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Show 25 subject adoration of men's eyes. Paradise or Hell? The distinction fades and all I know is that the water is deep there, that the shark lurks there, and that those girls draw me in over my head and make me like it to struggle to swim. Of course Escalante had no ocean, no lake, no pool and not even much rain so that I grew up from the dust. With dust in my eyes I didn't even notice when that woman moved in next door, though it must have been that winter some time, fall or winter. Now I would remember the season all right, the day and probably the hour, but then I was blind with myself. I thought the eighth-grade operetta far more important. Having foreseen modest fame in it, something like Caruso's, I began rehearsals a clear confident tenor, only to have a change grip my throat so that soon I was singing both tenor and a gargling baritone, without the slightest advance warning of which would issue forth. I remember Miss Puttie at the piano: every time we approached the part where I opened my mouth to sing she would brace herself as if I were a time bomb coming up to my last tick. But compared to me she was calm. I'd begun to hop around inside myself like a barefoot boy on a hot sidewalk and no wonder it was spring before I even noticed her. Between my window and hers was our driveway and then a wide stretch of lawn and I'm sure it was partly that distance which made her careless. Not at night, her shade was drawn then, but in the mornings she dressed at her window after the shade was up. Yet months went by before I even noticed, months of mornings forever lost, and still I sometimes agonize for my blind un-noticing thirteen-year-old eyes. I don't remember seeing her at all until one fine blood-rousing spring day when my father and I turned into our driveway in our '29 Pontiac and saw her out back of her house hanging laundry. She wore a cotton housedress and the sun beyond her shone through it and |