The principal seemed to take a shining to Dimmy Gene but in truth he just wanted an excuse to hang around Marilyn more. She had that effect on men, made them do bad and irresponsible things. Like letting Dimmy use his expensive computer for his supposed homework. “I know you like souped up things,” he said to the dim witted man-boy after his sex history lecture at the main auditorium below the Pear Room. People need to know how their sex is chosen and make wise decisions about it, he offered to school district superintendent Jonathan Petri Dish one day in early May. He thinks back to his own childhood. Not even a week old and they decided he would be a boy. All the aunts and uncles hadn’t weighed in yet. Cousins usually got a vote too. But, no, his old man, his old pops couldn’t wait. So while his mother Doris was busy reading her fashion and furniture magazines one day, engrossed in the moment, his father decided for all of them, each and every one. He was still king of his domain, he rationalized, not knowing there were other pieces on the chessboard of life that made it all work in unified peace and harmony. It took Doris several weeks but she finally realized. She’d been focusing on the navel and feeding the blasted thing day and night before then, navels being common to us all, whatever sex. The milk had to be *just* the right temperature else the navel rejected and they’d be up all night again. But one day, while he gurgled out more white on his blue bib, she understood. There was a hair on his upper lip, a single hair but one is enough to know. 3 weeks later they had to start shaving him as well. Oh for the old days, when sex was determined in the womb, way before birth. Now there were so many choices — well, two. But two very important options I think we all would agree.
Where was I… oh yes, Dimmy and the principal’s souped up computer, just like he had a souped up car now and drove all over his new town with Marilyn normally by his side. She’s normally with Gene they all agreed, which in time — but not too much time — was shortened to Normal Gene and finally Norma. Because they had gotten married and she’d acquired her first diamond ring on her left hand, which, since it was pretty small in comparison to the rest on her right, she wore on her pinkie, and joked all the time about having Dimmy wrapped around her little finger, usually to a gusto of laughs from a crowd of admirers. People, well, men, flocked to her everywhere. She grew tired of it. “Dimmy,” she requested one day in late May. “Drive me out to the country. Go fast enough where my hair will be billowing in the wind at a 1000 miles an hour. Go fast enough that it will *never* return to its normal, lackluster appearance. I want to be billowy… *forever*.” And she had her wish.
(to be continued?)
Sunklands 