'Well, we'll just have a few friends,' Mother said.

'Well, there will be the usual customers, too,' Father said, but he didn't look too sure, and we looked away from him. The 'usual customers' were such a small cluster of cronies; for the most part, they were the drinking friends of Coach Bob. We wondered if they'd ever show up again -- and on New Year's Eve we doubted it.

Mrs. Urick didn't know how much food to have on hand; Max wondered if the entire parking lot should be plowed, or just the usual few spaces. Ronda Ray seemed in the spirit for a New Year's party of her own; she had a dress she wanted to wear -- she'd told me all about it. I already knew the dress: it was the sexy dress Franny had bought Mother for Christmas; Mother had given it to Ronda. Having seen Franny model it, I was anxious about how Ronda would ever cram herself into it.

Mother had arranged to have a live band. 'An almost live band,' Franny said, because she'd heard the band before. They played to the Hampton Beach crowd in the summers, but during the regular year most of them were still in high school. The electric guitarist was a high school hood named Sleazy Wales; his mother was the lead singer and acoustic guitarist -- a strapping, loud woman named Doris, whom Rond

a Ray fervently called a slut. The band was named either after Doris or after the mild hurricane of some years before -- which was also named Doris. The band was called, naturally, Hurricane Doris, and it featured Sleazy Wales and his mother and two of Sleazy's high school pals; acoustic bass and drums. I think that the boys worked in the same auto garage after school, because the band's uniforms consisted of garage mechanics' clothes -- on the boys -- with their names sewn on the breast alongside the GULF insignia. Their names were Danny, Jake, Sleazy -- and all of them were GULF. Doris wore whatever she wanted to -- dresses that even Ronda Ray would have thought immodest. Frank, of course, called Hurricane Doris 'disgusting.'

The band favoured Elvis Presley numbers -- 'with lots of slow stuff if there's a lot of grown-ups in the crowd,' Doris told my mother over the phone, 'and the faster shit if the crowd's,young.'

'Oh boy,' Franny said. 'I can't wait to hear what Junior thinks of Hurricane Doris.'

And I dropped several glass ashtrays that I was supposed to be distributing to the tables, because I couldn't wait to see what Junior Jones's sister would think of me.

'How old is she?' I asked Franny.

'If you're lucky, kid,' Franny teased me, 'she'll be about twelve.'

Frank had returned the mop and broom to the first-floor utility closet and had discovered, in the closet, a clue to the existence of Sorrow. It was the board, the cut-to-size plank, upon which Sorrow had been mounted in his attack pose. There were four neat screw holes in the board, and the trace of the dog's paw prints; he'd been screwed by his paws to the plank.

'Egg!' Frank screamed. 'You little thief, Egg!'

So Egg had removed Sorrow from his stand, and was perhaps at this very moment refashioning Sorrow's pose into something closer to his own version of our old pet.

'It's a good thing Egg never got hold of State o' Maine,' Lilly said.

'It's a good thing Frank didn't get hold of State o' Maine,' Franny noted.

'There's not going to be much room for dancing,' said Ronda Ray, wearily. 'We can't move any of the chairs out of the way.'

'We'll dance around the chairs!' Father cried, optimistically.

'Screwed down for life,' Franny murmured, but Father heard her, and he wasn't ready to hear any of Iowa Bob's old lines played back to him -- not just yet. He looked very hurt, then he looked away. I remember New Year's Eve of 1956 as a time when everyone did a lot of 'looking away.'

'Oh, damn,' Franny whispered to me, and looked -- actually -- ashamed.

Ronda Ray gave Franny a quick hug. 'You just got a grow up a little, honey,' she said to her. 'You got to find out: grown-ups don't bounce back as fast as kids.'

We could hear Frank wailing for Egg in the stairwell. Frank didn't 'bounce back' so well, either, I thought. But Frank, in a way, was never a kid.

'Shut up your noise!' yelled Max Urick-from the fourth floor.

'Come down and help us with the party -- both of you!' Father cried.

'Kids!' Max bellowed.

'What does he know about kids?' Mrs. Urick grumbled.

Then Harold Swallow called from Detroit. He wasn't coming back to Dairy early, after all; he was going to miss the party. He said that he just remembered that New Year's Eve depressed him and he always ended up watching the whole thing on television. 'I might as well do that in Detroit,' he said. 'I don't have to take no airplane to Boston and ride in no car with Junior Jones and a whole crowd, just to stay in a funny hotel to watch New Year's Eve on TV.'

'We won't turn on the TV,' I told him. 'It would conflict with the band, anyway.'

'Well,' he said. Then I'd miss it. I better stay in Detroit.' There was never very much logic to the conversations one had with Harold Swallow; I never knew what to say next to him.

'Sorry about Bob,' Harold said, and I thanked him and reported to the others.

'Nasty isn't coming, either,' Franny said. 'Nasty' was the Boston boyfriend of Franny's friend Ernestine Tuck of Greenwich, Connecticut. Ernestine was called Bitty by everyone but Franny and Junior Jones. Apparently her mother had called her a 'little bitty' one terrible night and the name, as they say, stuck. Ernestine didn't seem to mind it, and she tolerated Junior Jones's version of her name, too: she had wondrous breasts and Junior called her Titsie Tuck, and Franny did, too. Bitty Tuck idolized Franny so much that she would endure any insult from her; and everyone in the world, I used to think, would simply have to accept insults from Junior Jones. Bitty Tuck was rich and pretty and eighteen, and not a bad person -- she was just so easy to tease -- and she was coming for New Year's Eve because she was what Franny called a party girl, and Franny's only female friend at the Dairy School. At eighteen, Bitty was very sophisticated -- in Franny's opinion. The plan, Franny explained to me, was that Junior Jones and his sister were driving their own car from Philadelphia; they would pick up Titsie Tuck in Greenwich, en route, and then pick up Titsie's boyfriend, Peter ('Nasty') Raskin, in Boston. But now, Franny said, Nasty was not allowed to come -because he had insulted an aunt at a family wedding. Titsie had decided to come with Junior and his sister, anyway.

Tags: John Irving Fiction
Source: readsnovelonline.net