Watch Your Mouth Read Online Free

inappropriately close to Hemingway Way. The neighbors all had each other’s keys. The Glasses’ house had stickers in the win- dows threatening an advanced burglar alarm system, but the stickers were all that were installed. Just about anybody could have walked into that house.
    On summer days like this one, everyone washed their cars
    while the radio played songs the fathers liked back in college. The rinsed foam swirled into the one drain that always clogged come October when the maples dropped Canadian propaganda over everything. Cyn’s car is still dripping from her father’s nos- taglic scrub as the lights go up on a table tableau, framed per- fectly by the garden window, up center. I am reasonably certain that even this far upstage all the singers can be heard. As the opera begins proper, Cyn Glass ( soprano ) is setting the table and singing of simpler times.
    “We’ve had these dishes as long as I can remember,” she said to me ( tenor ), swerving as I snuck up behind her to kiss her on the neck. I was holding silverware like a dozen roses, pointy ends up. She’d caught my reflection in the blue-rimmed plates. “Look how the overhead light reflects, behind your face. It’s like you have a halo.”
    “Your angel,” I cooed.
    “My fallen angel,” she said. “Look.” A big crack ran down the entire plate like a smirk, and it threatened to laugh. “I’d better get another one.”
    “I’m sure it’ll hold,” Mimi Glass ( soprano ) said pointedly, com- ing in with a pitcher of ice water. Mrs. Glass’s first-act costume should be casual clothes that don’t make her look fat, as she kept explaining to me whenever I saw her at home. She also had on an apron, heavily spaghetti-stained.
    “It doesn’t look like it,” Cyn insisted, leaning against me af- fectionately and to shock her mother. Beneath her blue jeans lay her ass, warm and ready like something that’d been basking. Just three days ago we’d made love standing up for the first time to celebrate the end of finals. “Look, I can practically bend it, Mom.”
    “I’m sure it’ll hold,” Mrs. Glass said again. Then, peeking back into the kitchen, she hissed, “I can’t believe you’re talking this way, what with your father and everything. Of course it’ll hold. Show a little consideration.” She brought down the pitcher like a gavel and left the room, grumpy, with trombones.
    “What was that?” I asked, while Cyn’s eyes widened. She shook her head and traced the crack like she was teasing some- thing. In my mouth there was something like an aftertaste, like maybe I should have stayed in Locust, wrote my paper, worked part-time for the Admissions office showing high-school stu- dents around the campus, but to be without Cyn’s taste all sum- mer long—“Did your father make these plates?”
    “If he had,” she said, “they’d definitely break.” Another Act One trick; just before a revelation, the crowd comes in and the party starts with a full-out choral number. If the crowd would come in only a moment later all that tragedy could be avoided. Though in this case not really. Steven ( tenor ), Cyn’s little sci- entific genius brother, brought in a platter of string beans, damp taut strands tossed with almonds. Mrs. Glass, now apronless but still grimacing slightly at Cyn, brought in a fleshy pink fish in a dark shroud of sauce, and Dr. Ben Glass ( baritone ) brought in his mother, Gramma ( contralto ).
    We dug in. Mrs. Glass had driven across town in an inexpli- cable Sahara-ready Jeep the family owned, early in the morning while the filth of the rivers is still submerged in grey light and Cyn and I, back in Locust, indulged in soapy caresses, sharing a shower in the deserted dorm. “It’ll be so good to be home,” she moaned, while her mother took her tan sunglasses off her eyes and perched them on top of her head, the better to see the whole fish gaping on ice, laid out morgue-like on thick tables
    for all the wives