This

Jug Chablis, a story

Jug Chablis
a story by Dennis Littrell

It was late summer in 1978 as I walked up the street to clean out my post office box for the last time. Warm smoggy air shimmered in the harsh light of the morning sun. The sunlight bounced off of cars and store front windows and made my eyes water. I had a longing for the sight of deep greenery and the feel of an autumn breeze. I could even go for some snow.

I found a note from a woman who had answered an ad that I had placed in the SoCal Singles Tabloid. My ad went like this: “WRITER, 29, col grad, seeks meaningful relationship.”

The woman had written on behalf of her daughter who was “shy and sensitive,” requesting that I send a recent picture of myself, a photocopy of my diploma, and anything else that might reveal my “sincere and good intentions.” She said her daughter was 23 and had a “statuesque figure.” She was also “very well educated,” having graduated from Stanford University after prepping at Beverly Hills High. The return address was a West L.A. (Brentwood) post office box.

I realized at the time that this woman had money and that there was something wrong with the daughter, otherwise the mother wouldn’t be writing. I wondered what it was.

So I dashed off a reply, going the mother one better by sending a copy of my college transcript, not just my diploma. I wrote that diplomas were easily forged. I included my height and weight and said that I tried to do everything with “sincere and good intentions.” Then I forgot about it. Now came her answer.
I opened the envelope in the parking lot. The mother said they had “enjoyed my presentation,” and would I be kind enough to call this number to arrange a date.

The house was two stories, white with columns—an ersatz colonial I guess it was—situated atop a mild slope away from the street in the expensive Brentwood neighborhood north of San Vincente Drive in West L.A. A crescent driveway sliced the lawn. In it set a white BMW and a polished gray and chrome Buick convertible, vintage early fifties. A quarter of a mile away was the bungalow Marilyn Monroe died in; around the corner on Bundy a Rothschild lived; next door there was a tennis court, a courtyard and a swimming pool; across the street VICIOUS ATTACK DOGS were ON DUTY. Somewhere nearby was the house Christina Crawford described in Mommie Dearest.

I parked my Toyota across the street, two houses down. I felt a little self-conscious in my jeans and corduroy coat. A cool ocean breeze had come up, and water sprinkled the lawn next door, pleasantly tickling my nose. A pair of blue jays lighted to a tree as I walked up the driveway.

The mother I had talked to on the phone answered the door, a glass of white wine atilt in her hand.
“Dana, how nice you look! Come in. Sharon will be ready in a moment.”

She was an attractive woman with blond-gray hair done in a stiff pageboy, thin with long legs, and tanned, lined skin. Her blouse was open to a bony chest and a little cleavage, accentuated by a string of pearls. She wore purple lipstick and purple nail polish. She looked to be in her mid to late forties, perhaps older. She took my hand and squeezed it warmly.

We skirted the sunken living room, white and brown with long lines and touches of red, took a corner of the dining room, done in mahogany and crystal, and landed in the kitchen where she introduced me to her boyfriend, the owner of the cherry Buick. He was a tweedy guy, stocky, red-eyed, happy, perhaps in his early fifties. He grinned at me as though he knew a delicious secret. Under the table near his legs were jugs of supermarket Chablis.

“Sharon will be ready in a minute,” she said again. “Would you like some wine?”

She brought me a glass. “Now—where did you think you would go?”

“You mean to dinner?”

“Yes.”

“Peppone’s. I’ve never been there. I hear it’s an excellent restaurant.”

“You don’t want to go there. You’ll never get waited on. It’s too expensive.”

She knew a little place on Wilshire that was perfect. She called and made a reservation.

Then she quizzed me about where I went to school, what I did for a living—things that I had already told her. When I reminded her I was a writer, she said, “I mean, what do you do for a living?”

I said I wrote for a living.

She said I must be a very good writer to make a living from it.

I said it wasn’t much of a living, but I got by.

“Well, what is it exactly that you write?”

I told her I had written a novel.

“Not one of those trashy sex books I hope?”

The cherry Buick spoke up, “I don’t think so, dear.”

