Read Online A Place to Call Home by Deborah Smith - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Deborah Smith
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trail one fingertip through the soft hair at the base of his neck.
The contrast was clear—sex was something sweaty and naked and embarrassing, not to mention highly regulated and often forbidden, but romance was lovely and polite and involved admiring each other with your clothes on.
So that was the kind of romance Roanie and I would have. I resolved to explain my intentions with a series of poems led by a polite ode to his worthiness.
I taped the first poem to our refrigerator in a prominent spot between the
Farmers’ Bulletin
calendar and a snapshot of Mama, Daddy, me, and my brothers in the lobby of the Atlanta Civic Center when we went to see the touring company show of
The Sound of Music
.
R OANIE , R OANIE ,
H E’S NO PHONY ,
G OT A PAIR OF BIG COJONES .
H E’D FIT RIGHT IN
W ITH US M ALONEYS .
BY C LAIRE
Cojones
was a term I’d discovered in one of Daddy’s detective novels. I judged its impressive power by the way it was used in the book. I waited to see who’d notice the poem first.
Aunt Arnetta was as nearsighted as a mole. She wore thick glasses with bright orange rims or prescription sunglasseswith Day-Glo blue reflecting lenses, which made her look like a big, blue bottle fly. She was a hefty woman, a no-nonsense woman with a fashion sense that favored brown with hints of more brown.
Her allegiances were rock-hard: God, church, children, job, bingo. I think thieving, weasel-inclined Carlton was an embarrassment to her, and probably the reason she was so hard on everyone else.
Uncle Eugene, who owned a local car dealership and was umbilically tied to a TV set in his spare time, was way down on her list of priorities. She worked for a state agricultural agency as a home economics expert.
She had come over to drop off a new brochure on no-salt cooking, because Mama was worried about Great-Gran’s blood pressure. Aunt Arnetta tromped into the kitchen, where I was lounging at the table pretending to read a
Reader’s Digest
. It was a freezing day in early January, and a streak of cold air seemed to follow her across the warm room.
“You’ll ruin your eyes holding that magazine up like that,” she said to me. “You’re a bookworm. You better practice good habits, or you’ll end up with bad eyes and stooped shoulders.”
“Oh. Okay. Yes, ma’am.”
She breezed past me, and I was afraid she’d go through to the back hall and miss the refrigerator completely. But she zoomed in on my poem like a radar and halted. I watched her lean forward. She leaned back. She took off her glasses and cleaned them on the lapel of her brown blazer, put them back on, and leaned forward. She quivered.
“CLAIRE KARLEEN MALONEY, what is this filth?”
Aunt Arnetta tore my poem off the refrigerator and whirled around and slapped the paper on the table. My mouth went dry. “It’s a poem!”
“You’re writing poetry about … about Roanie Sullivan’s
privates
?”
“What? Huh? No, it’s about his cojones!”
“Privates,” Aunt Arnetta repeated, shaking the paper under my nose. “Male organs. Gonads. Testicles.” Her voice rose on each word, and when I stared at her in blank horror, she finished loudly, “His
balls
.”
I shrieked.
That’s
what the men in Daddy’s books meant when they said somebody had big cojones? “I didn’t know! I thought cojones were
muscles
! Big, strong
muscles
.”
“Oh, I’ll just bet you didn’t know! A smart girl like you! Let me tell you something, Missy Claire, if you lay down with pigs, you’ll get up muddy! You don’t have the good sense to keep your distance from that lowlife Roanie Sullivan! Well, I’ll just put the lid on this pot right now! I’m telling your mama and daddy that that junkyard dirty-fingered hillbilly white-trash troublemaker is inspiring you to write dirty rhymes!”
I leaped up. “No! It isn’t his fault! I read about cojones in a book!”
“There’s not one book in this house that discusses the male privates in those sorts
The contrast was clear—sex was something sweaty and naked and embarrassing, not to mention highly regulated and often forbidden, but romance was lovely and polite and involved admiring each other with your clothes on.
So that was the kind of romance Roanie and I would have. I resolved to explain my intentions with a series of poems led by a polite ode to his worthiness.
I taped the first poem to our refrigerator in a prominent spot between the
Farmers’ Bulletin
calendar and a snapshot of Mama, Daddy, me, and my brothers in the lobby of the Atlanta Civic Center when we went to see the touring company show of
The Sound of Music
.
R OANIE , R OANIE ,
H E’S NO PHONY ,
G OT A PAIR OF BIG COJONES .
H E’D FIT RIGHT IN
W ITH US M ALONEYS .
BY C LAIRE
Cojones
was a term I’d discovered in one of Daddy’s detective novels. I judged its impressive power by the way it was used in the book. I waited to see who’d notice the poem first.
Aunt Arnetta was as nearsighted as a mole. She wore thick glasses with bright orange rims or prescription sunglasseswith Day-Glo blue reflecting lenses, which made her look like a big, blue bottle fly. She was a hefty woman, a no-nonsense woman with a fashion sense that favored brown with hints of more brown.
Her allegiances were rock-hard: God, church, children, job, bingo. I think thieving, weasel-inclined Carlton was an embarrassment to her, and probably the reason she was so hard on everyone else.
Uncle Eugene, who owned a local car dealership and was umbilically tied to a TV set in his spare time, was way down on her list of priorities. She worked for a state agricultural agency as a home economics expert.
She had come over to drop off a new brochure on no-salt cooking, because Mama was worried about Great-Gran’s blood pressure. Aunt Arnetta tromped into the kitchen, where I was lounging at the table pretending to read a
Reader’s Digest
. It was a freezing day in early January, and a streak of cold air seemed to follow her across the warm room.
“You’ll ruin your eyes holding that magazine up like that,” she said to me. “You’re a bookworm. You better practice good habits, or you’ll end up with bad eyes and stooped shoulders.”
“Oh. Okay. Yes, ma’am.”
She breezed past me, and I was afraid she’d go through to the back hall and miss the refrigerator completely. But she zoomed in on my poem like a radar and halted. I watched her lean forward. She leaned back. She took off her glasses and cleaned them on the lapel of her brown blazer, put them back on, and leaned forward. She quivered.
“CLAIRE KARLEEN MALONEY, what is this filth?”
Aunt Arnetta tore my poem off the refrigerator and whirled around and slapped the paper on the table. My mouth went dry. “It’s a poem!”
“You’re writing poetry about … about Roanie Sullivan’s
privates
?”
“What? Huh? No, it’s about his cojones!”
“Privates,” Aunt Arnetta repeated, shaking the paper under my nose. “Male organs. Gonads. Testicles.” Her voice rose on each word, and when I stared at her in blank horror, she finished loudly, “His
balls
.”
I shrieked.
That’s
what the men in Daddy’s books meant when they said somebody had big cojones? “I didn’t know! I thought cojones were
muscles
! Big, strong
muscles
.”
“Oh, I’ll just bet you didn’t know! A smart girl like you! Let me tell you something, Missy Claire, if you lay down with pigs, you’ll get up muddy! You don’t have the good sense to keep your distance from that lowlife Roanie Sullivan! Well, I’ll just put the lid on this pot right now! I’m telling your mama and daddy that that junkyard dirty-fingered hillbilly white-trash troublemaker is inspiring you to write dirty rhymes!”
I leaped up. “No! It isn’t his fault! I read about cojones in a book!”
“There’s not one book in this house that discusses the male privates in those sorts
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