Chapter 42 chapter eight

Your Excellency, I have done everything I can to deal with boys.Oh, I even used to read the so-called "Youth Column" in the Beardsley Star, wondering how to behave! Advice to fathers.Don't scare your daughter's friends away.Maybe you need to understand that boys find her attractive now, which is kind of uncomfortable.In your eyes, she is still a little girl.In the eyes of boys, she is charming and funny, cute and happy.They like her.Today, you're sitting in the manager's office deciding on big deals, but yesterday, you were just middle-school Jem holding Jane's textbooks.remember?Now it's your daughter's turn, don't you want her to be happy in the admiration and company of the boys she likes?Don't you want them to have a wholesome and fun time together?

Having fun while being wholesome?God! Why not treat these young lads as guests in your house?Why not talk to them?Get them talking, make them laugh, make them feel at ease? Welcome, young man, to this brothel. If she's not following the rules, don't blow it up in front of her fellow villains.Let her hear your displeasure with her without anyone else present.Don't make the boys think she's an old devil's daughter. First the old devil draws up a list of "absolutely forbidden" things, and then a list of "reluctantly allowed" things.Absolutely forbidden are dating in one, two, or three couples—the next step, of course, is mass orgies.She might go to a candy store with her girlfriend, and chat and laugh there with some young men who happened to meet, while I waited in the car at a reasonable distance; I also promised that if the Butler man A group of socially acceptable boys at middle school invited her group to their annual dance (accompanied of course by a number of older women) and I would consider whether a fourteen-year-old girl could wear In her first "evening dress" (a gown that makes a teenage girl with thin arms look like a flamingo).Besides, I promised her a party at our house, in which she would invite her prettier girlfriends and better-bred boys whom she had met at Butler's ball.But I made it pretty clear that as long as my discipline lasts, she will never, never be allowed to go to the movies with a young guy who is new to sex, kiss her neck in a car, go to a mixed party at a classmate's house , or indulging in boy-girl phone conversations where I can’t hear, even if “it’s just about his relationship with a friend of mine.”

Lo was furious at all of this and what I called a vile rascal and worse—if I hadn't soon discovered, to my great relief, that it wasn't any specific pleasure I was depriving her of that that really pissed her off. Is total right, I would probably have been offended.You know, I infringe on the regular schedule, the common pastimes, the "things everyone does", the routines of the young, because nothing is as conservative as a child, especially a girl, even if she's from October Orchard The most auburn, most myth-generating nymphet in the mist. Don't get me wrong.I can't be absolutely sure that she didn't manage to casually make inappropriate contact with strange young lads throughout the winter; of course, no matter how closely I controlled her free time, there were still frequent unaccounted-for gaps in time; in retrospect , she always fills it up with overly detailed explanations; of course, my jagged claws of envy are always caught in the delicate fabric of nymphet dishonesty; Accuracy of feeling - there's no real reason to be alarmed.I think so, not because I've never found any perceptible piercing young voices among the silent men flickering in and out of the background, but because there's something "surprisingly obvious" to me (this was a catchphrase of my Aunt Sybil), all the different types of middle school boys—from sweaty goofs who get excited "on a handshake" to acne-prone, arrogant Pompous rapists—all of them bore my sophisticated little lover. "All this talk about boys makes me sick," she scrawled on the inside cover of a textbook; along with a quip from Mona (who can be seen any minute now): "Rig How?" (Rig also appears.)

