contemporary bands and she should give them a chance. But we acted as if it were a big joke,
like we were being ironic. It was only much later that I began to see it for what it was, what she
probably knew all along: that the ironic pose was a shield against actual feelings.
For her, that is. Not for me. I had a girlfriend.
Keeping it from Julie was easy. I think Mrs. Flanagan respected my relationship, or was
at least clear-eyed enough to realize the impossibility of competing with a nineteen year old
who went to school with me. The one time Julie was back in town for a few days, Mrs.
Flanagan kept her distance. A rainy afternoon helped; I closed up and Julie and I ate
sandwiches in the supply room while we waited out the storm. But even after the skies cleared,
Mrs. Flanagan didn’t come back.
After Julie went back to her job in New York, Mrs. Flanagan became especially
aggressive, tearing off my clothes the moment I walked in her door. For the next week, every
day, she would begin things by saying stuff like: “Does your girlfriend do this ?” and then with
a sly smile, she would engage in something that made me uncomfortable, like when she did a
striptease, humming some tune I didn’t recognize while I sat in a chair staring up at her.
It made me feel sorry for her. But I never said anything. She fascinated me. Like the
fact that she smoked a lot and yet somehow managed to never smell like it. Instead, she
smelled like chlorine and suntan lotion and something else indefinable, something I would
come to understand in later years as the smell of someone who drank hard alcohol, a lot of it,
and often in the morning.
One time, one of the neighborhood kids, an asshole named Greg, came by with a couple
of his friends, home from college for a week before they headed out west on a road trip. They
strode into the pool like they owned the place, like they owned the whole world, towels flung
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