Chapter 4: Fish

Unlike Froggy and me, Trish McGovern moved out on her own as soon as she came back home from college. She lives, with three other girls, in a top floor apartment on the Country Club Plaza. Ritzy.

It’s the Robert Louise Stevenson building and handy to a variety of bars and eateries.

I overheard Auntie Pru talking with Trish’s mother, yclept Megan, “At least yours is an adult.”

I later puzzled it out. Froggy and I continued to live at home. Odd definition of maturity — defenestrating oneself from the nest, but there you go.

It didn’t take long for word to calculate around BB that Ms. Sloane had a rather largish brain. I asked her, with a suavity that becomes me well, “Do you eat a lot of fish?”

“Yes, I love seafood. Why?”

“Just curious.”

Now I may well start ordering oysters and poached salmon and the like. Crabcakes. There’s always room for a few more cells, cranium-wise.

My immediate dilemma, the horns of which upon which I was perched, was Trish McGovern. Not that Trish had antlers, nothing like that. In fact, she was a shapely little missy, quite lovely. A real dish. Known her all my life.

In the theoretical, talking about other people, I’m all in favor of marriage. In the abstraction. I’ve even attended a few weddings — friends, classmates, the like. It’s not like marriage was catching, a communicative disease or something.

But for a personal command performance ... well, maybe someday. Like in twenty or thirty years. Why milk the cow when it’s in your pasture? If I’ve captured the sentiment accuration-wise.

Froggy’s family and mine lived on the same street our whole lives. Trish’s too. Brewster, Attenborough, McGovern. BAM! I discovered the anachronism myself. BAM!

The three of us attended nursery school, the Two School, preschool, elementary school ... well, you get the drift. His parents are from Europe — England, Britain, somewhere out there. No, they’re Scotch, that’s it.

Now even for a top rated friend, Froggy has ... limitations. Lack of couth for example. Now do I expect everyone to be as smooth as Trish and me? Of course not; it would be a lonely world vis a vis Birdie Brewster.

One tends to overlook the shortcomings of one’s friends. And I’m a damned fine overseer. For instance, Froggy, that blister, considers himself quite the jokester. And I’m frequently the butt.

Back before Trish McGovern put the quietus on dating other girls, I sometimes invited a new acquaintance to accompany me for drinks or food or clubbing, like that. Froggy, heathen, would send her that damnable streetcar video.

He edited it down to about 30 or 40 seconds of innocent, giggly fun. Mostly innocent. Well, until Froggy — and this was near 13th and Main, about halfway to Union Station — called out, “Bet you can’t get it up!”

Ha! A Brewster, particularly one named Bertram Owen Osgood Brewster, does not ignore the slap of glove across cheek. We had just passed Anton’s when I was proudly at full staff. Froggy muttered, somewhat churlishly I thought, “He is good looking. And ... that ... too.”

Not to toot my own coronet, appearance-wise, but I inherited my looks, I assume, from my parents. Maybe a lot of people do. From their parents I mean.

So, with her own copy of the Streetcar Incident, Miss Trish McGovern, has taken to calling me, sometimes at work — poor form — to discuss my cinematic career. “You’re hot, Brewster.”

Now a boyo doesn’t mind hearing that someone of the fainter sex doesn’t consider him to be a blot on the landscape, but things had been getting a little too ... solemn. Talk — one-sided — of, say, favorite baby names. Trish’s mother, Megan, looking at me appraisingly.

Of course Megan has known Froggy and me since ... well, probably birth. She’s good friends with the Sisters; I’m sure they traded child-raising intel back and forth. But when you have a Megan McGovern looking at you speculatively ... well, it can be...

I needed guidance. “Momster, I’ve got a problem...”

“See Ms. Sloane.”