Peanuts Comic Never Ride in the Backseat Again

April 23, 2022 Post a Comment

She wasn't actually my aunt. Peradventure her name wasn't really Doris, I don't know. She was 1 of my female parent'south friends, and my female parent had lots of friends. They'd come over, drink, blab. Unremarkably the party went on all nighttime. Aunt Doris used to come into my room to brand sure I was withal alive. Sometimes she flopped on my cot and told me a story. She smelled of booze, perfume and something else, something I liked. Aunt Doris' stories were on the short and dingy side, just they were the merely ones I got.
[private]Since home life was the way it was, I stayed in school, striking the library when school let out. School plus library equals college scholarships. You better believe I went to college.
College was OK.
A week before graduation, I got a call from Aunt Doris. I hadn't heard from her in a long time. She said she was coming upwards for a visit. Nobody else ever came to visit me at College. I braced for first-caste embarrassment.
Aunt Doris showed up at the wheel of a blood-red custom convertible. She had a white scarf around her hairdo, big sunglasses. She looked like a movie star from Hollywood, which is exactly where she drove from. She parked liked she never really learned to drive. Perchance she'd been drinking. When she stepped out of the car, she went from Hollywood flick star to dorm room smoker babe. Aunt Doris was 50 pounds lighter than the last time I saw her, but none of the weight loss was from hips, keister or bust. The pounds took ten years with them. Suddenly I was extremely glad my Aunt Doris had come up to encounter me.
She hugged me a lot closer, a lot longer, kissed me on the mouth a petty deeper than a real aunt would accept. That was OK too. Slight alcohol jiff, but no cheap perfume when she raised her arms to wrap them around my neck. The scent I liked was even so in that location.
"Wow," she said slowly, moving her lips like this was her big glamorous close-up in a silent picture. "Look at you. My little boy's a handsome man."
College guys, football game players and engineering science nerds akin, popped from the library, classroom buildings, Educatee Union and dorms to go a expect at the sexy lady with the flashy car. Bronwyn Evans, my college steady engagement, caught me kissing my Aunt Doris. She walked away equally though she hadn't seen. I was going to have enough of explaining to do. Or peradventure none at all.
Aunt Doris wanted to take me to dejeuner. At a real eating place, she said, non a teenage hamburger grease-pit. After that, she wanted me to take her for a ride in the wooded hills around College Town.
The only real restaurant in town didn't have a large champagne choice, only we drank upward what they had.
Marriage, Aunt Doris told me over Baked Alaska, was a bum bargain. To be avoided at all costs. Savor youth and freedom while you've nonetheless got them. Keep on enjoying them fifty-fifty when they're gone, that's the hole-and-corner. Aunt Doris was briefly married to a Hollywood millionaire. She thought both things, Hollywood and millionaire, would make her happy. She said she idea her dreams had suddenly come true. Two years afterwards, she got a Mexican divorce and half the rich human's loot. Possibly happiness was simply a dream.
Out in the parking lot, both of the states woozy from depression-grade champagne and pre-lunch martinis, Aunt Doris handed me the keys to her convertible. "You drive. Get used to driving dreamboats for a change."
Concluding time I striking the hills was with Bronwyn Evans. Outset time for both of u.s., non terribly successful. Simply we kept trying, over and over once again, in other locations, strictly indoors, with the windows close tight, curtains drawn.
I thought Aunt Doris wanted fresh air and rustic scenery, later on Los Angeles. Plenty of both, among the pines, but she had other plans. The trunk was total of make new plaid blankets, a pack of rubbers, a bottle of proficient whiskey and a heavy navy blue cashmere sweater. She tossed me the sweater.
"Here, I idea this would become with your green optics."
Aunt Doris showed me a new view of the earth, possible solutions to the mystery of man meets woman.
Bronwyn made me put on a rubber before I even kissed her, practically.
Aunt Doris wasn't terrified by the nightmarish possibility of being impregnated. Male and female fluids didn't disgust her. She was just being sensible, I idea, but the rubbers from Hollywood made me pitiful anyhow.
Night barbarous and I was glad she bought me the fancy sweater. Aunt Doris didn't heed the cold. She kept her apparel off while we gathered forest. I started a burn with Wall Street Journals from the back seat of the automobile and her gold lighter from Paris. Her skin glowed yellowish rose in the low-cal and flicker.
She asked what I was thinking. I said I learned more from the last 3 hours than 4 years of college. Aunt Doris never finished high school. She never told me why she left home at xvi, but I gathered it wasn't a pleasant or pretty motion picture. Of a sudden she wanted to talk nearly the past.
