Rat Bohemia Read Online Free

over his shirt.
    Here is one of the classic Weems family stories. It stars me, age two, sitting in the stroller at the German deli near the house where Louisa bought her teawurst.
    â€œI’m not happy,” I reportedly announced in a booming bawl.
    â€œWhy not? ” Mr. Braunstein asked from behind the counter.
    â€œI’m not happy,” I repeated. “Because my daddy isn’t here.”
    Where was he? Off in a car full of tools to some richer person’s more expensive house in a better neighborhood of Queens or Kew Gardens or Forest Hills or some place in the city or out on the island, the North Shore. He held the nails in his mouth and spit them out into place. He carried a hammer in the sling of his work pants thinking about the good old days in the army during the war. Mr. Handsome G.I. Listening to the crap on the car radio. My dad knew all the songs.
    Now, after a night of smoking I lie in bed, terrified.

    â€œWhat am I doing with a cigarette in my hand?” I ask myself stupidly. “I’ve got to be out of my mind.”
    These days everybody is dying. Not just my mother. There’s no illusion left to let a person feel immune. Invincible is over.

Chapter Four
    I didn’t get my mother’s hair. Sam got it. Mine is blonde and brown, a sign of mixed race. Howie looks even darker, real black Irish, and that’s fine. But this in-between kind of washed-out blah sort of shut me down in the beauty department. I got blue eyes, true. But I also got blue skin, really pink nipples that look paraffin-coated. No pubic hair on the insides of my thighs. Thank God. Whenever you see pubic hair in a movie or magazine the girl has never got it down the insides of her thighs. But, in real life there are miles of it out there. There is wall-to-wall carpeting in every household in America. Some girls get embarrassed and some act like they never noticed. But there is a discrepancy between most thighs and the ideal ones. Mine are kind of ideal.
    I grew up. I got jobs. I moved far away from my destiny. No husband. No night school. No screaming kids in snow-suits and strollers. No trappings. Not trapped.
    My first lover was rough, knowing, leathery. She held my blue body. I was so young I didn’t know what lovemaking was. This woman was about forty, named Maria. She was sizable, weighty, assuredly handsome. I had no expectations. I couldn’t give anything back. As we were doing it, I just couldn’t be free. Lovemaking seemed to revolve around the shifting of weight. It had to do with climbing onto Maria’s body. Her whole skeleton was involved. But when she opened my lips and put her mouth on my clitoris I couldn’t react. It was too specific. The rest of me felt lonely. I was sixteen. I had no extra flesh. Maria masturbated in front of me. I sat between her legs staring like it was a television set.

    After that I just started talking, blabbing on and on. I told her everything I did all day and what I was expecting to do tomorrow. I told her about every song on the radio and which ones I liked, which ones did not deserve to be hits. I told her about the time, when my mother was sick, that some strange accented distant relative I’d never seen before or since, took me to a store in Brooklyn to buy some clothes for the first day of school. I wore size 6X. I didn’t understand why we had to go all the way to Brooklyn until we climbed up these shaky wooden stairs to the shop. The place was run by a group of friends who had all been in the same concentration camp. The clerks had numbers on their arms and screamed at each other like they were home in their kitchens. I was so small, their numbers were eye level and kept swinging past my face.
    The second time Maria picked me up from work and made me keep on all my clothes. She was smart. Passing her hands over my young breasts, there was no direct touching. No contact. That was the first time in my life that I ever felt