Read Online The Wishbones by Tom Perrotta - Free Book Online

wedding.”
    She pulled down the sun visor and studied her face in the little mirror, puckering her lips as though preparing to kiss the glass.
    “Ever since she got married, all she wants to do when we get together is complain about Paul. I mean, sometimes I just want to say, ‘Look, Margaret, if the guy's such a jerk, why don't you just divorce him?’ “
    Dave punched on the radio and began fiddling with the tuner to dramatize his lack of interest in Margaret and Paul. Julie pretended not to notice.
    “He's like from another era. She works longer hours and makes more money than he does, but it never even occurs to him to pitch in around the house.”
    The radio was a Saturday-morning wasteland. The best song Dave could find was “Movin’
On”
by Bad Company, a band about whom he had profoundly mixed feelings. As stale and mediocre as they seemed now, he could never forget what it had meant to hear them for the first time in Glenn Stella's bedroom in 1975—like being struck by lightning, visited by some rock ‘n roll version of the holy spirit. He'd walked home in a daze and announced to his parents at the supper table that he
needed
a guitar.
    “You know what he does? He just sits in front of the TV playing his stupid computer games while she vacuums around his feet.”
    “You think she should divorce him because of that?”
    “That's as good a reason as any, considering that he has no redeeming qualities whatsoever.”
    “He's not so bad,” Dave said, defending the guy out of some vague sense of gender loyalty, even though he despised him even more than Julie did. “He probably does a lot of chores around the house. Mowing the lawn and whatnot. Taking out the garbage.”
    “That's not the worst of it.” Julie lowered her voice, in case people in passing cars might be trying to eavesdrop. “He insists on having sex with her every night, right after the weather report on the eleven o'clock news.”
    “Every night?”
    “That's what she says.”
    “Even when she's sick?”
    “I'm sure there are exceptions,” she conceded. “But the basic pattern is every night.”
    Dave gave a small shiver of disgust that was only partly for Julie's benefit. Paul was a 240-pound furniture salesman who collected baseball cards and believed that
Hotel California
was one of the high points in the history of human civilization. Margaret was a formerly pleasant person whose personality had been ruined by constant dieting; Dave couldn't remember the last time he'd seen her when she wasn't carrying around a plastic baggie full of carrot slivers. The thought of the two of them having sex was almost as difficult to get his mind around as the thought of his parents getting it on in a motel room while vacationing at Colonial Williamsburg.
    Julie pulled down her bottom lip and inspected her gum line in the mirror. Then she pulled up her top lip and did the same.
    “He claims he can't get to sleep without it. If she says no he whimpers and thrashes around until she finally gives in just to get it over with.”
    “Aren't there laws against that?”
    “Every night,” Julie said, her voice touched by wonderment. “Imagine watching the news with that hanging over your head.”
    A life-sized Cardboard cutout of Mr. Spock greeted them as they entered the mall, the normally expressionless Vulcan smiling enigmatically as he extended the live-long-and-prosper salute to the earthlings who drifted past, “MEET SCOTTY!” said a cardboardposter attached to Leonard Nimoy's cardboard shirt. “2 P.M. TODAY.”
    It wasn't yet eleven-thirty, but a large contingent of
Star Trek
buffs had already begun forming a line in front of an empty table in the mall's central plaza. The table was surrounded by cardboard cutouts of Captain Kirk, Bones, and Lieutenant Uhura, who looked as sexy as ever in her skintight, probably somewhat itchy polyester uniform.
    They had to cut through the line on their way to the escalator, drawing a surprisingly huffy