Fair Finley's description of her neighbors Monty and Gomery Overbove, direct from WILFAIR.
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The Overboves looked out the window and spoke low, making a point not to include me. I stepped over to pretend-look at a stack of bumper stickers on the front desk, but turned to admire the cousins because my up-close, slack-jawed-staring chances were so few.
Gomery’s nose
was a classic integral, long and swooped at the end, and his chin an acute
angle, though not sharp. His cheeks were two narrow rectangular planes with a
wave at each cheekbone. A freckle just above and below the middle of his mouth
gave the appearance of a division sign. A handsome equal sign made up his lips,
thick lines, not thin. The loose curls that bunched at his back collar whenever
he leaned on the front desk were a tangle of sixes and eights.
And his rather elegant face? Total
polygon. A polygon that sometimes appeared in my dreams, or in waking places I
wouldn’t expect, like my oval soap dish.
Monty’s appearance was pure movie
theater. He was built like a vintage popcorn box, tapered at the hips and wide
at the shoulders, though not white-and-red-striped with “Popcorn” large across
his chest. Still, he was often salty, prone to buttering-up, and hot. His
profile had a delicate gorgeousness, like he was shot in soft focus and
projected on some screen. He stood as straight as a theater lobby standee made
of heavy-duty cardboard, unlike his cousin, who sometimes bent over the motel’s
front desk in the shape of an "is lesser than" symbol.
Or an “is greater than” symbol,
depending on the angle.
Monty’s open stance forever blinked
on-off-on-off-on, like the clear bulbs over a multiplex marquee. Gomery
sometimes seemed to move through a cloud of chalkboard dust, as though he was
thinking about symbols, and what they symbolized.
They both had brown hair and both
were tall, and there was no comparison to make to a movie theater or physics
lab in their particular hair color or height categories. Rather, their tallness
and hair color were similar to a lot of young men who were beginning their
twenties in the typical way young men have begun their twenties for the last
several millennia.
So. Very well, in other words.
I had checked in on the Montgomery
Overboves #1 and #2 from my bedroom window for the last nineteen years, so I
liked to think of myself as something of a local expert on these matters.
“Expert” sounds extreme, but we had
to be some of the only people to have grown up at our respective workplaces.
I’d had a lot of time to “somehow” the cousins half ridickity, in my own mind.
Somehow, we’ll be friends. Somehow,
they’ll get to know me. Somehow.
And I thought if I ever got to know
the cousins better, beyond talking about hotel and motel business, I might
begin to associate how they look with who they really are, rather than the two
subjects I knew they were studying.
I couldn’t wait for that day, if
that day ever came, though I’d probably always look at the freckles just above
and below the center of Gomery’s mouth in a particular way. And my soap dish
would forever be face-shaped.
*****
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