“Of course not,” she said. “I can see that. But there are so many of them being written. Aren’t there?” she said to me.

I said I didn’t know. I didn’t read them.

“What do you read?”

I named some fancy writers, Joan Didion, Doctorow, Nabokov.

She said one of her favorites was James Michener, and did I ever read what’s-his-name? “You know, darling,” she said to her boyfriend, “what’s-his-name?”

He said he didn’t know, smiling steadily. I thought: nothing bothers this guy.

“Yes you do. It’s—you know who I mean—the one with the mustache.”

He grinned, his hand surrounding a glass of beer.

“You know—.” She looked at me, teetering now. “He writes…science fiction.”

“Bradbury?” I suggested.

“No, the other one.”

“Heinlein?”

“Who?—No.”

“She means—I can’t think of his name.”

“Yes that’s who. Oh, what is his name? He has a mustache.”

“What did he write?” I asked.

“Oh shit—excuse my French. I know his name as well as I know my own.

“Anyway Sharon’ll know. She always knows. I’ll see how she’s coming along. Let’s have some more vino. Oh, here she is. It’s your date, darling. We seem to be having a memory failing. Ha, ha. What’s that writer’s name—the one you like so much?”

There was a moment while everyone assessed my reaction to seeing Sharon for the first time.

She had clear white skin, not tanned like her mother’s, light brown hair, blue eyes and a straight figure, tall. But I had trouble looking directly at her because there was one thing wrong with Sharon, and this thing dominated her whole appearance: Her forehead was caved-in about half an inch like she had been hit with the back of a shovel right between the eyes.

“Oh, well, it’ll come to me,” the mother said. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you two have a good time. Let’s go into the living room where you can sit on the couch and be comfortable. I made the reservations for eight so we’d have time to chat.”

Sharon and I sat down rather awkwardly at opposite ends of the couch while the mother sat in a chair opposite us. I tried to smile at Sharon when I caught her coolly evaluating me, but the shock of her caved-in face paralyzed my smile muscles.

“Sharon went to Beverly Hills High School for the last two years before being accepted at Stanford. We rented a residence just for the address. Of course she could have gone to University High or to Pacific Palisades or to private schools, but private schools tend to be so inbred, don’t you think? And where did you go to school?”

I think it was the “inbred” that did it, or the fact that I had already told her several times, but I answered:

“Compton High School.”

“Compton?”

“Yes, there was no busing then.”

Sharon stifled a giggle.

I nodded.

“Oh—Compton. Isn’t that, ah, just north of Long Beach?”

“It’s in Watts, Mother.” Sharon spoke for the first time. I looked at the hem of her flowery skirt, at her black pumps. One ankle lay against the other.

“Oh.”

“That’s a black ghetto, Mother.”

“Oh—ah?”

“He’s pulling your leg, Mother. Don’t you remember he’s from New Jersey? Don’t you recognize his accent?”

I looked sharply at Sharon and tried to concentrate on her nice mouth, not on the severe slant of her forehead. I was pleased with myself for having said what looked like the right thing.

“Oh, oh,” the mother said. “I guess I had better leave you two alone.”

“What did he write, Mother?”

“What—who?”

“The writer whose name you couldn’t remember.”

“Ah—he had a mustache.”

“Mother, if you can’t remember what he wrote how do you expect me to know his name? Dana has a mustache.”

“He writes science fiction—he sometimes writes science fiction.”

“Kurt Vonnegut,” Sharon announced. “Has to be since he’s the only science fiction writer you ever read.”

“Yes, that’s right, of course.”

Sharon and I exchanged authors and titles on our way to the restaurant. It quickly became clear that she knew a lot more about literature than I did. She informed me that I was “a little thin, especially in the nineteenth century which, after all, is the century of the novel.”

When we got to the restaurant the subject shifted to her mother.

“You are the latest result of Mother’s never-ending quest to get me married off. It’s something of a problem. I’m sure you understand. Once a week she has a date for me.”

“How do I measure up?”

“Average. Better looking than average, but not as intelligent. You’re too old, by the way. You asked.”

