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“Well, I hope you like the surprise,” she told him.
The cook knew it was what Da
He glanced once at the dialogue he had written in the notebook. Da
Dot and May, who were still waiting for their pizzas, had watched everything between Da
“Yeah, he’s more interested in what he’s writin!” May said.
“What’s he eatin’?” Dot asked her old friend.
“It’s somethin’ on a stick,” May said. “It doesn’t look very appetizin’.”
“I get the feelin’ our pizzas are go
“Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised,” May said.
“Now look at him!” Dot whispered. “He’s got food in front of him, and he still can’t stop writin’!”
But the food was good; Da
“Not now,” Da
CHAPTER 10. LADY SKY
SPRING WAS A BIG DEAL IN IOWA; THE FIELDS WERE A SPECIAL green. Pig roasts were the rage with the art-department types and the writing students. Da
This particular pig roast had been hard to find. Little Joe cried the whole way to Tiffin on U.S. 6, but Da
“What do you care if we can’t find the stupid farm?” Katie had asked him. “You never want to go to the parties I’m invited to, anyway.”
“I never want to go to the parties I’m invited to, either,” he pointed out to her.
“Which makes you loads of fun, fuckhead,” Katie said.
The farmer tended to his pigs in the early morning, and once again in the late afternoon; he lived in one of those motel-looking but expensive ranch houses on Rochester Avenue in Iowa City, and he rented his falling-apart farmhouse to four scruffy young men who were graduate students in art. Katie called them artists-as if they’d already achieved something.
The writer was more cynically inclined; Da
Joe didn’t seem to recognize his mother in the first of the sketches the two-year-old saw; in the farmhouse kitchen and dining room, some smudged charcoal drawings of Katie were taped to the walls. “Nice decor,” Da
In the car, he’d said to his wife: “I didn’t know that the life-drawing classes were open to photographers.”
“They aren’t,” Katie had told him. “It was arranged outside class.”
“Arranged,” he’d repeated.
“God, now you’re repeating everything,” she’d said, “like your fucking father.”
While Da
Katie usually resented carrying diapers in her purse, but she had wanted to go to the pig roast badly enough that she hadn’t complained-until now. “It’s about time the two-year-old was house-broken, isn’t it?” she said to Da
In the downstairs bathroom of the farmhouse, there was no curtain for the shower stall, and the bathroom floor was wet. Father and son both washed their hands in the grimy sink, but finding a towel was no more successful an endeavor than Da
“Try waving both hands, Joe.”
“Look-Mommy!” the boy said. He was pointing to the photographs on the wall behind his father. There was a black-and-white contact sheet and half a dozen enlargements thumbtacked to the wall above the empty towel rack. Katie was naked with her hands hiding her small breasts, but her crotch was fully exposed; it looked as if her modesty had been purposely manipulated or misplaced. Someone’s conscious idea, clearly-a deliberate statement, but of what? Da
“Yes, the lady looks a lot like Mommy,” Da
“It is Mommy,” the boy said.
“You think?” his dad asked. He’d taken his son’s small hand and was leading him out of the filthy bathroom.
“Yes, it’s really Mommy,” Joe answered gravely.
Da
The party was outside on the lawn, near the pigpen. Given the late-afternoon, early-evening time of day, Da
Da