The Birth of Ulysees

I saw fucking Carroll on of all places, Carroll street. I call her fucking Carroll because she’s about the most up tight, prissy woman you ever wanted to meet. You get the sense that she never left the library of an all girls Catholic school. I mean UP TIGHT. She gets embarrassed by the slightest mention of bodies, let alone their function. That in itself wouldn’t get her the name, but a couple of years ago she announced at a cocktail party that she and her husband were trying to have a baby and I guess it took a while for them to figure out the plumbing down there, because for a year and a half you’d ask her , “How are you?” and she’d say, “Well John and I are still trying to get pregnant….” and she would start in talking about thermometers and calendars and positions and all in a way that seemed completely divorced from the act of sex… as if it were paper work, or taking out the trash, or something and it was only half way down the street that you’d be seized by the horrendous mental vision of her and john copulating at any and all moments of the day.

It was my wife who first called her Fucking Carroll and I thought she was angry at her and I said, “Why are you mad at Carroll?”

“I’m not. I just find it hysterical that she can’t look at an underwear add without blushing, but she hasn’t the slightest hesitation in announcing her rate of intercourse to the entire register line at Key Food.”

I couldn’t stop laughing. For the rest of the year, whenever there was a sort of awkward silence between us, or dead air over dinner one of us with break the ice by asking, “I wonder where fucking Carroll is fucking right now?”

any way, I saw fucking Carroll on Carroll street and it made me laugh to myself and think of my wife