There came moments when Nicole thought her mother was very intelligent, for Kathryne could pick up on what other people were thinking. Nicole never believed Kathryne listened much to her own soul, but she could sure hone in on others. If you lived around her long enough, you didn’t have to think about something before her mother would mention it. That sure gave her a way of bending you out of shape. Kathryne was a tiny woman, but she would tell her big handsome husband with his beautiful black mustache that he was nothing but a slob. Tell him to go fuck the lady he had just been with. When Charley came home from work, which was usually late, because he’d stopped off to have a few at a bar, it wasn’t that he walked drunk, or his speech was slurred, but he’d have a half smile on his face like Clark Gable, and Nicole could tell he was feeling good. Then Kathryne would start to fix his mood. She wasn, t about to forgive him for a lot.
One time, Kathryne actually caught him coming down the stairs in some motel. He had a girl on the second floor. Kathryne had his Service pistol and threatened to shoot him. But she didn’t. In turn, Nicole’s father would always accuse Kathryne of adultery, her mother! — Charley Baker was the first man she had, and she never had another one. Didn’t stop her father. Once he got home late and nobody was there, and he thought Kathryne’d left forever with the kids and a man. Instead she had just taken the kids to a drive-in movie. When they got home, Charley wouldn’t believe it. The kids had to run out of the house and climb in the car, and when Mom leaped in to drive away, Charles tried to jump on as they were all pulling out, and broke his leg. That was when Nicole was around 7 and her father was 25.
There were always fights about money. Her mother’s argument was that he was just plain stingy about the family and spent his l money on hunting rifles or drinking with his Army buddies. Still, Nicole could remember when she was io, and her daddy was in VietNICOLE AND UNCLE LEE
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nam 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 i i, she wouldn’t let anybody put it in. Still, she liked to take her clothes off, and have them look. Then she would let
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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 ff she was a good girl and went to church and got good grades, who would acknowl edge 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. When it was late in the evening and her mother was out with her father, Nicole would know it was coming. She’d begin to feel ner vous while waiting for Lee to come out of the tub. Soon after, sitting in the living room alone with her, he would open his bathrobe and ask her to play. Called it rubbing pee-pees.
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With the lights out, she never really knew ff it was touching, or what he was asking her to kiss. After a while, it didn’t even seem that unusual, she would answer him politely when he asked, Does that feel good? She would say, Yes.
Nicole was z2 before she told him that he couldn’t make her do it anymore. She was sleeping next to April when Lee woke her up. Nicole thought April was awake anyway, so she told him no. Then, Lee said he had caught her in the bathroom. Went into detail how he had seen a little masturbating. Said, You’re such a free spirit, you can do it with me. She said, I don’t care what you saw, you tell the world. A little while after, he went to Nam and was killed. It made Nicole wonder if she had left a curse, cause she had enough evil thoughts about Lee.
She never told anyone in the family what he had done. She was afraid they might not believe it. Yet, now, they seemed to know. Maybe the nice lady who sent her to the nuthouse got around to telling them.
Gary was silent for a long time. “Your.old man,” he said, “ought to be shot.”
“Are you sure you want to hear all of it?” she asked.
“I want to hear it,” he nodded.
So she started to tell him about the nuthouse and her first mar° riage. And she didn’t hide it about the orgy in between. Otherwise, it would have been too confusing to explain that she met her second husband before her first.
It was really only half a nuthouse and half a Reform School. Kind of a youth home. It wasn’t all that bad, except Nicole felt crazy all the time because it was ridiculous that she was locked up. Why are they keeping me here, she would ask herself, when I’m not nuts? It would get quiet in the night, and she would feel lonely when somebody would scream.
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The first time they let her home for a visit she got to stay at her grandmother’s and some dudes next door asked if she wanted to party a little bit. She slipped off to the next house with them for a few days, and got in trouble overstaying her leave. They kept such a watch on her when she went back to the hospital that it took six months before she could go AWOL again.
One time, a real dopy old lady was on guard at the door and Nicole was able to get past her. She took off down the field, climbed two fences, went through a few backyards, found a good-sized road and hitchhiked over to Rikki and Sue’s house where she hung around for a few days, and started to go with the guy who became her first husband, Jim Hampton. He claimed to be in love and wanted to marry her from the first date on. She thought he was a big immature clunk. Yet every day she was AWOL, Nicole was with him. She felt very conceited about being superior to him.
