Little Casino

Absolutely beautiful

DOLORES, DARK, BLACK-EYED, SWEET ITALIAN girl, with a straight-A average at Fontbonne Hall, who looks absolutely beautiful in her school uniform, asks him if he’d like to come over to the Ryans’ apartment to keep her company while she’s baby-sitting. Her breasts are too small — just as well — for her to wear a brassiere, but lovely beneath her snowy, spotless blouse.

He sees that the Ryans have a piano in the living room, a small upright that, he will soon discover, is utterly out of tune. They drink Cokes, they eat peanut-butter sandwiches, and then Dolores, he’s certain, looks directly into his face and tells him that she’s wearing black lace underwear. He thinks that he probably hasn’t heard this, so he grins and says — what savoir faire! — “What?” She says, he is certain that she says, “I know you won’t believe me, you’re such a dope, but I’m wearing, really, black lace underwear.” Just as he’s about to do something crazed and reckless, he has no idea what, perhaps pull up her skirt or kiss her white anklets, she smiles, drapes, for some arcane reason, a towel over his head, and sits down at the piano. She plays, mechanically, the tinny piano making the music sinister, “All or Nothing at All.” One of the straps of her jumper slips off her shoulder and he buries his face in the towel. He cannot look at her and he cannot think of her and he cannot say her name. Even the towel is making him crazy.

“Just as well,” in the context of this faux-vignette, or, perhaps more accurately, Catholic joke, means “just as well,” and only “just as well.”

Dolores became a registered nurse.

“Haunted heart,” a malady with which this “dope” was afflicted, has an almost comic or melodramatic ring to it, especially when paired with “registered nurse.” Can’t be helped.

Many of the boys and young men in the neighborhood thought that Dolores’s nose was too big, and made crude and vulgar comments about her. These comments issued from those who had driven themselves senseless with pink-and-white fantasies concerning blondes like Doris Day, June Allyson, and Virginia Mayo, women who, it might fairly be argued, were virtually noseless. Dolores’s nose was the nose of Clodia and Lesbia, of Sulpicia and Cynthia. Of Helen.

“If hair is mussed on her forehead, if she goes in a gleam of Cos, in a slither of dyed stuff, there is a volume in the matter.”

And if her skin smells of Castile soap, he “shall spin long yarns out of nothing,” and sing them to the dreadful noise of an out-of-tune piano.