The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [46]
She came out wearing a reddish-orange wash dress which looked nice on her, because she was dark, curly-haired, with red-fair skin, and the dress set her off just right. And she had on a little powder and lipstick, but it didn’t make her look like a sinful woman or anything of that sort. Studs didn’t usually pay attention to how girls looked, except to notice the shape of their legs, because if they had good legs they were supposed to be good for you-know, and if they didn’t they weren’t; and to notice their boobs, if they were big enough to bounce. He looked at Lucy. She was cute, all right. He told himself that she was cute. He told himself that he liked her, and she was cute. His heart beat faster, and he scarcely knew what he was doing.
They strolled east on Fifty-seventh Street. A Negro nurse-maid came along with a bow-legged baby, and Lucy made a fuss over it; Studs thought it was a pain, but he decided that girls were girls, and if they were like Lucy, they must be higher creatures that a guy just couldn’t understand, no matter how much he tried. He pretended that he was interested in the darling tot, but it gave him a pain. They strolled on, and Studs kept side-glancing at angelic Lucy, straining his mind to think of something to say. He said that it was a nice day, all right. She agreed. He said that it was the kind of a day that made a fellow want to do nothing, and she said yes. She said she liked doing nothing. Studs said that usually he didn’t like doing nothing, but now he felt different from the way he felt on most days. He said that there was too much for a guy to do to want to do just nothing; he told her some of the things a kid could do, instead of doing nothing; he told her now he, Red O’Connell, and the gang had gotten Red’s beebe gun, and had stood on Red’s porch, shooting pigeons, and he had killed the most, three; and how Red had shot Muggsy McCarthy in the pa... the back and Muggsy didn’t know who shot him, and it was funny, and then Red had gotten his old man’s Chalmers, and they had gone riding, and Red had stepped on it, and they had gone down South Park Avenue fifty miles an hour, and they had kept shooting away, trying to break windows, and they had broken five or six of them. She said it was just horrid, and that boys just wanted to make mischief; as Sister Bernadette Marie always said, boys had the germ of destruction in them, and they did perfectly awful, horrid things; but she said it just like a girl, meaning the exact opposite.
They came to the park, where it was cooler. She walked more slowly, and they gazed idly about them. Everything was sun-colored, and people walked around as if they had nothing to do. It was nice out, all right, with the sky all so blue and the clouds all puffed and white, and floating as if they were icebergs in a sea that didn’t have any waves. And he thought it would be fine if he and Lucy could have wings and fly away past the sky; he thought about their flying away, flying right through clouds, and way past the other side of the sky, where there was nothing, and they flew through nothing until they came to some kind of a place with a palace, and servants, and everything they wanted to make them happy, and all Studs had to do to get the place, for himself and Lucy, was to clean up on a couple of big boloneys, that owned it. But he called a stop to these thoughts, and told himself that Studs Lonigan was not the kind of a gee to have goofy thoughts like that. She said that it was awfully nice. Studs said that it was cooler in the park than it was outside. They glanced off at their left, and saw the playground, surrounded by shrubbery and an iron picket fence. From inside they could hear the shouts of playing children. They saw the swings, with the colored shirts and dresses of kids flashing, disappearing, flashing above the shrubbery, a momentary rhythm in the sunlight. It all sounded and seemed as if it belonged to the park. Lucy said that she thought it would be nicer to walk