Free Beautiful Kate by Newton Thornburg Page B

and over, with her skirt riding up to her garter belt. Cliff and I might as well have been dating each other for all the attention we paid the Mandelbaum girls, so mesmerized were we by our sister’s performance. During slow numbers, she kept steering Waldo toward us like a bumper car at a carnival.
    “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said, after one collision. “I guess it’s all the booze we had earlier—right, Waldo? A whole jug of it. Tell me, twin, are you interested in jugs? ”
    By then I was already spinning my startled date away from her, slamming into other couples in my haste to be free. But minutes later I would see her going through the same routine with Cliff and his Mandelbaum, saying something that turned my fair-skinned brother’s face crimson as he too wheeled his date to safer ground. Once she and Waldo came upon the four of us between dances, as we stood under the gym backboard daintily drinking punch.
    “My, what a good-looking foursome y’all make,” she bubbled, suddenly a southern belle. “Why don’t we all do something together afterwards? Waldo and I are thinking of the Bide-a-Wee Motel. Y’all want to join us there?”
    By then her date had the look of a smiling ox, even when I told Kate to shut up and get lost.
    “Well, I declare!” she said, smiling brightly. “If that isn’t the meanest thing you ever said to me—you adolescent, perverted little shit.”
    She gave us a smart bow of the head and walked off, leading Waldo as if by a nose-ring.
    Joan Mandelbaum shook her head. “My, your sister’s different,” she said.
    “Yeah, isn’t she?” A slow dance had begun and I took her in my strong right arm again, holding her just close enough so I could feel her glorious jugs rubbing against my chest, even through my suit jacket. I was still surprised that they weren’t at all like kneecaps.
    “It’s an act,” I reassured her. “Kate didn’t mean that about the motel. Because she’s a virgin. In fact, she’s just about as virgin as you can get.”
    Joan put her face against mine and whispered silkily. “You shouldn’t talk like that. It’s embarrassing.”
    “Well, we’re not little kids anymore,” I intoned—just as Kate and Waldo blindsided us again.
    “Careful,” Kate advised my partner. “You might get terminal acne.”
    And so it went. Cliff and I and the Tit Sisters drove to the Eskimo for sundaes after the dance. And later, try as I might, all I got were a few kisses, a slapped hand, and the expected colossal stone-ache. Kate was already home and in bed by the time we came in, so we could only assume that she’d had no trouble handling the redoubtable Waldo, which he confirmed the following Monday at school, black eye and all, complaining to Cliff that our sister ought to be committed.
    “Look at this eye,” he whined. “And all I tried for was a kiss. What a jerk that girl is. What a pricktease.”
    Normally Cliff would have taken a poke at anybody who called Kate such a name. But I guess he felt that Waldo had some justice on his side, so he did nothing. And the Sadie Hawkins Day dance faded into memory.
    I realize that I have treated it here like some typical anecdote in a casual comic memoir. And I really don’t know why I’ve done this, since I do recognize, as surely as you must, the fanatic character of Kate’s possessiveness. I know now that her problem wasn’t any simple case of jealousy, for she had to know even then that the Tit Sisters were not in her long-legged All-American league. No, I’m afraid that, once I had mentioned my quest for “bare jug,” she would have gone on the same sort of rampage no matter whom Cliff or I invited to the dance.
    In any case, she did not come down off her high horse for at least two weeks after the dance. And I think she did then only because Waldo’s black eye had become something of a family joke. Jason kept calling her his little Rocky (for Marciano, not Balboa) and I guess she took sufficient pride in