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Show Anting Alone Page 274 or a hankie or something. The busdriver, for example, had a fully-equipped first aid station stashed by state law under his seat. But there you have the United States of America. Unless cash changes hands nobody gets anything, people bleed to death. (Polycarpana was getting into her angry, strident political mood today, her brave mood, too; for she was on her way to our nation's capital via an economical, obscure and, if it please debunked Saint Christopher, safe Kansan airline.) All she had was her handkerchief and some Kotex. Pressed against the hole in the middle of his face, the Kotex would work fine. It was sterile, medicated with something, probably, and obviously would be quite absorbent. So she gave a Kotex to him. She had to show him how to unwrap it. She hoped he would interpret this as a gesture of solicitude and love. Even through whatever daze he was in, Dr. Edwine seemed able to accept the offering in the spirit intended. "It's not the sex I want, it's the intimacy," he said as though earnestly as he fixed the pad to his head by means of one of his basketball shoelaces. He tried to make a joke of something so personal, to put Polycarpana at her ease. "It looks like one of those frozen burritos before you cook it." Immediately it turned as red as a clown's false nose. Formal training in etiquette, such as the Servant Sisters of Saint Willibrord of Perpetual Adoration received in crash-courses whenever Father Wagstaff Bopp came to the refectory to dine with them, would have taught Dr. Edwine that food jokes are necessarily even more tasteless than sex or even excrement jokes. But, somehow, he made his frozen burrito comment |