Sharon had a Seven-Up while we looked at the menus. I had wine.

“I have to give you credit though for that Compton High stuff. Way over Mother’s head. That was astute. Mother, among her other numerous faults, is a racist. You must have noticed.”

“I don’t know about racism, but she was just trying to fix me socially. I don’t like snobbery.”

“Where did you grow up?”

“Not at Beverly Hills High, I can tell you that.”

“I know. Let me guess. Cherry Hill?”
I laughed.

“Your accent is subdued, it must be suburban, or you watched a lot of TV.”

“Yes.”

“Certainly not Newark or Elizabeth—it must be the Jersey shore.”

“Yes,” I said with surprise.

“North or south?”

“Um—middle.”

“Atlantic City?”

“Close, Asbury Park.”

“Ah. And your father was a fisherman and your mother was a fisherman’s friend.” (She was paraphrasing a Simon and Garfunkel lyric.)

“They were friends before they got married. He’s a machinist.”

“You mean he works on an assembly line. Probably in Newark and commutes.”

I laughed again. “You seem to know a lot about New Jersey.”

“I had a pen pal and I’ve studied the demographics—an idle afternoon in the sixth grade. Mother always wanted me to be a brain. I always did what Mother wanted. She said being a brain was my only chance—for obvious reasons.”

She looked up and stared at me defiantly. “How would you like to sit next to Tuesday Weld for two years?”

“I wouldn’t mind it.”

“Sexist.”

“She went to Beverly Hills High?”

“She and numerous others, but not while I was there.”
“So you didn’t sit next to her?”

“You’re slow, Dana. I asked you how you would like to sit next to her. Actually ten years later all the girls in my class were still trying to look like her. I always hated Dobie Gillis.”

“We couldn’t afford a TV,” I said, grinning.

“You had a Muntz, seventeen inch, black and white, and you watched I Spy and reruns of The Honeymooners and you also had a thing for Mary Tyler Moore.”

“Her and some others,” I said, “but you’re too young to have ever watched any Dobie Gillis.”

“You’re wrong. My Dad used to watch it. I was only two, but I remember. I was even a brain at two. My Dad—he’s the one who insisted on propagation—he lives in working class Lakewood, second marriage, two kids, normal, a little wifey, everybody terribly normal and lower-middle. When Mom was having her breakdown I lived with them. So I know all about lower-middle class types.”

“You see me as a lower-middle class type?”

“I didn’t say that—but if you insist…”

“Aren’t you being a little class-conscious here?”

“Class distinctions are fundamental facts of life. But that’s not something you’d want to hear.”

“I don’t mind. Lots of things exist, but we don’t talk about them.” She was making me a little uncomfortable, but I fought it.

“—At least not in mixed company.” She gave me a sly grin. “That’s the ostrich style.”

“What sort of class do you see yourself in?”

“Upper-middle. Almost everybody is really middle. You’re middle. Only a few are truly upper. The lowers are all invisible.”

“To you.”

“To everybody, the government. They’re mostly Chicano now—legally invisible as well.”

“What class is your father?”

“Middle, lower-middle. Mother married beneath herself.”

And she paid the price, I thought, but did not say.

I began to see that Sharon had the ability to create a wall around herself with her talk so that you didn’t see her, certainly you wouldn’t actually look at her, but she was there enormously in her voice, and in her character. She controlled the environment around her with her personality.

“Speaking of Mother,” she said. “What did she pump you about? Did she ask if your intentions were honorable? She always asks that.”

“She missed it with me.”

“What did she say about sex?”

I chewed the lettuce and shrugged. “She was oblique. She asked me if I wrote dirty books—actually she accused me of writing dirty books.”

“That’s nothing. She wanted to have me sterilized. She wanted to send me to Mexico for an operation. It’s one of her threats when I’m bad.”

“Really?”

“Really, Dana Point. By the way, that’s hardly your real name.”

I assured her that it was.

