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7. Does She Do It On the First Date?
Published 1961, Fig Leaf Press, 171 pages
Gudrun didn’t want a child for the reasons she presumed other people did. She didn’t want company because she couldn’t ever remember having any to begin with and she didn’t think babies were cute because they really fell pretty low in the hierarchy of adorable young animals and she didn’t need anyone to take care of her when she got old because she had Murray. She didn’t have any faith in future generations. She didn’t think her genes were anything special. She didn’t even think she’d be a particularly good mother, though she felt pretty confident she could best the local record without much effort.
Gudrun wanted a child because 57.9% of Jack Oskander’s books ended that way. You wouldn’t think so, but they did. Maybe Old Jack just liked those stories better than others. Maybe the ratio would hold even if you had the whole of the publishing world packed into a four-bedroom bungalow. A pregnancy, a return to a happy family after erotic adventuring, an orphan adopted, a runaway un-runnedaway. The statistics were overwhelming and undeniable. No other ending had those numbers, not weddings, not tragic death, not even simple orgasm and breakfast after. A child was the ending. The Platonic. The ideal. The good art.
The requirement of another person irritated Gudrun profoundly. There had never been anyone else but her and Ruby. The Adoratron Mark 5’s Reproduction Chamber seemed so much easier and more sensical. Why should she have to track down somebody and convince them she wasn’t weird, which she was, and let him, a total stranger who had once been one of those germ-infested children Ruby so feared, who couldn’t hold a candle to Chet Hardtree or Sir Quicktongue and probably had never so much as glanced at The Sword of Lust in the library, invade her body and infect her with his alien DNA? She couldn’t think how it could possibly happen. If a nice man took her out to dinner, all she’d be able to manage would be to order the soup and then bellow Murray’s broken-drum scream/belch mating cry in his face.
It happened once, of course. Everything does. Eventually. But there was no child.
Instead, Gudrun split in half a month before Snow Day.
6. The Sinner and the Nun
Published 1956, Harem House Press, 203 pages
Mr. Abalone died in March, 1976. His son took over the general store and Gudrun would probably never have known one way or the other except that a little while afterward, a tin of Cold Palace Brand No. 1 Silver Needle Tea turned up in her monthly delivery, snuggled in between the bag of sugar and the toilet paper. Gudrun screamed in joy. Six years down the hole in a tealess purgatory. Her scream echoed around the jungle hills. Murray fretted and pulled out a tail feather in his distress.
Inside the tin, with its etched peonies and elegant cursive logo lay a note:
I found a crate in the warehouse after Dad passed. I thought I remembered you like this stuff. Tea doesn’t go bad, does it?
—Johnny Abalone
Johnny Abalone was a ridiculous name, that much was clear. Not even the Oskander Collection would tolerate a hero with a name like that. Not even The Pearl Diver Dives for More, and that was easily the worst of the lot. Gudrun meant to make her tea last this time, horde it against the Silver Needle-less future. But she was weak, when you added her up. She drank it all in a day, cup after cup, until she was sick, and kept drinking anyway. She drank in a delirium of plenty, grabbing a new mug from the cabinet every time, so that none of them would feel left out. When she went to bed, the counter was a riot of crockery, red and blue and white and black scattered everywhere, with no pattern, like summer flowers. She’d fix it up in the morning. No problem. Gudrun’s sleeping stomach distended as if she’d conceived from fine leaves and hot water, but she wasn’t sorry.
Every month, a new tin arrived with a new note.
I drank some of this stuff. Figured if you like it so much, it must be something grand. Tastes like licking nickels to me, but I guess nothing tastes the same to two people at a time. Maybe the pipes are going. Can’t make good tea without clean water and the stuff out of the faucet looks a little yellow these days. I guess you’re on well water up there. I bet that’s nice.
—Johnny Abalone
I remember you came down to the shop that one time and I said you should just drink Lipton instead. That was stupid of me. I know how sometimes you just want what you want and fuck everything else. I know how sometimes what you want is gone and it feels like you’re not allowed to be as upset as you need to be about it.
Hey, do you have a generator up there? I hate to think of you stuck in the blackouts. Pretty bad this year, huh? Last longer and longer. I have a spare if you need it.
—Johnny Abalone
Do you take your tea with milk or lemon or sugar or what? The little white bits look like hair to me. Like an old man’s hair.
It’s pretty quiet in the shop these days. I think people liked Dad and got used to him but now it’s just me and it’s weird for them. They just want what they want, right? You could come and pick up your delivery and you wouldn’t see another soul. Except me. I wouldn’t say anything if you didn’t want me to.
—Johnny A
If you need gas, you should probably come down and fill up sooner rather than later. It’s real pricey and the Chevron usually sells out by Tuesday afternoon. Then everybody has to wait all week for another tanker to refill the pumps. Come early, though. The line gets long as hell.
When I was a kid, I knew the guy who had your place before you. Funny dude. We used to have a whole magazine section but after he bugged out we dumped them and put the beer freezer in. Turns out he was keeping the whole rag rack going one-handed. He didn’t talk to anyone much. Just like you. Maybe that house takes your talk.
I like writing these notes. Do you like reading them? I could come visit sometimes, if you wanted. I don’t have to. But if you wanted.
—Johnny
And then one day when Johnny Abalone’s busted old truck came meandering and misfiring up the mountain, he didn’t just leave the wooden mango crates at the property line. He knocked on the door and suffered Murray’s cold, furious glare and when Gudrun answered, she wasn’t really surprised, except that Johnny Abalone was older than she thought. He had a little grey in his shaggy black hair and a bad leg with tiny shards of bullet still floating around in it like the white hairs in silver needle tea, bullets he took on another mountain very far away, which, even as he bled into the infinite forest filth, even so far away from Ko’olau and the beer freezer at the Abalone General Store, had smelled so much like home.
“Full thrusters engaged, Commander Hardtree,” Gudrun whispered.
“What?”