I happened to see those young masters staying with her whose names I didn't know.Like Red Sweater, who walked her home one day, the day the first snow fell; I saw them talking by our porch from the living room window.She was wearing her first cotton coat with a fur collar, and she had my favorite hairstyle: bangs in the front, curly hair on the sides, natural curls in the back, and a hat. A brown cap; her damp dark moccasins and white socks were more scruffy than usual.When she was talking or listening to the other party, she held the book tightly to her chest as usual, and her feet kept moving: she stepped on the big foot of her right foot on the instep of her left foot, and moved backwards. , cross your feet, sway slightly, move a few steps on the ground like a sketch, and then do the whole set of movements again.Windbreaker was talking to her in front of a restaurant one Sunday afternoon while his mother and sister tried to lure me away to chat; lover.She has developed more than one habit, such as nodding her head a little, which is a polite way for teenagers to say that they can't stand up laughing, so (when she hears me call out), she still pretends to laugh , took a few steps back, then turned around, and walked towards me with a smile that gradually disappeared.On the other hand, I very much like—perhaps because it always reminds me of her memorable first confession—her habit of saying "Ah!" Or a long "no" in a deep, almost menacing bass when the blow of fate does strike.And what I like best—since we're talking about action and youth—is watching her spin up and down Thayer Street on her beautiful new bike: straight up on the pedals, very Pedaling vigorously, then sitting feebly on the saddle, and the bike slowed; then she would stop by our letter box, still straddling the bike, and put her I found a magazine in my pocket, flipped through it hastily, put it back, put my tongue against the side of my upper lip, and rode off with one foot, speeding through the sun and the dim shade of trees again.

On the whole, considering my spoiled little slave, and the way she had coquettishly played with her bracelets the previous winter in California, I think she is more attuned to her surroundings than I am. It turned out to be better.Although I will never be able to adjust to the constant anxiety-ridden life of erring, great, weak-hearted people, I feel that I am trying to emulate it.After bouts of admiration and disappointment in Lolita's cold bedroom, I would always lie on the narrow couch reviewing the image of myself that crept rather than grandly before the eyes of my flushed soul, looking back on what had just happened. end of day.I watched Dr. Humbert, dark and imposing, Celtic, presumably Higher Church, and probably extreme Higher Church Dr. Humbert, sending his daughter to school.I watched him smile slowly, and greet good Mrs. Holligan with an amiable lift of his bushy black eyebrows like those on a poster; she smelled of the plague (and, I know, She'll go get the master's gin).Mr. West, a retired sheriff or a religious pamphlet writer—who cares? —I saw with him a neighbor (what was his surname) who must have been French or Swiss—sitting at his typewriter in his study with the large glass windows that let him see, He appears rather thin in profile, with an almost Hitlerian lock of hair on his pale forehead.On weekends, Professor Heng might be spotted in a well-tailored coat and brown gloves, wandering with his daughter to the Walden Hotel (where the china bunnies with purple ribbons and beautifully decorated chocolate cartons are very famously, you can sit down and wait for a “table for two” still dirty with crumbs from a previous customer).On a normal day, around one o'clock in the afternoon, he might be seen dignifiedly greeting the sharp-eyed Easter, backing the car out of the garage, skirting the damned evergreens, and heading onto the slick road. the way.In the sweltering heat of the Beardsley College library, he raised his icy gaze from his books to the clock on the wall, surrounded by fat young women staring blankly in the ocean of human knowledge.He walked the campus with the Reverend Rigg, the chaplain of the college (who also taught the Bible at Beardsley High). "I was told that her mother was a famous actress who died in a plane crash. Oh? Maybe I was mistaken. Is that so? I get it. How miserable." (Let her mother be idealized eh?) I'll be seen slowly pushing my trolley through the maze of supermarkets after Professor W, also a slow-moving, mild-mannered widower with goat-like eyes You will see me shoveling snow in only my shirt, with a large black and white scarf around my neck; you will see that I am not greedy and eager (even wiped my feet on the grass mat calmly) and follow me It's a high school girl's daughter walking into the house; you'll see me taking Lori to the dentist - nice nurse looking at her with a big smile - lots of old magazines - ne montrez pas vos zhambes; you will see Edgar H. Humbert taking Lori to dinner in town, eating steaks in the Continental fashion with a knife and fork; you will see me going to a concert in double capacity: two The impassive, serene French sat side by side, Mr. Hen Hen's little musical girl at her father's right, Professor W. (the father of a wholesome evening in Providence) My little musical boy sat to the left of Mr. G.G; I would be seen opening the garage into a light that engulfed the car and then disappeared; I would be seen in Lolly's bedroom in bright pajamas on Saturday mornings, unseen, sternly scrutinizing the winter-whitened little girl in the bathroom; Don't be too late, the churchgoers said to Lori, who was walking toward the covered courtyard; I'll be seen letting in one of Lori's sharp-eyed schoolmates: "It's the first time I've ever seen a man in Smoking shirt, Uncle—saw it in the movies, of course."