Then her father found out where she was, and came over. He wasn’t mad or nothing. Thought it was kind of neat she’d run away from the nuthouse. Suggested she get married.
Nicole always felt Mack-trucked into that one. There was a saying they used up in the nuthouse for when you got pushed into a mar riage by parties larger than yourself. Mack-trucked. It was obvious to Nicole that her parents wanted her off their hands.
On the other hand, even if she didn’t like Hampton’s personality, or couldn’t be impressed much with his intelligence, she thought he was awfully good looking. Moreover, her dad kept telling her she didn’t have to go back to the loonies if she was married. Then Hamp ton asked Charley for permission, and her father just said, “Let’s go.” Never did ask Nicole.
He got in the car with Jim Hampton like they were old bud dies — her dad wasn’t even thirty and Jim was over twenty — put her in the back seat, and the car took off. Nicole knew damn well she wasn’t gaining any freedom by marrying Jim Hampton. They drove along, drinking it up in front, and Nicole told herself she’d gotten into this and might as well give it a good try.
Sitting in the back seat, Nicole remembered a time when she was z years old and her dad took her to a bar. She thought he was
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showing her off, but soon found out he had a girl friend in there he wanted to show off, and knew she wouldn’t tell her mother. Only, at the door, she stopped. NO ONE tNDER ZI ADMITTED was what the sign read.
Her father pointed to the z and the I and he said, It says no one under . You’re old enough. She never was all sure when she was reading numbers backwards and so thought zi was that day. Now that she had become 4, it was all she could do to keep from laughing about it.
Charley sure made a sight drinking with Hampton. In fact her father looked a little like her husband-to-be. She began to think they both looked like Uncle Lee, damn him,
Well, the trip turned out to be not too bad. They picked up a friend of hers named Cheryl Kumer, and she drove with them to Elko, Nevada, where Nicole and Jim Hampton got married.
Jim was never rough with her, but kind of sweet, and treated her like she was a precious doll. He was always saying to the rest of his friends who weren’t married, Hey, look what I got. You know? He didn’t have a job so they were living on unemployment. He wouldn’t go to work, but really knew how to use a fingernail file on Coke machines. Even if she didn’t wholly like living on dimes and quar ters, Nicole thought they were having fun.
After a few months, she was still faithful to him, which wasn’t a bad trip. She was trying to unsort her sex hang-ups. They went from too little to too much. She could never come in those days which she knew wasn’t all Hampton’s fault. Besides Uncle Lee, she had one other big secret in her past she never told Hampton about. It happened the first time she left the nuthouse on a weekend pass and stayed at the party for two days and two nights. That was months before she’d even met Hampton.
The guy that talked her into coming over from her grand mother’s house on that occasion was about 28, and there had been booze and dope to smoke. She really liked that dude. He babied her, and paid a lot of attention, and kept her close by. When he made love, it left her feeling kind of mellow. Then he told his buddies there ‘was a SWeet little thing in the bedroom, go talk to her. Nicole was really
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hung up on the guy even when he began to hint to her that she would be befriending him if she would fuck his friends, you know.
Nicole felt a lot of things as it was going on. She took herself off to a distance and watched herself’. It was a way to think about things. Think out problems.
Bottom of all, she was proud. Even if, to some degree, the fellows were fucking her over, yet she was into the kind of party her friends would be too chicken to go along on. That was exciting. So she got a little wasted and ended up with just about every guy in the house. Maybe she was there for three days. She just never went out.
In the middle of it, she met Barrett for the first time. He came walking into the bedroom, a skinny little guy she’d never seen before. There she was all alone in bed on the second day, feeling spacey, and he walked in, and spoke to her from the hallway. He said, You know you don’t have to do this. You’re better than this. Yes, he said, you don’t have to waste it all. That was her first memory of her sec ond husband, Jim Barrett. He was only there a few minutes, but she always remembered the way his face looked then.
She didn’t see Barrett again until a month later when she was back in the nuthouse, and they threw him in, too. He wasn’t the least bit crazy. He had, however, gone AWOL from the Army, so his fa ther signed papers to have him committed. The nuthouse was bet ter than the Stockade. Barrett’s father had been a State Trooper, he told her, before he became an insurance agent, so from the point of view of the authorities, the son had to be kind of crazy.