After that Maxie had some difficulty in negotiating the
remaining four or five feet. But she made it in the end. Her friends were far away. Applause from below. Those comical figures in absurd foreshortening. Naturally they'd noticed something; they were cracking silly jokes. Maxie was just a bit dizzy but happy all the same in the swaying treetop.
"So what!" came the cry from above. "Just jealous. You can do it, too, if you want to. There's no shortage of trees. Come on, Billy. Old sourpuss. Lift your fat ass. Get a little tree between your thighs. Rub yourself up. Come on, come on. You going to be a stupid chick all your life, a crybaby bedwetter mama bigtit, a lie-still-and-take-it cunt?"
At that my Sibylle tried to fight back the tears, but they seemed to well up of their own accord, while high overhead the exalted Maxie did gymnastics, let out Iroquois war whoops, demanded full freedom to be different, reduced everything that was, is, and will be woman to a hair-haloed hole, and belittled men as stoppers: "I, Maximilian, am the new sex!" And from high in the treetop Maxie shouted into the well-advanced Father's Day, "I will beget a son, beget a son. And shall call his name Emmanuel. Em-ma-nu-el!"
That sounded good down below, though kind of grisly and ripe for the nut house. "Come on down!" cried Frankie, and busied herself with the two stones that Billy had positioned as a fireplace. While Maxie slowly, cautiously, testing her footrests, descended from her Ascension pine tree, Frankie hauled the two stones, one under each arm, to the lake shore and there shot-put first one, then the other amazingly far out into the water. With consummate technique. Frankie, the man with the broad back and narrow hips. Splash and splash again went the Grunewaldsee, and put forth two circles, which grew and intersected until they may have represented roughly what Frankie had in mind — God knows with whom; for if Maxie seemed to be self-sufficient, Frankie still needed a partner: two stones, still hot on one side, wrenched away from the fire that had meanwhile burned down, that went splash splash and intermingled their waves.
The phallic pine, the splashing stones. "You two and your symbolic shit!" said Siggie, and she spat out her chawed cigar butt. "Now tell me, what does this mean? Here you see a trouser button. And here you see needle and thread. Good housewife, is that it? A screw loose somewhere? A button
looking for the right buttonhole? Just a little patience. All honest and aboveboard. I'll show you. Just keep quiet."
And with even, parallel thrusts from the outside in, through all four little holes, Siggie, without a tremor or a moment's hesitation, sewed the common trouser button to her left cheek. Not a drop of blood flowed. No jokes were cracked, not even by Maxie. Billy sweated with excitement, while Frankie stared at the sewed-on button as though more than a trouser button had come to rest on Siggie's left cheek.
"There!" said Siggie after biting off the thread that protruded between her large, regular incisors. "Well? How does it look? Button on cheek. Doesn't mean a thing. It's not symbolic; it's gratuitous, so to speak. Or would somebody like to tell a thoughtful little tale of love's labor lost?"
Since in all situations Siggie (as did the feminist prosecutor Sieglinde Huntscha later on) displayed a face of strict classical beauty — Greek nose, high cheekbones, large hawk-eyes under boldly delineated eyebrows and chiseled forehead — the button on her narrow, tapering cheek did not look funny but seemed, rather, to intimate that her beauty (without a button) was perhaps excessive.
"Not bad," said Frankie. Maxie pleaded, "Sew one on me. Please, please." But when Billy cried, "Marvelous!" and produced a pocket mirror from somewhere—"Look; look how becoming it is!" — Siggie rejected this bit of feminine frippery. "I know what I look like. Nothing to get so excited about. A little joke among friends. So now I'll wipe it off. OK, Billy, what have you got to offer?"
So then my poor Sibylle, who had always done everything wrong, decided as Billy to do something especially forceful and masculine. She suggested, seeing they were all friends, that they build a pyramid of friendship. She would be the bottom man, the base. On her right and left shoulders she would gladly support Frankie and Siggie. The athletic Maxie was invited to stand, balancing herself as she had learned to do, on Frankie's left and Siggie's right shoulder, so crowning the pyramid. And maybe Maxie could do a handstand on top. But first they would have to practice in a halfway position, that is, without Billy as bottom man. And oh yes, would they kindly do their climbing with bare feet. And maybe they could ask the solitary bald-headed leech-man down by the shore to snap a few souvenirs of the once completed friendship pyramid with Billy's foolproof camera-mabubble. Because it would really be good. Something they'd like to look at later on. No, she'd manage all right as bottom man.
And, with interruptions and incidents, they did it. Maxie practiced her handstand on Frankie's left and Siggie's right shoulder until they had it down pat. Billy looked on while Frankie and Siggie took their boots and shoes off. Maxie trotted down to the lake and asked the solitary bald man if he'd mind snapping a few pictures. He said he'd be glad to, and pulled the last leeches off his legs. With taut thighs and rock-hard calves, Billy stood still while, with Maxie's help, Frankie and Siggie climbed up. But then, suddenly capricious, Maxie refused to crown the pyramid. It was all a lot of nonsense, some shitty idea. Besides, Maxie wasn't going to take orders from a femme. That would be the end. She'd rather climb the big, tall pine tree again.
So Frankie climbed down from Billy's left shoulder, while Siggie stayed in position on the right. "Do as you're told," cried Frankie, "or you'll catch it."
"I ain't takin' orders from you," Maxie whined. "I do my own thing."
Whereupon Frankie gave it to Maxie in the face, one two, left and right: "How about it? Not yet? Bim bam. Better now? Or would you care for a little more? OK, then." In the end Maxie stood weeping on the shoulders of Frankie and Siggie, who were both standing on the shoulders of my poor Sibylle, who was crying because she felt sorry for the slapped Maxie. Frankie and Siggie were looking grim. Maxie didn't dare do her handstand. But even so, the picture, which the helpful baldy took after spoiling two exposures by jiggling the camera, was a success. Later on, when she had given up dog breeding and was free-lancing, Siggie had the picture of the pyramid of friendship blown up to enormous size and pinned it to one of her attic walls.
"Damn it all!" said Prosecutor Sieglinde Huntscha when asked about the meaning of the large, coarse-grained photograph. "It's just a part of what our Billy had to put up with."
Naturally, since the pyramid of friendship, with Billy as bottom man and Maxie, standing on the shoulders of
Frankie and Siggie, as crown, was erected (and snapped) on Father's Day, it was not only seen by the neighboring group of fraternity students in full regalia, but also attracted attention on the far shore of the Grunewaldsee, where the black-leather boys had stopped playing with their sharp knives and wanted at last to be doing something.