Whatever Lola Wants by George Szanto Read Free Book Online Page A

with envy. Might even drive Libby to drink. Bobbie laughed. No, never; Libby couldn’t handle half a beer.
    Over her time at Mount Holyoke, the most critical hour of her life was hearing Robert Frost read “Birches” and “Nothing Gold Can Stay” and “Fire and Ice,” pieces of magic she spoke in silence as he read. But she was born too late, the last basic truths had already been written early this century.
    She was expelled for anti-anticommunist rabble-rousing and in the fall enrolled at the University of New Hampshire, graduating a year late with a degree in economics and history. She came home, taught a year at Median High, and lived with her parents, her crazy father locked in his room, her mother’s money taking care of them both. Her older sister, lucky Annette, married the writer who made enough so his wife could do exactly what she wanted: paint. Annette was getting to be real famous. And he took care of the boy.
    Bobbie, writing poems nobody cared about, spent time down in Boston in coffee houses with her friend Mark, listening to men in dirty jeans and sometimes women too pretty for words read poems, the men, likely as not, returned vets who’d seen the black torments of war but didn’t truly know how to write about agony: that had all been dealt with by the poets of the Great War.
    Back in Median she met Dennis the dentist. He too was married so he was safe. She liked him enough, delighted in driving him out of his mind with what she knew about sex or invented. Except a year and a month of Dennis was enough, despite his giving her whatever she wanted if money could buy it; good bourbon and her first taste of cannabis. Not clothing or jewelry. Dennis was schizzy, too often not all there. Bobbie wondered what happened when he wasn’t all there while drilling into cuspids and extracting molars. To his torment she took off for New York to live with Mark, but not usually in his bed because he was too much her friend. She met his city friends, they remembering the war in Korea, Pusan and Inchon, and Heartbreak Ridge; others still guilty with the relief of not having been there, still others that they’d missed out on the last great adventure of their times.
    Dennis came to New York to take Bobbie home but Mark hid her. Dennis went back to Median. A few months later Bobbie got a letter from Dennis: “In the prison of my days I am my own warden,” which turned out to be a copy of his suicide note.
    She lay in bed with Zed, smoking shit. He tried to arouse her with palm, mouth, fingers, but her mind was held by those other Vomit poems she said she hadn’t written. They were done and they were right but her stomach ached when the words came out. Writing them was a wrenching blast of fire, and now what was she supposed to do, publish them? Useless words and impossible to read, who would print such pain-filled, wonderful crap? Lawrence, ten minutes after she’d finished reading, said sure he’d bring them out in his chapbook series, especially the “Vomit Cycle” if the rest were as tough as what he’d heard, he liked that, that was good, good. But Lawrence said that to everybody. But if he really printed them? Did she dare allow her name on the little book? The Vomit Cycle and Other Poems by Roberta Feyerlicht. Not even her sister, Annette, would approve. And Annette’s husband—? Bobbie snickered.
    Zed thought he’d finally got her.
    Except she turned her back to him and laughed outright. Maybe Annette would love the poetry. And Edward? They were artists, in their special way. But so normal. Craftsmen. Zed whispered a small perverse not-tried-in-a-while suggestion into her ear and she figured, Why not.
    After a waste year in New York—not completely wasted, she wrote her poetry—one day she’d packed up and driven across the country with Mark and his friend Louis in a 1947 Oldsmobile they’d bought together and