks like a gangster in a movie. He’s wearing a white carnation but still he could be Brian Donlevy playing Heliotrope Harry.

      Doris asks me about the birds. That’s something I don’t want to talk about. If I really thought she was interested I’d tell her. I’d stop the stupid dancing, sit down and tell her about it. I look to check; but all she’s doing is making dance conversation. Sometimes it seems humans can only play games; all kinds of complicated games. Going to the Junior Prom is another game with a whole set of rules. Talking while you’re dancing is one of the rules.

      I don’t have a watch and I can’t see Doris’s with the big orchid draped all over it, but there are clocks at each end of the gym. They have wire mesh over the face to keep them from getting broken by stray basketballs, but you can still read the time if you get the right angle. The time is crawling by. I’m pooped. It’s past eleven o’clock and I’m usually in bed by ten for the dream. My arm is tired from holding up Doris’s arm. I try letting my arm down sometimes, taking the weight off my shoulder muscle, but she doesn’t pick up the load at all, just lets both arms drop. Finally, when I can’t keep them up any longer, we leave the arms down and she snuggles in closer to me with her head tucked under my chin. Now I’ve got her hair tickling my nose, while the flower is tickling me on the back of the neck. Both my hands are occupied. Besides that, Doris’s big tits are pressed against me, they’re about the consistency of blown-up inner tubes. From all my flapping exercises, my sternum has a tendency to stick out more than most people’s, so her tits fit on both sides of it. We make a beautiful couple. We fit together like tongue-in-groove flooring.

      At last it’s over. I take Doris over to get her cape; we go outside. Everybody’s slamming car doors in the dark and laughing. I help her into her side of the car. She asks me if I want to drive. That’s wild. Nobody drives in our family; we’ve never had a car; never will. My father won’t even ride in an automobile.

      When I tell her ‘no’, she sticks the key into the ignition and turns it on. The car’s a Buick, the last model they made before the war. The motor is eight-cylinder, loaded with power, but it’s all pissed away in this car with something they call Dynaflow. This is a way you get to drive a car without knowing how to shift. My father says soon they’ll have cars you won’t have to steer. People’ll go around killing each other without knowing it.

      Doris turns to me. Her face is soft as a baby bird with just the lights from the dashboard. Her cape is pulled back and she looks almost naked. She reaches over and turns on the radio. She must’ve had the dial set beforehand, maybe even called up the radio station to have the right music played. They come on with Glenn Miller’s ‘Sunrise Serenade’. It’s one piece of music I really like; it has the inside completeness of a good canary song.

      ‘Let’s go for a little ride out to Media.’

      It doesn’t matter what I say, we’re going to Media. She’s most likely already gone out and mapped the route. I settle back to relax and let it all happen. This is probably the night I get fucked. She has to be back by two o’clock. The clock glowing green in the dark dash says quarter to one. How much can actually happen in an hour?

      Doris isn’t paying too much attention to what her father said. We’re whipping around these tight curves, on roads one car wide, through the heavy green overhanging trees of Media, at about fifty. There’s a straightaway under the high stone arched railway overpass and she gets it to almost seventy. She’s so little, she’s peering up over the edge of the dash. I scrunch down and concentrate on those tiny silver shoes pushing on the accelerator and brake. I wonder what Perta’s doing. What would happen to the dream if I wind up welded into that dashboard in front of me, with an eight-cylinder engine hot in what’s left of my lap.

      She has the place picked out. We swing off the macadam road and along a dirt road so small, the branches on both sides are scraping the edges of the car. She isn’t saying anything, just driving, peering up to avoid potholes. We’re following through. Doris is going to have her Junior Prom with all the trimmings. I feel like a candle on the cake that’s about to be blown out.

      We cross a little stream with that monster car and the road turns into nothing but rocks. Finally, she stops, turns off the motor, pulls on the emergency and puts out the lights. She turns the ignition so the dash and radio stay on. This car has everything. It gets about nine miles to the gallon but they have a Bration sticker, so what the hell.

      At first, she sits there holding onto the wheel of the car, like a kid pretending to drive while the car’s sitting in a driveway. I unscrunch myself and sit up. I turn toward her and pull my inside leg bent up on the seat. Anything can happen. I know it’s going to be embarrassing.

      Doris climbs up onto her knees. In the darkness I see she’s left her shoes down there by the accelerator. She holds out her wrist with the orchid on it for me to take off.

      ‘I’d like to keep it as a souvenir.’

      She says this as I try to untwist the rubber band in the dark. She’s wiggling the end of her hand at the wrist like a snake. When I get it