“Oh, sure. Anyway, Mother is desperately afraid I’ll do something sexual. She’s afraid I’ll become pregnant. She says I have normal hormones, and she’s promised me a new and more glorious breakdown if I use them. It’s almost worth it. When we get home she will try to get you drunk. She likes everybody to be as drunk as her. That is, if you’re planning on staying…”

I said I’d love to stay for a drink. At that Sharon smiled faintly and stared straight ahead. In the car as we were pulling out of the restaurant’s lot she asked, “Do you like Mother?”

Before I could think of a suitable reply, she said, “Mother will want you to like her. She wants very desperately for all my…dates to like her.”

“I like her all right.”

Sharon smiled faintly.

Her mother was alone watching television, still drinking white wine when we returned.

“How was dinner, darling? Did you two have a good time? Let me get you something to drink, Dana. How about some brandy? Do you drink brandy?”

Sharon excused herself and disappeared. I said brandy would be fine.

“Kurt Vonnegut—isn’t it funny how I couldn’t remember his name? And Sharon’s right—I so seldom read science fiction, you’d think I’d remember. Just between you and me I think it’s boring. I’ll bet you two just talked yourselves silly on books and more books. Sharon’s so very bright—wouldn’t you agree?”

“I do agree and very well read too.”

She put down her glass and waved a hand. “You wouldn’t believe it, everything, just everything.” She touched my knee. “You should see her room—stacks of books on both sides of the bed. Every night. She reads all the time. She carried an A-minus average at Stanford, and you know what the competition is like there. That is until her senior year when—but I’ll let her relate that. So. You did enjoy yourself, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I did. Sharon’s an interesting girl.”

She scooted closer to me. “Interesting…but.” She rolled her hand in front of her chest as though playing charades. “Did you…feel?…you know, you can be candid with me. What did you feel?”

“I don’t know. I felt comfortable.”

“That’s good. That’s very good.”

“I think Sharon and I understand each other.”

“Yes—?”

“We’ve read a lot of the same books.”

She laughed, spilling the wine on her blouse. She plucked a tissue from a boutique box and patted herself. She opened another button on her blouse and laughed. “It dripped down.”

I averted my eyes.

“Oh, I’m embarrassing you.”

“No…no.”

“Did I get any on you?” She grabbed my wrist.

“No, no.”

“You’re handsome, Dana. You know that. I wonder if you’d be truly…comfortable with her, you understand.”

I said, “Well…”

“Listen—that’s all right. Listen to me now. She’s in her room. She always goes right to her room after a date because she feels she’s going to be rejected.”

I nodded.

“So I usually talk to her dates…you know, in a confidential way…”

“Of course.”

“And if there’s a simpatico with me”—she touched her breast bone—”then I know there can be a simpatico with her. Do you understand me?”

I nodded.

“I don’t want Sharon to be hurt. I think you can understand that.”

“Of course.”

“That is my primary responsibility.”

“Certainly.”

“She’s suffered enough pain in her life…as it is.”

“I understand.”

“Let’s have another drink.”

“I’m fine,” I said.

She got up and poured herself another glass of wine.

“Sharon doesn’t drink. She doesn’t drink because she thinks her mother drinks too much. You see, she blames me.”

“Oh, well…”

“Of course there’s no blame to be assigned. Everything will work out for Sharon if we find the right man. Do you understand that, Dana? That’s why I am working so hard for her. Sharon and I have a lot to offer the right man.”

“I’m sure you do.”

“Not just financially—although my family is very well-to-do. But culturally, and I like to think there are certain advantages in being accepted into a well-to-do home.”

“I’m sure there are.”

“There are business advantages. My family has connections. There’s travel and security. These are the tangibles. I’ll speak candidly, Dana, the dowry of my daughter…” She looked at me, raising a lecturer’s finger. “I don’t believe in long engagements…”

“Oh.”

“I don’t see any point to them. Two people are in love or two people find, as I said, a certain simpatico, a certain arrangement and they know what they want. Of course, if Sharon had grown up as I had, things would be different. Long engagements. A certain picking and choosing. Romance, if you will. But Sharon and I know what she wants. We understand the limitations of choice thrust upon us. Please—here—have some more brandy. Am I embarrassing you or making you uncomfortable with this conversation?”

