Word: pocock
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Vries' new hero needs more than fruit. Ted Peachum is a budding aesthete and furniture mover in Pocock, Ill. He is also a parody of that familiar species, the small-town boy with big ideas and an ambition to rise above his station. Who can blame him? His father rereads comic books and hibernates like a bear, his aunt is known chiefly for canceling subscriptions and returning unused portions, and his grandfather contracted a venereal disease at a health...
Anyone who talks like that in Pocock is bound to attract the attention of Mrs. d'Amboise, a sculptor "who like all women of quality chewed her gum with her front teeth and rarely popped it within earshot of people with known academic degrees or season subscription boxes to the Opera." At 16, Peachum becomes Mrs. d'Amboise's model and a suitable future suitor for her ten-year-old daughter Columbine...
...Columbine's "doorbells," he feels a pang of remorse that is followed immediately by a twinge of desire. Peachum's entanglements are due to varying intentions of various d'Amboises. There is, for instance, his lust for Vim d'Amboise's wife Kathy, a Pocock police officer. "But soft," as De Vries might say when the going gets muddy. His explanation is more involved than his predicament: "There was Mrs. d. wanting me to wait for Columbine, with Luke standing by ready to feed me some knuckle pie if I didn't do right...