Free Heading Out to Wonderful by Robert Goolrick

what to expect, he was still startled, startled by the vastness of her, her expanse of skin, her breasts, her deep pink nipples, the shimmer of her skin, pale and powdery everywhere except her arms and her face. All the women from all the magazines under his bed were now lying on him, touching his skin with skin that was sweet but strangely frightening, unlike the girls in the pictures, whose skin was glossy and inviting.
    He pulled her on top of him, and kissed her. She didn’t kiss him back. He rolled her over and lay on top of her as she closed her eyes, and he did what he was supposed to do, what he’d waited forty-eight years to do in his own bed. She didn’t respond, but she didn’t seem to mind, either.
    It didn’t take long. When it was over, he lay beside her in the room that was now dark, neither of them even close to sleep. She got up and went to the bathroom and, when she came back, the blood was gone from her legs, and Boaty looked down and discovered to his horror that there was also blood on his shorts, so he pulled a clean pair from the drawer and went into the bathroom and put them on. He didn’t know what to do with the soiled ones. He didn’t want Louise to find them in the laundry basket, so when he came out, his new blue shorts replaced with his favorite green ones, the color of spring leaves, he rolled the blue ones up and put them at the back of his closet, underneath some shoes, to be tossed out later with the trash.
    When he lay back down on the bed, grunting again, she didn’t even turn to look at him. He took her hand as they lay in the dark, waiting for sleep, his sweaty palm engulfing her dry one until she pulled it away and rubbed it on the bedspread.
    In the dark, afterward, listening to the night, he decided he didn’t think much of it. He didn’t see what all the fuss was about. Maybe he’d done it wrong, but he didn’t think so. It wasn’t the kind of thing Boaty would think about himself, anyway, and, besides, how many ways could there be to do it?
    No, he didn’t think it was all that great, this thing he’d waited for and dreamed about for forty-eight lonely years, and he didn’t suppose that he would make it a regular thing. Maybe once a week. Maybe.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    B UT ALL IN all, Boaty Glass was pretty pleased with himself. The next day, he drove his new wife into Lexington to get some clothes, the kind of clothes that might make the other women in the town turn their heads. They went to Grossman’s. Almost every Southern town has one clothing store run by Jewish people, and in Lexington it was the Grossmans who kept the ladies looking up to date. Boaty watched as Sylvan tried on the clothes, and he got more and more pleased with himself every time she came out of the dressing room. She had a nice figure on her, full and round, and the Grossmans looked her up and down and pulled out things that looked like they had been made just for her. It gave him a funny feeling in his heart, watching her, a rush to wrap it all up, the dresses and the suits and the hats and gloves she had to be taught to wear, and take her back home, dress her up, and just walk her up and down the main street in Brownsburg all day long.
    In Arthur and Ginger Grossman’s hands, Sylvan became the thing he had driven all those miles on all those country roads to find, had sat in all those parlors in Staunton and Charlottesville, drinking cups of condescending tea under stony unforgiving glances so he could bring her home. She might be the fake version of that thing, but, like they say, when she stood on top of Boaty’s money, she stood pretty tall.
    She had a natural grace to her, in the way she walked, in the way her hands moved up to rearrange her hair or smooth an eyebrow. And she seemed to take Boaty as he came, his hulking body with that faint smell of sweat, his age, whatever it was, and she didn’t know and didn’t seem to care—as long as he was older than eighteen, he might as well have