The Next Velvet Underground

Here's another piece of the memoir! It's not quite as sweet as the wedding pictures, but hey, it can't all be wine and roses. Hope you're having a great weekend.

I met the man who raped me through one of my high school girlfriends. She dated him for a few months, hot with jealousy over his Nordic blonde sister named after victory. I have never heard the name, before or since. My friend said, I know there’s something totally weird in that house. “Like what?” I asked, a flat-chested bubble-butt Nancy Drew. My mother always told me, You’d be so pretty if . . . My friend had no ifs. She knew all the beauty tricks even as she didn't need them but her family was even poorer than mine, and she’d wear the same pretty wool sweater dress all year long even on the hottest of days. “Like he’s fucking his sister,” she said. The only person I knew who did that was Leland, the grandson of my babysitter! “I knew a dude who got his sister pregnant,” I said to my friend’s scant interest. She did not give a rat’s ass about that piece of Faulkner gone wrong.

“Nobody with their money gets pregnant out of wedlock,” she said. But she was wrong. The sister got pregnant while I was dating the rapist, another teenage desperation story, all that goth Nico-like promise gone. She wouldn’t be doing any of the things I could imagine with the next Velvet Underground. I looked up the meaning of her unusual name years later to find it mean victory, all right, but the kind that is empty because you used up all your resources to get it.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn."
Gore Vidal

Cocktail Hour
Drinking television suggestion: Weeds

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Sunday!