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Snack bar cook, you grill hamburgers at Echo Lake Swim Club. Mrs. Staub has
a plain piece of lettuce with cottage cheese glopped on top. A slice of
pineapple, if one is available. She wears a white visor and comes to the snack
bar in her bathing suit, bends to rub her foot free of sand or bark bits. You
peek down the top of her suit, feel you must keep your distance from the
counter. She pays with red nails, her purse snapping primly when she puts
the change inside. "Thanks," she says. She walks to the picnic table and sits,
eats with knife and fork balanced carefully in her hands. She is brown as pine
ship tar, her lipstick pale pink. You see her legs sometimes under the table,
watch as they live what seems a life separate from the one her hands live. At
the end of the summer, at the pool dance, you kiss her daughter, Sally, who is
small and timid, a ghost of Mrs. Staub. You put your hand on Sally's breast
fast, faster than you should, and she lets you. She knows she is a ghost, a
daughter ghost, and finally you dry hump on a pool pad in the towel room at the
back of the men's locker room. Through movement, she becomes her new
self, is no longer a ghost, and you kiss a lot, kiss like crazy, Sally becoming a
new Mrs. Staub.
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©1999
Joseph Monninger and Nerve.com
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