Aunt Doris and my mother hooked upward in the Big City back Eastward. They had the same job. I asked what the chore was. She laughed. Eventually, she said, "Waitress." I couldn't picture my mom as a waitress, not in a hundred years. She would have poured hot soup all over the head of the start guy who got fresh. She'd have told bad tippers to fuck off. She'd have taught the manager how to run a eatery and the cook how to cook, even though she didn't know how to run a restaurant or melt. My female parent didn't teach me how to read. She knew how, but she only read movie magazines. She tried to teach me to dance, once.
While Aunt Doris was in the middle of telling me how she and my mother got their first apartment together with no deposit or key fee, I asked if she wanted to dance. Dancing without music works fine. Aunt Doris was a adept dancer. She used to milk shake it similar crazy at my mother'south parties. But that dark we just held on. She stopped talking most old times with my mother and I was glad. In that location was plenty I didn't want to know. Similar who my male parent was. Long listing of names to choose from. I had a feeling that'southward where her story was headed.
The fire burned to embers. Information technology was full-on spring only still seriously cold on Blackness Caprine animal Colina. Aunt Doris and I got nether her blankets, but first I made her put on the sweater she gave me.
"Don't be giddy. You lot're so skinny. I can feel y'all freezing away. All I got to do is hug you tight and drink more whiskey. I'll exist fine."
"Not for the common cold," I said. "I want the sweater to olfactory property of you."
"Stink of me, you mean. I'1000 a drunk old lady and there isn't a shower for miles, I'll bet."
"That's not what I hateful."
She sat upward and put my new sweater on. Navy blue, dark every bit the moonlit night. Her skin was pale, soft, warm and almost, different the stars.
Aunt Doris looked slightly haggard in the forenoon. Not hung-over. I knew what hangovers look like. Aunt Doris asked me to drive her to the nearest airdrome, most two hours away from College Boondocks. There was a 7:30 flight for Los Angeles. She said she had to be on it. She had appointments in Tinseltown. Important appointments she couldn't afford to miss.
We stopped for lunch at a diner.
"Those rubbers," Aunt Doris told me, in her normal voice, like she didn't care if anyone heard an older woman talking to a college kid about rubbers and recent sex, "were for you, not me. I only wanted to protect you, baby, from what I got. Besides silly, but I want to keep you safe. What I got's non fifty-fifty catching, but I didn't like the idea. Now, I'm sorry. I wanted us to feel each other. I'd dearest making babies with yous, Joe. I'd love goose egg amend. Honest."
"Aunt Doris, last night was actually neat, I mean information technology, but I don't know if I'g ready to…"
She cut me off. Of course I wasn't ready. Of course the idea of having children and beingness a human scared the living shit out of me.
"Just wanted you to know I wasn't afraid," she said, "of touching you. Of having you within me. That'south what I wanted. I was thinking of y'all, that's all. And it was so silly. Silly me, that is. Silly."
The convertible was for me, she said. A graduation nowadays.
People still flew effectually in silver Constellations in those days. Everything in America looked big, beautiful, full of promise and dreams. I parked my incredible new car as close to the rails every bit the police allowed, watched the gleaming aeroplane taxi, race its engines and take off towards the dusk. I waved at the porthole I idea might be filled past Aunt Doris'due south face. I stayed on the track till dark.
Stars shone from their usual places. Constellations don't actually be. Constellation stars are millions of light-years apart and can't see each other. My Aunt Doris is one of them.
She had cancer. Sickness grabbed her between the legs on the inside and spread with hellish speed. That's what she told me the adjacent time she chosen. I couldn't effigy out how she got my number. I was working in Alaska, a military airport construction project that was supposed to be superlative surreptitious. She said no when I said I was going to get on the next plane, or drive down in the car she gave me, even if it took all day and all dark and most of the next day. She said she didn't want me to see her looking the way she did. She said she was down to 85 pounds. She simply wanted to say goodbye, that'southward all.
A week after the call, she died. There wouldn't accept been enough time for us to have a baby together. She probably knew that. She thought a thin stretch of safe could come between a human existence and death. She didn't want what was killing her to touch me.
When it's cold and clear and nighttime enough to meet the stars really smooth, I put on the sweater she gave me, sit on the ground and await up. I experience warm though information technology's night all over.[individual]

Matthew Licht is an underground filmmaker and the author of The Crazy House Gag and the detective trilogy World Without Cops. His book of brusk stories The Moose Evidence (Common salt) was nominated for the Frank O'Connor Prize 2007. Justine, Joe and The Zen Garbageman is due to be published this year. He lives in Italy.