By popular demand.... (ok, one person requested) The story from the most recent podcast:
The All-Seeing Girl
I grew up in a decaying East Coast Victorian mansion with a forever crabgrass yard rolling to a lonely farmer's field. My town was poor, we were poorer, and my sisters and I spent sweaty summer afternoons sitting on the grass of the town common with the neighbor kids, just dreaming and talking and thinking up no good things to do.
One of those neighbor kids was a scrawny girl with perpetual Daisy Dukes and a candy-striped button down shirt tied up under her flat chest. Susan lived next door with her divorced mother and an older sister in high school who had a real boyfriend and everything. Most of our shenanigans involved spying on Susan's sister as she sunbathed in a string bikini in the backyard, her boyfriend running one slow hand up and down her thin back.
Susan taught us all the facts of life, at least back then I thought they were the facts of life.
You can't get pregnant if you jump up and down after he pulls out. If you get bad zits having sex will clear them up.
We nodded our heads as Susan held court in that tall commons grass. She tossed her carefully feathered hair and leaned back on two small hands. My mom didn't let me wear short shorts, so I would fold my sensible cutoffs over and over my thighs, hike them to new heights, as they squeezed my legs into sad girl summer sausages. Sometimes Father Ayers peeked his head out the door of Saint Francis, waved us over, and handed us paper lunch bags filled with saltines or nutter butter cookies. Every Saturday afternoon I sat in confession, Father Ayers in the stuffed easy chair that screamed "new church rules, come and chat, let's be friends." He wore casual clothes, no priest's garment, and his triple chins wavered as he rocked back and forth. Father, I have sinned, I began, but I never ended with a description of our afternoon sex talks with Susan.
Some days we swam in the tiny town pool. Susan never swam. She lay on a rotting velvet towel in her bikini and read Tiger Beat magazine, a popped can of Tab at her side. I dove and played Marco Polo with my sisters in our sensible one-piece parent-approved suits, a novel like Charlotte's Web next to my towel. I took liquid sustenance at the free water fountain.
One day my middle sister snuck up behind me and pulled my legs until I fell into the water with a belly flop. I jumped to my feet, hauled my arm back, let it sweep across the surface of the pool, splashed her really good in the eye. Susan looked up from Tiger Beat and barked from behind a photo of The New Kids on the Block, "Did you know this water has chlorine in it? I have a friend who got splashed in a pool and the chlorine went into her eyes and she went blind!"
A week later I playing near the street with a neighborhood girl named Mary. She pulled my pigtails - hard! - and I threw a handful of dirt at her in retaliation. I swear to God Susan popped up out of no where and screamed, "I saw that! did you know I had a friend who got dirt thrown in her eye and she went blind? Do you want that to happen? I bet you'd be real sad if it did!"
A month later, my sisters and I attended a neighborhood block party. We danced to Devo and Steely Dan, ate burnt hotdogs and melting smores, and we blew soap bubbles into the stale summer air. I laughed as I blew a stream of bubbles in my friend John's face and as if on cue Susan appeared from behind a tree and says "Don't blow those bubbles in his face! The soap could get in his eyes and he could go blind! It happened to my friend!"
I couldn't take it any longer. I stuck my hands on my hips and yelled at Susan. "How many BLIND friends do you have? Can ANY of your friends see? Who ARE these supposed 'friends' - Helen Keller, Stevie Wonder and Mary Ingalls?!" She gave me a blank look and then stomped off to tell her mother I made her cry.
We didn't play much with Susan after that. Her mom found a new husband and her sister ran off with her back rubbing beau, and one they they up and moved to Rhode Island. I didn't think about Susan until a couple of weeks ago, when my boys blew bubbles across my backyard, and I remember those hot August days with nothin' to do and no money to do it with. I wonder what happened to Susan, I thought?
I did what anyone does these days. Google. And there she was! Still in Rhode Island, married with three kids, a beefy husband, and a full-on professional career..... as an optometrist!
8:28:13 AM 
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