She smelled of fresh baked sugar cookies and carnations from the corsage I had delivered to her that afternoon. Through the screen door, I could see Fawn’s mother in a zippered house-coat, puffing a cigarette. On the wall behind her glowed one of those neon Coors signs distributed to delis and bars. This one had a backlit photo-panel of a mountain stream, and I could hear the whirr of an electric motor turning a set of hidden plastic drums that made the water look like it was cascading over rocks. She fixed me with a glare: Truscotts don’t marry Fawns!Īngry at her outburst and offended that she didn’t trust me - she didn’t even know me - I pulled free of her grasp and got out of the car. On the porch, Fawn took me around the waist and kissed me on the lips. She interrupted me and said she didn’t care how old I was, or how pretty she was, I wasn’t going to marry that girl! Ma, her name is Fawn, I protested. I said something like, gee, ma, I’m only 15 and she’s just my girlfriend. You are not going to marry that girl! Do you understand me? Standing there on the porch of her shotgun house with hard-packed dirt for a front yard, she looked like one of those swans in a Tennessee Williams play who sweep through shabby rooms, depending on the heat and a hazy elegance to keep them afloat.Īs I opened the car door, my mother reached across the seat and grabbed my wrist, her face drawn and drained of color. Listen to me, she hissed. When we pulled up in front of the shotgun on the river side of 3 rd Street, my girlfriend was waiting for us in a simple, floor-length sheath of pink satin her mother had hand-sewn from a Sears and Roebuck pattern she cut on the kitchen table. Fawn was tall and wearing satin heels that matched her dress, with her hair done up in a French twist I knew she would tower over me, but I didn’t care. At 15 in Kansas, I had a license to drive only until 9 p.m., so my mother had to drive us. We made the turn onto Osage around 14 th Street, and by the time we reached 10th, she braked hopefully at the best house on each block. By the time we hit 4 th Street, she gripped the wheel with white knuckles. I’ll never forget the night I took Fawn to the prom. Every time I smell cookies baking in the oven, I think of my girlfriend back when we I lived in a rented house on the western edge of Leavenworth, Kansas while my father was away in Korea. There were always cookies in the oven, and her mother used to sit in a straight-back chair next to the open kitchen door, chain-smoking and fanning herself, trying in vain to escape the heat from the stove and the humidity that rose from the Missouri River like an invisible fog. My girlfriend’s name was Fawn, and the first time I said it in the presence of my mother, she winced. I took that as a signal to conceal the minor detail that her father was a two-time loser doing eight years for interstate bank fraud in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary, as I did the fact that she lived down on Osage Street near the river in a shotgun house with only one overhead light in each room. We conjure the past in the aromas of an exotic brew of memory and physical sensations.
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