“It’s fascinating.”

“Don’t be so cynical now, Dana. That’s Sharon’s tendency. We want her to be relaxed, don’t we? See, this is what I’m driving at. Because, you understand, because Sharon has not had the normal dating experiences, she tends to be shy.”

“I don’t think she’s shy,” I said.

“Not exactly shy, but reserved. She’s not naturally affectionate the way we are, Dana. She can’t be. The world has not let her be. The world can be cruel to a young girl who does not fit the stylized ideal of what every young girl should look like. I’m sure you understand. But in Sharon’s case it has gone beyond that. Do you understand the term ‘hysteria’—the clinical term, Dana?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Well, let me explain it this way. You touch me—go ahead touch my arm. That’s right. I respond. It feels warm. In Sharon’s case, if you touch Sharon she freezes up. Not because she doesn’t like you and not because she’s frigid. She’s not. But she experiences a kind of hysteria, a blockage that makes her tense up, go stiff as a board. But Sharon is a warm person. Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you?”

“I think so.”

“Now Sharon has gone into her room and shut the door. She won’t drink anything to relax her. She’s scared to death you’re going to reject her, do you see that?”

“I understand.”

“Well, how do you feel? Do you think…? I know she likes you very much. I know my daughter. I know her reactions. She is very positive about you.”

I opened my mouth to speak, but couldn’t come up with anything to say.

“Well?”

“Why don’t I just go talk to her,” I said.

Sharon’s bedroom was immediately around the hall from the living room. Her door was open and she was sitting cross-legged in the middle of her bed. I realized that she had heard our conversation.

“Hi. Your mother and I were just talking.”

“I heard.”

“She—maybe I should shut the door.”

“Maybe you should.”

Her dress covered her feet but I could see the toes sticking up under it.

“You’re in a full lotus,” I said.

“Always observant, Dana. Now that you know that I’m not only ugly but hysterical as well, how do you feel about me?”

“You’re not ugly.” I sat down in a chair.

“I’m not ugly if I pull my dress up over my head. My legs are actually kind of nice.”

“Most guys think legs are more important than faces.”

“Not you, Dana.”

I flushed.

“So. You do think I’m ugly?”

“No. I wouldn’t say that.”

“How about deformed or monstrous?”

“No, not at all.”

“At your level of candor, Dana, I’d settle for plain.”

I laughed.

“You’re not looking at me,” she said.

I looked. There was a coy expression, a half smile on her face.

“I don’t think you’re hysterical at all,” I said. “And you’re definitely not shy.”

“Ha. You’re so clever, Dana. So clever.”

“I don’t think your mother understands you at all.”

“She doesn’t. How could she? She doesn’t see me any better than you do—I take that back. You’re doing all right.”

“Thanks.”

“Let me tell you about this thing that happened at Stanford that Mother just had to allude to.”

“Tell me.”

“It was pledge week for the frat rats. One of them was waiting outside my Shakespeare class to invite me to a Greek party. Three years and nobody—or at least no boy—had ever invited me to anything. He was football cute with his little butt and boyish grin. Also he was a freshman. Naturally, Dana, I knew this was a sick little joke. He begged me. I could barely shake my head no. ‘Please, I really get into your legs,’ he said. Get into, he said. I was sincere and innocent then. This was before Mother recruited all these…dates for me. So I just broke down crying. I couldn’t even speak. Down the hallway I could see these guys standing around in a group giggling—his fraternity buddies.”

“Screw them.”

“You don’t see, Dana.”

“What?”

“I wanted to go with him. I wanted him to kiss me and get hot over me. I dreamed about it all the time. Every time I’d see him I’d blush. I prayed to God that he was halfway telling the truth. I thought, endlessly analyzing it, I thought, how could he think to say, ‘I really get into your legs,’ unless there was something to it?”

“I think that’s healthy. I think there probably was.”

“Healthy, Dana? Every day, Dana? Every day for nine months I thought about nothing but this guy. I dreamed about him. I day dreamed about him. I wrote his name down. I looked for him from the moment I stepped out of the dorm to the moment I shut the door behind me. Every day, Dana, for nine months.”

