Free Heading Out to Wonderful by Robert Goolrick Page A

been a hundred. He kind of loved her, but then, he loved his car the way he loved his money, and he had loved his sainted mother, but this girl was not his delicate mother. This was a flesh-and-blood woman. He’d seen her naked. He never got up the courage to ask himself whether she loved him, too.
    Some things he had to teach her, like how to hold a fork and knife in the right way, how to put a napkin in her lap, but most things he only had to tell her once. She was that quick.
    The first time he took her to town, to church on Sunday, she caused a stir. She turned some heads. She was by far the prettiest girl in town, and she made the other teenaged girls look unfinished, somehow. She was voluptuous where they were meager, and, of course, she was married to Boaty, and everybody knew the desperate and disastrous course of Boaty’s various courtships. Nobody knew who she was, exactly, except Alma, who remembered from her days of going out to Arnold’s Valley and trying to teach those children some few simple facts about the world, and Alma knew the girl wouldn’t remember her, or, if she did, she wouldn’t acknowledge their acquaintance, so Alma didn’t say anything, except to Will, later, at lunch, and Will laughed his head off. “Arnold’s Valley?” He laughed at the whole idea.
    Then Will told just one or two people, and that was enough, so by the end of the week, everybody in town knew exactly who she was and where and what she had come out of. But still. But still.
    She didn’t talk like a hillbilly, that was the remarkable thing. She didn’t talk like anybody in Brownsburg, anybody in the county. She talked like somebody you’d hear on the radio, which, of course, was where she’d learned to talk like that in the first place. She talked like Helen Trent.
    Boaty liked showing her off, and so, once he felt Brownsburg had been suitably impressed, he took her back into Lexington, where they had supper at the Dutch Inn. Then they went to the movies. The movies cost a quarter apiece, but they also cost him—and Boaty didn’t know this at the time, how could he?—they also cost him much much more. The movies cost him his wife, because after the lights went down in the State Theater, and the first image flickered on the screen, and she saw those enormous, beautiful faces and heard them talking in that way that didn’t sound like any country except the country of the movies, Sylvan never belonged to him again. From that night on, she belonged, body and soul, to the movies.
    The movie they saw was The Big Sleep. The plot didn’t even begin to make sense to Sylvan, but then there was Lauren Bacall, a girl almost her own age who had made herself up out of her own imagination, or so it seemed, falling in love with Bogart, a man who was totally and completely authentically what he was. She felt in her heart he wasn’t even acting; he was just that man who talked like that and smoked cigarettes and who was obviously old enough to be Bacall’s father. She knew right away that she was Bacall, and suddenly her black silk dress from Grossman’s felt drab and itchy on her skin, as though it didn’t fit her right, didn’t belong to her. And it was clear as a bell that Boaty wasn’t Bogart.
    Sylvan took in every line of every dress Bacall wore, the drape of a suit, the flow of a gown, the sparkle of a brooch, the actual words the characters spoke flowing past her as though in a language she’d never heard before, all money and music. She imagined her own hair falling like that, in soft, gleaming waves around her face. She didn’t watch the movie so much as she watched the way Lauren Bacall moved her beautiful mouth, and heard the way she breathed sex and glamour into her every word. She imagined Lauren Bacall’s body moving beneath those clothes, and she could see in Bogart’s eyes that he was thinking the same thing.
    The next day, Boaty gone, she stood in front of the mirror and lowered her chin and raised her