27
AFTER ANOTHER BLOCK, we were out of the business district. We walked another quarter mile or so, past a few houses that held the offices of lawyers and dentists, over a creek and past a canal, and came to a small piece of public land on the left side of the street. I hesitate to call it a park, because it wasn’t at all like McGee Memorial Park, the centerpiece of town, on the other, wealthier side of Bolotomy and Main. McGee was the place where newly married couples would stand stiffly on the grass, with their attendants arrayed around them—gigglers in pastel gowns and rowdies in rented suits—the whole party shuffling to the right or left at the signal of a photographer so that when viewed from the one important point of view, the eye of the camera, they would have behind them, just over the bride’s shoulder, forever in their wedding album, the tumbling waters of McGee Memorial Falls, an artificial waterfall with a drop of nearly six feet. The park we had come to, if park it was, looked nothing like that. It looked like a willowware plate. It had a stream, a tiny pond, a bridge, and willows, and the rest of it was wild. The Glynns tugged me toward it.
“Come on,” they said. “We’ll cut through here.”
I followed where I was led.
The pond in the willowware park had not been prettified; its margins were not planted with grass, clipped, trimmed, restrained. Trees grew down to the edge at spots, and an irregular path led around the pond and crossed it on a footbridge at the far end, where the stream emptied into one of the canals that brought the bay inland. To me, walking through it that night with a Glynn on either arm, it felt like paradise, of course.
On the bridge, we paused, and they gave me for the first time what we later called the lizard kiss. They brought their mouths to mine, on either side, at the corners, and pressed their lips against me lightly. Then their little tongues began tickling and lapping at my lips and slipped into my mouth, flicking at the tip of my tongue, while their little lizard fingers ran over my face, and I slipped again into mists of Glynn.
(I see now, watching from the shadows, that I had my eyes closed, in that misty reverie. I didn’t want to open my eyes, didn’t want to risk discovering that the lizard kiss was just a misperception, one of my many misperceptions, just another of my bouts of wishful thinking, discovering, say, that the girls were just licking the chocolate from my face to make me presentable for their parents.)
“We can’t stay here,” said Margot through the kiss.
“You’re right,” said Martha. “We’ve got to keep moving.”
“Allons!”
Without a word about what had happened, about what they had done to me, they grabbed my hands and tugged me along behind them, dashing from shadow to shadow, cover to cover, and, to keep the mood intact, I held myself in check and resisted the urge to whoop or giggle.
[to be continued]
In Topical Guide 842, Mark Dorset considers Setting: Romantic, Willow-Pattern-Like from this episode.
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🎧 842: After another . . .