Pat Boone Fan Club by Sue William Silverman Read Free Book Online Page A

copper pennies wedged in the leather slots of my loafers. If only he’ll glance up in the stands, notice the lipstick, the Lincoln-head pennies.
    I nervously scrape the polish from my nails before the match is over. Luminescent chips fleck my skirt.
    Christopher drives me home. His good-night kiss brushes my lips, feathery, quick. After settling in the den of my split-level ranch house, I watch professional wrestling on our black-and-white Zenith. My grandmother hunches beside me. The Crusher. Black Jack Mulligan. Mad Dog Vachon. Killer Kowalski. Nothing like Christopher’s orderly high school wrestling. Nothing like the gentle—“good”—way he hugs me, either.
    “No Jews are such meshuganahs, ” she says. In this, at least, my grandmother and I agree as we watch gentile wrestlers slam off the ropes or plummet onto the mat.
    Anna Karenina as Teenage Role Model
    Saturdays, I ride the bus to the bookstore in Ridgewood to buy mounds of novels. The wooden floor smells raw, like a forest, in the damp morning air. I climb the rungs of the ladder on runners that glide past the floor-to-ceiling shelves. The words in all the books seem muffled, tightly packed together. Which ones most want to be released, read? In which ones will I discover the meaning of teenage life?
    I ease a spine from the shelf and ruffle the pages. Words seem to spill everywhere. I must gather them. Believe every word I read. I leaf through Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary . Surely these women will teach me of love and all its triangles. Anna/Alexei/Vronsky. Emma/Charles/Rodolphe.
    I also slide from the shelves Crime and Punishment , War and Peace , The Brothers Karamazov . Russian novels! I consider slipping them back in their empty niches. After all, no Russian novels are assigned in high school. None of my friends read them. Maybe I should only read American books instructing me how to be like Lynn?
    Oh, but the passion of thousands of pages of operatic Russian intrigue! Grand gestures! The cashier puts the books in a sack. I keep my reading habits a secret.
    I place my dollar bills on the counter and notice the Great Seal on the backs. Is the eye atop the pyramid God’s? Is it my grandmother’s? Has she been watching me, commanding my hand along the bookshelves to Russian titles? Both?
    Failure as an Art Form
    Don’t know much about history . . . But I do know that I love you . . .
    Answering SAT questions, I grip my no. 2 yellow pencil, guessing wildly.
    Choose the word or set of words that, when inserted in the sentence, best fits the meaning of the sentence as a whole.
    The scientist ascribed the ____ of the park’s remaining trees to the ____ of the same termite species that had damaged homes throughout the city.
    A) decimation . . prevalence
    B) survival . . presence
    C) growth . . mutation
    D) reduction . . disappearance
    E) study . . hatching
    All the empty circles float across the page: a constellation of possibility. I could choose answer A. Except I love the idea of a“scientist ascribing the growth of the park’s remaining trees to the mutation of the same termite species that had damaged homes throughout the city.”
    Mutation. My tongue clicks each consonant with satisfaction.
    Can I mutate from Russian to American? From Jew to Christian? Am I
    A) Anna Karenina?
    B) Sandra Dee?
    C) Both A & B?
    D) None of the above?
    If Lynn didn’t exist, I myself could fill in the blank of her absence.
    Rapunzel as Teenage Role Model
    I weave a chain of chewing-gum wrappers, folding the paper lengthwise, bending it in half, in half again. I slide the end of the next wrapper sideways inside the bend, linking them. I save my allowance for Juicy Fruit, Big Red, Adam’s Clove, Beech-Nut, Black Jack, Doublemint, Clark’s Teaberry, Beeman’s, Fruit Stripe, Wrigley’s Spearmint. Discarded foil, silver as coins, cascades to my feet.
    I coil the gum-wrapper chain around the three-bulb lamp in my bedroom. I wind it over browned gardenia corsages,