I'll Love You When You're More Like Me Read Online Free

funeral home, don’t ask my father, ask my mother. I think my mother’s the world’s foremost authority on the dos and don’ts of funeral-home life. Do keep all the shades in the front of the house at the exact same level. Don’t sit around in any front rooms watching television with the drapes open at night. Do keep “the coach” (the polite word for the hearse) in the garage with the garage doors down, at all times. Don’t just throw out old “floral tributes” in the trash, but stuff them into a Hefty Lawn and Leaf Bag so they are not recognizable as old flowers. On and on and on.
    Every time I slip out of my trousers on the beach, I hear my mother’s voice in my mind crying, “ Wal -ly! Oh, no !”
    That hot August afternoon after I left Harriet’s, I left my pants and shirt and sneaks in a ball on the sand, and walked down to the water’s edge. The tide was coming in, and Lunch Montgomery, this old blind-in-one-eye, black-and-white hound dog, was running around in the surf barking. That meant Monty Montgomery had to be around somewhere, a prospect I didn’t welcome.
    A few afternoons a week I worked for Monty in the store he and his wife owned, called Current Events. Monty sold newspapers and magazines, greeting cards, games and office supplies. He also sold T-shirts, standard ones already printed up, or the kind you could have anything you wanted printed on them. I was the printer, the poor slob who fitted the letters on the shirt and then stream pressed them into it. For this I got $2.60 an hour. The fair thing would have been for Monty and his wife to pay me about triple that, since I acted as their go-between. I don’t think they even talked when I wasn’t around. When I was there, Monty would say things to me like “Ask her why she orders twenty copies of Town & Country every month when we only sell three.” Martha, his wife, would come back with something like “Ask him if he’s heard that slave labor is against the law, or hasn’t that rumor spread to the beach where he spends all his time?”
    Monty would say, “Ask her if she imagines my idea of the perfect life is working twelve hours a day in some hick store selling Sugar Daddies to runny-nosed kids?”
    Martha would say, “Ask him when he’s ever worked twelve hours a day anywhere.”
    â€œAsk her,” Monty would say, “if she thinks I got an education at Yale to stand here marking half the TV Guides New England and half Manhattan.”
    â€œAsk him,” Martha would respond, “if he could have done better with his striking Yale education why he didn’t.”
    They were your real all-American happily married couple, the kind you saw eating out in restaurants across the table from each other without saying anything but “Pass the salt,” or “Where’s the butter?” Silently We Eat Our Sizzling Sirloins, Hating Each Other’s Guts Department.
    Lunch was really Martha’s mutt, but he followed Monty whenever Monty took off for the beach, which was a lot in the summer. Monty would swim out and Lunch would stand in the surf barking, as though he was a scolding stand-in for Martha.
    Lunch’s blind eye was a light blue color; the other eye was black.
    â€œDid anyone ever tell you you were hilarious looking?” I asked him.
    The dog ignored me. Sure enough, there was Monty out in the ocean, riding the waves on a surfboard.
    The only other person around was this blond girl, sitting on a towel. Everyone else was in the area where the lifeguards were, about a half mile down the beach.
    I was standing there wondering what the chances were of going in the water without having to strike up a conversation with Monty.
    Monty’s conversations begin something like this: “Hi there, Wither-Away, seen any good corpses lately?”
    A variation: “Hi there, Withering Heights, I’m dying to see