“And then?”

“And then nothing. I graduated and came home.”

“That was it?”

“Of course that was it. Don’t you see, he said one little thing to me. One little tiny, insincere, sick little thing and I fell madly in love with him. I really get into your stupid legs. It was a sexual joke too. He probably told the other guys at the house what a laugh he had. Sometimes I would act out a scene in my head where I’d squelch him with, ‘You’ll never get into me. You’re not good enough.

“But finally it went away. Everything goes away eventually.”

“This is normal, Sharon. This happens to everybody.”

“Don’t give me your normal and healthy shit, Dana. You sound like a cheap shrink.”

“You’ve got a chip on your shoulder, you know that?”

“Would you like to smoke?”

“Smoke?”

“Marijuana, dope. Mother didn’t tell you about my little habit, did she?”

“No.”

“You do indulge?”

“I have, on occasion.”

“It’s an outlet—at least that’s what I tell Mother.”

Sharon produced a joint from a cigarette package inside her purse.

“She can smell it, but she never says anything. It scares her. I think she saw Reefer Madness when she was a kid and never got over it.”

The dope was pleasant and I got stoned very quickly. Suddenly I saw Sharon staring at me, her blue eyes accusing me of something. I was suddenly self-conscious and emotionally naked. The thing I felt like telling her as we stared bravely at each other, was that her brain seemed, because of her deformity, very close to her face.

Light reflected through a glass unicorn and caught my eye—and then there again was Sharon’s ironic little smile. But I couldn’t tell her that. Somehow I had to tell her something just the opposite. I had to tell her she was pretty or cute or sexy. I wanted to feel that myself.

For her part she may have been waiting for me to leave. Her legs were now stretched out in front of her. She was talking again, ironically, but a little nervously, something about her mother…

“We run a Scandinavian household,” she said, with some sexual meaning about her mother intended.

I got out of the chair and sat on the edge of the bed.

“Swedish—that’s why you’re allowed in here…”

“You really do have nice legs,” I said, touching a calf.

“Please. We’re not that Swedish.”

I cupped her chin as though to kiss her. She shook her head away.

“Don’t make us both sick.”

I grabbed her chin again and kissed her. She didn’t respond. I told her she had a sensuous mouth and kissed her again. She lay back stiff as a board. I put my hand under her dress. She was frozen. I stopped. She withdrew to the other side of the bed and ran her hands down her legs, straightening her skirt.

“It won’t work,” she said. “Believe me, I know. Thanks for dinner and the old college try.”

There was a long moment when this truth became obvious to me. I was embarrassed. In explanation I told her that when I put the ad in the Tabloid I wasn’t really looking for anyone. I was just doing it to get a story. “So it’s not you.”

“Don’t make me vomit,” she said, turning away.

For a moment I sat seeing the back of her neck, the skin white and young, the wisps of hair, the curve of her shoulder, her bare feet. From this angle she could have been a very pretty girl. I could feel her body and the smell of her perfume. I felt for the light switch on the lamp.

“Don’t you dare,” she said. “Who cares about you anyway?”

I stood up.

She said, her back to me, her voice a harsh whisper: “Thanks for dinner. It was…fun. We’ll do it again sometime.” There was a silence. “Watch out for Mother as you leave.”

“I’m…”

“It’s okay. I understand.” Her voice was softer now, her back still turned.

“I think you’re nice.”

“Sure,” she said.

“I mean it.”

She said nothing.

“Well…I better go.”

“Yes,” she said.

She never turned around.

The mother was sitting on the sofa maybe lost in an alcoholic daze, seemingly far away with thoughts of other things. She wiped some moisture from her eyes, stood up and forced a smile.

“Leaving—so early?”

“Yes, I better go.”

She stumbled toward me and took my hand. She searched my face with wet eyes. Before I could speak she squeezed my fingers tight, pressing a nail into the flesh as if to say, Don’t you dare say anything.

She walked me to the door and squeezed my hand again, her fingers cold from the wine glass.

“Thanks so much.”

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