Free Beautiful Kate by Newton Thornburg Page A

he think would happen? Would the voluptuous pair put out? Would I get bare jug? Would the two of us finally lose our accursed virginity? Not unexpectedly, Cliff had no answers for me. Mostly he just shook his head, as though in sad recognition of the fact that his little brother finally had gone over the edge. And since I was never one to press, I simply carted all my queries over to Kate, who after all was as much my buddy as Cliff ever was, and in addition had a far dirtier mind, in fact almost as dirty as my own. So I was blithely unprepared for the storm my little litany of questions stirred in her. Her eyes blazed and her mouth curled in revulsion as she shoved me back against the wall.
    “ Bare jug ?” she yelled. “ Bare jug ! What are you talking about? You twerp! You snotnose! You haven’t even kissed a girl! You—”
    But suddenly she was crying, tears of rage, I realize now. Then, however, I was totally baffled, and somewhat thunderstruck too, as she tore up the stairs and slammed the door so hard even Jason came out of his study to ask what the trouble was. I did not tell him, nor did Kate. But from that moment on, until weeks after the dance, she was not herself. Suddenly she would have almost nothing to do with either Cliff or me, unless Mother or Jason was within earshot, and then she would begin on us. Hymie and Abe , we were, the newest Hebes in Woodglen High. Had we been circumcised yet? Was she invited to our bar mitzvah? Had our noses always been so long?
    Jason, who was never bashful about expressing his own anti-Semitism, took all that in stride. But when she began to refer to us as the tape-measure twins and to our dates as the Jewish squaws, Big Big Tit and Little Big Tit, Jason finally put his foot down, going so far as to send her up to her room.
    For weeks he and Mother had been after her to ask some boy to the dance herself, but without success. Kate simply would not hear of it.
    “I may have to go to school with the pimply freaks,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean I have to dance with them.”
    By then, Kate was already known as a “character” around town and especially at school. Students both male and female had learned early on that it was best not to mess with the pretty Kendall girl because she was as quick now with her tongue as she once had been with her fists. But where, in grade school, she had been content to bloody noses, now she went straight for the jugular, often marking her antagonists with a sobriquet so apt and cutting it would stick with the victim like a wound all through school, and maybe all through life, for all I know. Boys knew better than to ask her for dates and girls knew better than to laugh at her except behind her back. And laugh they did, because she wore no makeup and let her hair hang loose, a decade before it became the fashion.
    Nevertheless, one day out of the blue Kate announced that she too had a date for the dance, a senior named Waldo Fixx, whom Cliff and I would have figured just about the last person on earth Kate would invite even to a dog fight. He was stupid and greasy and had a vague reputation for minor criminality, things like stealing hubcaps and selling condoms on the school grounds. And worst of all, as far as Cliff and I were concerned, he drove a low-slung black hotrod that he himself had labeled—on the door, in gilt script— The Baby Factory . Angry and puzzled, the two of us tried to talk her into disinviting the creep, but all she did was smile sweetly and ask us if we didn’t want to triple-date.
    “We could all go in The Baby Factory,” she said. “Or don’t the Tit Sisters associate with gentiles?”
    Anyway, to shorten this particular story, Kate had Mother cut one of her best dresses down to provocative proportions. And she had her hair done and put on lipstick and went to the affair, where she proceeded to I draw all the attention she could, not only dancing “fast” but letting Waldo dip her to the floor over