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Getty submitted to the Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of American University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Chair: Kermitit Moyer Q k Richard McCann Dean of the Collegeor School Date 2001 American University Washington, DC 20016 W W lHW BWVERSTY LM Uft Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI Number 1403363 ___ ® UMI UMI Microform 1403363 Copyright 2001 by Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. © COPYRIGHT by Matthew J. Getty 2001 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. YOU WILL BEHAVE AND OTHER STORIES BY Matthew J. Getty ABSTRACT At the heart of You Will Behave And Other Stories lies the conflict between reality and concepts of masculinity. Throughout, male characters struggle to reconcile who they are with who the world expects them to be as they encounter love, violence, and obsession. In the title story a mother berates her son for assaulting a Barbie doll as she tells him the story of his life. In “The Short Hairs” a would-be father-in-law traps a young man between the needs of women and the demands of manhood. Later, an alcoholic’s unorthodox recovery plan exposes the links between love and addiction in “The Girl with the Scarf.” Yet, always the collection offers hope. Especially in the redemptive “Oncoming Traffic,” and the farcical “Epilogue for a Game of Kickball,” You Will Behave And Other Stories asserts that, though we wander lost among myths and cruel realities, we are all connected. u Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT.............................................................................................................................. ii Stories 1. YOU WILL BEHAVE............................................................................................. 1 2. THE SHORT HAIRS............................................................................................. 20 3. ONCOMING TRAFFIC....................................................................................... 26 4. THE GIRL WITH THE SC A RF...........................................................................44 5. FOOTPRINT BY FOOTPRINT...........................................................................74 6. WHAT THEY MADE ........................................................................................... 95 7. EPILOGUE FOR A GAME OF KICKBALL ................................................... 115 8. LOVE LIKE WHISKEY..................................................................................... 136 9. IN THE W A Y .......................................................................................................152 ill Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. YOU WILL BEHAVE You will behave. You will sit right there and listen until I am finished with you. and then you will march up those steps and apologize to your sister for sodomizing her Sparkle Beach Barbie with Darth Moll’s light-saber. Then you will give that poor doll a proper burial — preferably out back, in the lot behind the garden where you buried ail those little army men who laid down their lives on your Iwo Jima play-set. And please see that she receives the same honors as those soldiers — the casket will have to be a shoe­ box instead of a matchbox, but you can keep the twenty-one incher salute, the kind words from the Furbie. She deserves at least that much. Then you will take Darth Moll — without his light-saber, o f course — over to Barbie’s Beach House, where he wall just have to face Barbie’s friends and see first-hand the damage he has done, see with his own eyes that when you rape and murder a lively young girl with a future as bright as her glitter-streaked hair, you create a deep dark hole in the lives of those who’ve loved this girl. And yes, Darth will have to face Ken. Ken, of course, will be strong, stoic, and accepting in his chiseled, all-American way. He will even shake Darth’s hand before he leaves, and for a second, as plastic touches plastic and their little eyes meet, Ken and Darth will feel a tiny pocket of inexplicable homoerotic lust swell inside them. But you will behave. You will walk the dark Sith Lord out the front door of that beach house, take him back to your room, and he and Ken will forget their little moment. 1 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 2 When you wake, march into that bathroom, do the ugly things you have to do, then get your butt down here and eat your breakfast without saying a word to your sister. If Stacey’s got anything to say to you, she will say it and you will listen. She may tell you things you don’t want to hear. She may tell you that your nails are dirty, that your pudgy face is quickly outgrowing its cuteness, and that violent and aggressive forms of sexual play have no place in our enlightened society. After all, every girl knows in her heart of hearts that Ken is really gay. In the same subtle unknowing way they know that there is already something shameful about certain holes in their own undeveloped bodies, they know that Ken can do nothing to Barbie but love her. He can hold her, he can listen, he can drive her around in a lovely little pink convertible, humming opera arias while the wind does nothing to his sculpted hair, but he cannot “do” her because he has no light- saber. Take down his pants; he is smooth. And this is why Barbie and Ken are an appropriate form of sexual play — because they are smooth, because they are clean. You will understand this some day, but for now you will keep quiet and listen to your sister. When she is through with you, you will get your books and go to school for nine more years, and you will behave. You will sit quietly, maybe even fold your hands, tilt your head slightly in a practiced look of astonishment you learned from studying pictures of angels on popular calendars. You will listen attentively to men with off-kilter toupees and sour talcy odors. You will listen attentively to young women in pastel skirt-suits with matching pumps. You will listen attentively to white-haired men with tweed jackets and craggy red faces. You will listen attentively to white-haired women who wear hairnets and squeak mysteriously from the hips when they walk past your desk. And you will pretend that nothing they are telling you has anything to do with sex — that not a single Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. movement they make is connected to anything in the least bit bodily. In fact, you will forget from time to time that these voices you hear even have bodies. Do you understand me? You will behave; you will not picture these men and women — without their toupees, pumps, hairnets, and underwear — piled into a glistening, oil-soaked orgy. You will not draw pictures of them engaging in oral sex with each other or with barnyard animals, and you most certainly will not snicker over these pictures with your pimple-faced friends. Yes, by this time, you will all have pimples. Feel free to spend seven to nine hours a week locked in the bathroom caking your face with Noxzema, Clearasil, and some lemon water and baking soda paste you pick up from the Internet, but it will do nothing. And in this way — as you listen, as you wash, and as you behave — you will pass your high school years in a dull and proper normalcy with the exception of one major indiscretion. In the second half of your senior year, despite all my efforts, despite the patient teachings of several priests, and despite a $164 collection of soft-core pornography magazines stashed under your bed, you will fall in love with a cheerleading uniform. It will be blue and gold - the school colors — with white trim on the sweater sleeves and the edge of that pleated crotch-length skirt. There will also be a pair of tights — gold.