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Show 7 back of our 1929 Pontiac, only three years old and so practically new, two kids moving as stiffly as if their clothes would break, while two grown women who should have known better drove them the six small blocks to the Fox Egyptian Theatre, the kids sitting side by side like two dolls propped up back there, as solemn as Sunday. At the theatre the little boy did not want to get out of the car; his mother convinced him he should. And so while the little girl waited to one side, he paid a dime each for two tickets. Boisterous boys in overalls gaped in awe, girls tittered, the boy made a dash for the theatre and the covering dark. Not one backward look at the two hideously grinning women in the car, not a look back at the girl who followed him, trotting to keep up. From the lobby they marched on into the auditorium as stiffly as toy soldiers, only to be struck blind. In that dark it was minutes before they could see and they groped their way down toward the front, found a row, found seats. The girl nudged the boy and said she couldn't sit where she was, she was on somebody. So they moved over one and, catatonic, waited for the screen to turn silver. Yet they were waiting for the show to end before it had hardly begun. He never remembered what moving picture it was, and then they walked back outside into the violent light. Blind again in the late sunshine, blinking and devastated, he saw in a haze the black Pontiac and the two women who awaited them with simple glee, as if they had wound up the children and wonder of wonders they worked. What the kids knew, both of them, was that never again would they have anything to do with each other. So, that was the end of that, except for a small mess with Rudy Furstenberger, who told me in ominous tones that Noreen was his girl and that he was going to beat the hell out of me after school. I knew it didn't matter that he never spoke to her; if he said she was his girl, she must be his girl. He was even smaller than I was, with a sweet face and an innocently turned up |