“You ‘bout finished with your 400 laps?”, Dice Man chuckles.
PP giggles. She’s a sucker for gross exaggeration.
“This one here,” DM nods toward PP as he chats up Beefy Swimmer Guy whom he’s sharing a lane with, “she’s something else. I try to keep up with her, but no way. She just zooms ahead. I think I can catch her, but her arms just pull her ahead of me no matter how hard I try.”
BSG grunts, unimpressed, takes off down the middle of the lane in a show-offy butterfly.
“You remind me of Esther Williams,” DM continues.
“Really?” PP grins. “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me in years.”
He laughs. “Yeah, my mother, she was a sucker for Esther Williams. Those were quite a production, those movies….”
“…and she smiled the whole time!” PP interrupts, thinking how this is where his comparison with Esther would stop.
DM nods, serious. “Why I remember when we were kids, I had a twin brother, (PP wonders what the story is here with the “had”—Did the twin brother die? Run away? Become estranged?)”we’d go to the picture show. 'Show' that’s what we called 'em back then. And for twenty-five cents, oh now I’m dating myself,” DM laughs, shaking his head, “we'd go and spend all afternoon at the theater watching The Lone Ranger, or Roy Rogers or the likes of them…”
His voice trails off. Wistful. PP thinks that the brother did die. Some tragedy when they were young. Maybe a car accident. Or a lethal lingering terminal illness where all the family and friends shook their heads in disbelief. “He’s so young. Too young to die… if only the bone marrow had been a match.....”
Do you think PP watches too many Soap Operas?
“You really are a nice person to share the lane with,” he says suddenly, interrupting PP’s Tragic Twin Brother Soap. She nods, remembering how he’d said the same thing last week after the Dice Counting Laps Discussion. So she says the same thing back that she’d said last week. Likes the parallel universe of it: “You’re a nice person to share the lane with also.”
He nods, leans over, stares down at the dice, gives it a turn, then takes off down the lane, his left side flailing a bit more than his right as he breathes.
Sighing, PP climbs out of the pool, chilled a bit from standing around bullshitting. She glances down at the dice, notes that it’s on number 6.
Bending down, she turns it.... back to 1.
Hah! Not really! But she wonders if he woulda remembered that it’d been on 6?
She’ll never know. About the dice and the laps.
The Twin Brother?
She’s gonna hafta work on getting more about That Story!
2 comments:
Yes, too many soaps, and soap in the pool is a bad thing.
But no, you're just a hilarious story-teller. I overheard half that conversation, and even with it being word for word accurate, you make it a much funnier story here.
I also liked Dice-man's stories about his boat and taking 14 years to sail round the world. No wonder he can't keep up with you in the pool. But then neither can I.
Let's hear more about the Dice-man...
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