Angels and Electrons: A Sub-Suburb Tale
Page 6
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His insides sparked at her. The magnificence of her beauty charged him to the depths of his newly-minted heart. He felt and treasured that first strong feeling of love; he tested it then thought about her again. He felt his limbs flushed to life like they had only been wooden before. The Angel of Unknowing that always guarded Blaise as he lumbered his way through life pulled back her wings and let him see something brightly and clearly, and he wanted her, and the angel let him see farther than usual toward a mark on the horizon that might be his future if he could reach it, but in doing so it cried a little.
Blaise and Maria were good for each other. He made her think that there might actually something worthwhile in the flat Oklahoma landscape to which Castro had exiled her family. And her presence made Blaise want to be better than he had wanted to be before. She made him want to learn about computers because they were something practical and could support a respectable life.
And so she and Blaise went out evenings while during the day he went to school and waited tables and appeared in the ads for Buffington’s, and I (Rosalind) kind of watched out for him and I think I was jealous of Maria, but Blaise was madly in love and so I tried to be happy for him.
From Blaise’s Journal
Rosalind and I appeared together in ads for “J. Buffingtons,” and those ads appeared in the social pages of talk-of-the-town magazines like Oklahoma Happenin' (later retitled Oklahoma Fancy and later still, Oklahoma: Faces and Voices - A Monthly Panoply of Culture). Their ads appeared alongside numerous photos of tuxedoed Okie royalty with their many chins and piles of hair, or else alongside photos of the heirs to these people, all gathered ostensibly to admire art or promote the cure to some disease or to rally to oppose some social blight (a favorite being the homelessness in the shadow of highly-valued real estate).
And I did try going out with Rosalind once but she smacked my hand when I tried to shove it under her blouse and so we both decided we had better just be friends. You’d think she would have remembered that.
Along with waiting tables my career with Buffington’s sustained me for a while but being formerly athletic I still had an athlete's appetite but not the workout regimen, and in time I got kind of complacent and fat (I should say “hefty” since you could still see where the muscles were underneath the heft and that they could be reawakened with a little effort), but anyway I eventually had a sordid falling out with the Buffington clan and found myself ousted from their ads and demoted to appearing as a member of the "Flannel Family" in ads for the local home-grown shabby retailer, Tippins. Rosalind followed me there – she fell out with the Buffington’s when she defended me - and so together we played husband and wife in such photogenic features as the Flannel Family Christmas, Flannel Family at the Beach, Flannel Family enjoying a wholesale lot of nearly unblemished mattresses - the Flannel Family wholesomely endorsed all Tippins had to offer.
But all this is to paint a picture too sordid too soon.
From Rosalind’s Journal
Blaise is painting too sordid a picture too soon, because at the beginning of the summer he had been optimistic and bright inside and in love - the world had been pleasant and his future had looked grand because Maria had made him finally want to come out of himself, to be a better man than he had thought he could be. Despair fell aside like an old cocoon – at least for a while. Blaise and Maria enrolled for the new school year together and took as many classes in common as they could and in between kisses she said her major was accounting and she was a whiz at numbers and would help him if he tried to learn to coding, because computers were the future and programming was kind of like math. He readily accepted and they were inseparable even though she drew the line and insisted she was saving herself because there is part of a woman you can make a mistake about only once. He accepted that though it led to many a restless night after their dates, tossing and turning in miserable hot sheets, or driving around aimlessly just to cool off, or else bothering Jude to come over for a beer and throw rocks into the WPA fake lake.