LIPPING HER PUCKERED LIPS over the tip of her paper straw, Patti sucked up and swallowed a mouthful of vanilla milkshake and then in a voice thick and soft, milky and sweet, asked, “Well, Peter, did you learn anything new last night?”
    I had been expecting this question since the day when Patti had suggested another experiment.  I had known that we would meet at the malt shop the day after that experiment, when we were playing ourselves again, to consider what we had discovered while playing my mother and Mr. Beaker.  I had, since the conclusion of the experiment, often practiced what I wanted to say to her, and I felt fairly certain that if I delivered my answer in the way that I had rehearsed it I could strike just the right note—not just the right note, but the right chord, composed of notes that might before I had so cannily combined them have seemed discordant, a chord in which humor harmonized with high purpose, friendship with lust, the offhanded assessment of a dispassionate investigator with the all-but-inexpressible awe of an impressionable adolescent, a chord like one of those complex—and, for me, unsingable—chords that ended so many of the doo-wop songs.
    “I found,” I said, drawing my words out to emphasize the depth of thought underlying them, “that—you—have—beautiful—breasts.”
    She exhaled a bit of a laugh down the straw and it bubbled richly through her milkshake.
    “I always supposed that you did have beautiful breasts,” I went on, “but I was very—ah—pleased—to have my supposition confirmed—by direct observation—and—ah—digital palpation.”
    She pulled her straw from her glass and blew an inch of milkshake into my face.
    “Nice shot,” I said.
    “Was this whole paternity experiment just a way to get your hands on me?” she asked.
    “No!” I said quickly, perhaps too quickly.
    She rolled her eyes.
    “It wasn’t,” I asserted.  “Honest.”
    She ran her tongue over her lips.
    “Patti,” I said, in a tone of deepest sincerity, “I really do have strong doubts about my paternity, and strong suspicions about the part that Dudley Beaker might have played in my conception.  I meant what I said about conducting an experiment, and I’m grateful to you for being willing to assist me with it.”  I paused; then, with a shrug, I added, “I never said I wouldn’t enjoy it.”
    She threatened me with the loaded straw again, and I raised my hands to suggest surrender, or at least a truce.
    “I seem to recall,” she said, “that you told me we would be investigating certain events that may or may not have occurred in the past, between your mother and Dudley Beaker, not that we would be considering your opinion of my breasts or any other part of my gorgeous little body.”
    “You’re right,” I said.  “Forgive me for straying from the purpose of our undertaking.”
    We snickered at each other.
    “I learned something, too,” she said.
    “Yes?” I said, hoping for a compliment.
    “Assuming that you’re doing a good job of portraying Dudley—”  She paused and cocked her head.
    “I think I am,” I said.
    “Then I think that Ella probably did have a crush on him.”
    “Really?”
    “Yeah.  He’s kind of cute—and I’m talking about him, you know, not you—”
    I hung my head.
    “You’re kind of cute, too,” she said, “but I’m talking about Dudley in the pictures you showed me.  He’s good-looking, and he’s suave—for a small-town guy, anyway—but I think that—if I’m really being honest with myself about this—the thing that I find most attractive about him when I’m with him might be the fact that he’s grown-up, especially the particular way that he’s grown-up.”
    I hadn’t expected this.
    “He’s still young,” she explained, “and he’s got those jazz records and that crazy sports jacket in the back of the closet, but basically he’s a grown-up guy, a man, and it’s flattering to think that a man is interested in me—as if I were a woman, not just a girl.”  She poked her straw at the last of her milkshake.  “That’s it,” she said.  “He makes me feel like a woman: he makes me feel grown-up, and sophisticated.”
    This was interesting.  He had always made me feel like a little boy, and a bumpkin.
    “To tell you the honest truth,” she said, “I—Ella, you know, when I’m being Ella—I like that feeling.”
    “Mm.”
    “I like the feeling a lot.  I like the feeling more than I like him.”
    “Ah.”
    “But liking the feeling is enough, I think.  Enough to make me—me, Ella—want to go back and see him again.  And I might go further than taking my blouse and bra off next time, too.  I might.  Because I want to be grown-up, and do what grownups do.”
    She drank the last bit of the milkshake, and then, almost reluctantly, she said, “I learned something about myself, too.  I think it was something I already knew, but I wasn’t fully aware of it, if that makes sense.  I’ll tell it to you.  It might come in handy to you someday.  You can use it to get girls.  Some girls, anyway.”
    “What is it?”
    “Girls like to hear guys say, ‘I love you’—”
    “I think I knew that.”
    “Patience, jackass.”
    “Sorry.”
    “We like to hear, ‘I love you,’ but it doesn’t take long before we begin to understand that the words usually mean something else.”
    “Oh.”
    “But there is something that a girl—some girls—this girl—might rather hear, or would find more beguiling—”
    “Beguiling.”
    Yeah.  Beguiling.  I would have said seductive, but seductive sounds as if sex is the only motive, and it might not be.  Love could be.  Even companionship.”
    “I’m lost.”
    “Sorry.  I’m kind of wandering among my thoughts.  What I want to say is, I discovered that I could become a hopelessly giddy gasbag for a man who said, ‘I want to take you away from all this.’  Do you know what I mean at all?  I mean somebody who could—who could and would—take me away from my house and my family and the dark hallway that runs down the middle of that house, with the torn carpet the color of peas, and the smell in the morning when my little brother wets his bed, and the heavy way my mother falls against the other side of the wall beside my bed on nights when my father decides that a good smack will help her sleep, and the way she wheezes in the mornings when she lights her cigarette, and the way she asks me if I want one, with a smile that’s an invitation to join her in regretting everything I just listed for you.  I’m not saying that Ella felt the same things I do—I just mean that she might have felt the way I do—but for a different set of reasons.  I could be very attracted to a man who would take me away from all that, or who seemed as if he would, even if he just seemed as if he might possibly take me away from all that, and I could imagine that Dudley might.”
    I am embarrassed to record my response to what she said, and I confess that I thought of including here something different from what I said, but I found my attempts at improvement more embarrassing than the original.  At least the original was honest in a way, the way that our thoughtless responses to people are, and mine was as thoughtless—may I say guileless—as a reflex.
    Here it is.
    “My dear,” I said, in Dudley’s manner, reaching across the table to take her hands in mine, “won’t you let me take you—”
    “Don’t make a joke out of it,” she said, pulling away, getting up, scraping her chair on the floor as she did.
    “I’m sorry,” I said, and I was.
    “I’m going home,” she said.  She walked to the door.  At the door, she turned, and, indicating with a sweep of her arm the malt shop and everything that had transpired there, said, “Peter, why don’t you let me take you away from all this?” and I did let her take me away from it, and along the way to her house I tried to convince her that I was better than I seemed, and I explained to her that making a joke was my way of clearing the air, blowing the smell of her brother’s piss away, and she laughed at that, and when I said goodbye at her house she turned her face up to be kissed, and I kissed her, and for a moment she took me very far away, but then the kiss ended, and we were still standing on the unpaved road in front of her house, and it was time for me to go.