cog: No.
cog: Oh come on, eh? It’s not like, Jesus how
embarrassing can it be?
cog: Very.
cog (laughing): Is it worse than mine?
cog: Very.
cog: Well you know what you can do? You can either just tell us, or you can let the whole suspense thing just get so way out of hand that one of us'll end up calling your family or something and then...
leaving the conversation suddenly to attend the
trilling phone.
cog: Was it some lewd reference to an over or
underdeveloped body part?
cog (laughing): Hey fuck you.
cog: Hang on
picking up her mug of coffee
cog: okay and tell me it now when I’m taking a drink
eh, so I can do that thing you know where you have to spit out real hard to,
into your drink with surprise and it all goes pfff!
miming the gesture at a safe distance from the joe.
cog (returning from the telephone): She tell you
yet?
cog: No, and I’m not going to either. Hey!
to the fourth, arriving late, and wet.
cog: “Is it raining? Are you kidding me, is it
raining?”
cog: Hey.
Sister: Hey.
cog (setting down her coffee): Apparently ummm,
Jenny had some spectacular nickname at school and she’s doing her point-blank
on revelations. Any ideas?
Sister (smiling): Plenty. Plenty
ideas.
cog: I think it’s bitch.
Laughter all round.
cog: Now whoah, whoah. I know it’s not witty, and
it’s not original and everything but...
with the palms up shrug.
cog (affording the suggestion no little mock
gravitas): Hmmm. Bitch. Hmmm.
cog: What about you, what was your
Sister: My nickname? I didn’t have one for, I didn’t
have a permanent one, but I did get called Lucy for a while.
cog: Lucy? Where, what’s that got
Sister: You know, like in Lucy van Pelt?
There is a degree of embarrassment to their
ignorance.
cog: Is this some T.O. thing? Or
Sister: No, no. Lucy van Pelt. You don’t know
Lucy van Pelt, from “Peanuts”?
and now the universal
cog: Right, right, that Lucy
and
cog: That’s her name? Lucy van Pelt?
and
cog: I didn’t know she had a surname, I just,
I thought Charlie Brown was the only one. You know whenever they talk to him
they always call him Charlie Brown? Like, no-one ever just calls him
Charlie?
Sister: Well, except for Peppermint Patty.
cog: Well, yeah kinda, but she calls him Chuck, and
that, her sidekick, she
Sister: Marcie.
cog: Yeah, Marcie, she calls him Charles.
cog: How come you know alla this shit but you
didn’t know Lucy’s name is van Pelt?
A shrug.
cog: No really, I’m just curious.
cog: Sooo. Lucy?
Sister (nodding): Mm.
cog: How come?
cog: Were you crabby?
cog (puzzled): What?
cog: That’s, the original Lucy, that was her, her
defining characteristic, that she was crabby.
cog: Oh my God. Ladies and gentlemen, we proudly
present the fucking “Peanuts” know-it-all genius here for one day only.
Sister: She’s right though, but it wasn’t, I mean,
that’s not what they told me. I had this kid sister used to suck her
thumb all the time and for a while she used to get called Linus
cog: As in Linus van Pelt?
Sister: Yeees, and then I sort of got the Lucy by
default since I was her big sis.
cog: I never knew you had a sister.
cog: Does she still do that, does she still suck her
thumb? You know what they say about a grown woman who still sucks her thumb?
with accompanying mock embarrassment and laughter.
Later, at first break, and with only two of them
now.
cog: So what does she do, your sister?
Sister: She’s... Well, she uh, she disappeared
when... It was just, she she went out one morning and that was that. I never
saw her again.
cog: Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh God I’m sorry.
Pause.
cog: And you don’t know where she is, or
Sister: No, I don’t... no. No. But I don’t have that
um, you know that sometimes people who’ve, if they’ve if they know someone
that’s gone missing, and they somehow seem to know or they have this feeling
that they’d know if the other person was dead, because they’re so sure they’d
feel something? I don’t have that either way. I haven’t
cog: What age was she? When she
Sister: She was seventeen.
