Free The End of the World as We Know It by Robert Goolrick

wore gloves and even hats, and everybody looked like they had a lot of money, even if they didn’t have a dime and had just charged it all at J. Ed Deaver or Grossman’s, the two local clothing stores for grownups.
    There were rules, then. My mother, for instance, never drank or served rum. That was a rule. Nobody had even heard of tequila, then.
    My mother was lovely in her bones, as the poem says. She could sew, and so she could make beautiful dresses out of Liberty lawn or linen or, once, gray wool with a jeweled collar. She wore them well. She didn’t have any money, but she was always turned out beautifully. She had a friend whose sister or somebody lived in Ohio and bought her clothes at the Dayton Oval Room, and, every now and then, a box would arrive with this woman’s castoffs, which wouldn’t fit my mother’s friend, so my mother had some clothes with fancy designer labels like Pauline Trigere.
    At the going-away party, all the guests looked like they didn’t have a care in the world. Men stood on the back terrace and told jokes in the waning sunlight and talked about the war and the Virginia Military Institute. Women talked about books or poetryor the garden club. They talked, but they didn’t talk dirty. My mother once told me that she’d never heard a woman say
fuck
until after the men came back from World War II, and even then they never said it in public.
    A lot of them had grown up together. They had had adventures. My mother and her friend Sunshine and my godmother Emily and my other godmother, Fran Pancake, true, would sometimes talk about the week they had spent at Virginia Beach when they were young, sunning themselves and drinking what they called Scotch-type whiskey. They never tired of talking about that trip, and it was always funny. I saw photographs. They were on the beach, wearing very dark glasses, like blind people in bathing suits.
    We heard the stories because we would work the parties. My brother and sister and I would dress up and we would pass things, little cheese straws and cucumber sandwiches with the edges cut off. My mother made this dip for which she was famous. It was made of crabmeat and sherry and Cheez Whiz, and people thought it was delicious, so a lot of them would hover around the dining room table where the chafing dish was. Imagine having a chafing dish.
    Their names are the stuff of legend to me. They were the grownups, and I more than anything wanted to be a grownup. Jack Leary, the first man I ever saw naked, who would always get drunk. His wife, Sunshine. Mack and Mary Monroe. Jack and Kyle. The Tutwilers, Ann and Tut. Tommy and George. Movie stars. Might as well have been movie stars.
    Sunshine was a sardonic woman. She was stuck in a bad marriage to Jack, a terrible drunk, so she took a very ironic view of life,bitter, of course. I used to spend the night at their house a lot—her children were my best friends—and I saw it all. Once they set the chimney on fire. The fire department came and sprayed water down the chimney. It was over way too soon. Jack was the only man who ever spanked me, except for my father. He spanked his son and me for riding our bicycles in the street in front of the Kappa Sig house. My father didn’t really have the heart for it. Jack did. Their house is sold now. So’s the Kappa Sig house, actually.
    Once my mother passed Sunshine at a stoplight, it was just before Christmas, and my mother leaned out and called, “What do you want for Christmas?” And Sunshine answered, without a trace of a smile, “Out.” My mother drove on.
    I came home from a birthday party once, having drunk too much punch, and then I threw up on the floor and Sunshine was out for drinks and all she said was, “Listen to me. If it’s purple, don’t drink it.”
    See. Cocktails. They knew their stuff.
    At parties, at cocktail parties, nothing bad happened. Except sometimes this one woman got