Chapter 8
You’ve Got to Ask for What You Want
I TOLD MYSELF that if I couldn’t get what I wanted from Patti, I would have to learn to be content with what she was willing to give me, which was friendship. She didn’t consider me a candidate for boyfriend, but she did consider me a friend, and as her friend I often got to walk her home after school. We walked, and we talked, but we didn’t touch. On nice days, we sometimes took a very long way home, strolling all the way downtown, where we stopped at the malt shop at the corner of Bolotomy and Main.
This shop was called Malt’s; I think that whoever originally opened it intended to call it Malts, so that people wouldn’t mistake it for the shop around the corner called Shoe Repair, but the signmaker’s rascally sidekick, that old demon apostrophe, crept in, and as a result many a Babbingtonian believed that the shop was originally owned by the eponymous Malt, who had concocted the drink that bore his name, a personage of whom all Babbington ought to be mighty proud. Malt’s was an institution of long standing, but its time had passed. Old people went there, and parents brought children there, but no one from Babbington High went there. That’s why Patti and I began frequenting it. We went to Malt’s because we wouldn’t be seen by our classmates. Neither of us said that, but I think it was true. I wanted her to myself, and I think that she wanted me to herself, as a friend. That’s all, just a friend. Damn it.
I suppose it was because Patti and I were friends and because Malt’s offered the security of relative solitude that I brought up the question of my bastardy on one of our afternoons there. I didn’t do it to try to seduce her. Honest.
“This is really inflated, our coming here,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said.
“My mother used to come here.”
“Did she?”
“Uh-huh. Everybody used to come here, all the high-school kids. That’s what she says.” I looked around. The shop was still, hushed, and almost empty except for us and the leering soda jerk. “You know,” I said, “back then, bringing a girl to Malt’s was a date.”
“It was?”
“Under the right circumstances, at the right time of day.”
“Your mother told you that?”
“Mm,” I said, distractedly. I was wondering how often my mother had come to Malt’s and who had brought her there.
“Is something bothering you?” Patti asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Something.”
“What?”
“Something — personal.”
She touched my arm and said, “Tell me.”
[to be continued]
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