All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [171]
Little girls wear white dresses with skirts that flare out to show their funny little knees, and they wear round-toed black patent-leather slippers held by a one-button strap, and their white socks are held up by a dab of soap, and their hair hangs down the back in braid with a blue ribbon on it. That was Anne Stanton and it was Sunday and she was going to church to sit still as a mouse and rub her tonguetip pensively at the place where she had just lost the tooth. And little girls sit on hassocks and lean their cheeks pensively against the dear father’s knee while his hand toys with the silken locks and his voice reads beautiful words. That was Anne Stanton. And little girls are fraidy-cats and try the surf with one toe that first day in spring, and when the surf makes a surprising leap and splashes their thigh with the tingle and cold they squeal and jump up and down on thin little legs like stilts. That was Anne Stanton. Little girls get a smudge of soot on the end of the nose when they roast wieners over the campfire and you–for you are a big boy and do not get soot on your nose–point your finger and sing, “Dirty-Face, Dirty-Face, you are so dirty you are a disgrace!” And then one day when you sing it, the little girl doesn’t say a thing back the way she always had, but turns her big eyes on you, out of the thin little smooth face, and her lips quiver an instant so that you think she might cry even tough she is too big for that now, and as the eyes keep fixed o you, the grin dries up on your face and you turn quickly away and pretend to be getting some more wood. That was Anne Stanton.
All the bright days by the water with the gull flashing high were Anne Stanton. But I didn’t know it. And all the not bright days with the eaves dripping or the squall driving in from the sea and with the fire on the hearth were Anne Stanton, too. But I didn’t know that, either. Then there came a time when the nights were Anne Stanton. But I knew that.
That began the summer when I was twenty-one and Anne Stanton was seventeen. I was back from the University for vacation and I was a grown man who had been around. I got back from the University late in the afternoon, had a quick swim, ate my dinner, and bolted off to the Stanton house to see Adam. I saw him sitting out on the gallery reading a book (Gibbon, I remember) in the long twilight. And I saw Anne. A was sitting in the swing with Adam, when she came out the door. I looked at her and knew that it had been a thousand years since I had last seen her back at Christmas when she has been back at the Landing on vacation from Miss Pound’s School. She certainly was not now a little girls wearing round-toed, black-patent-leather, flat-heeled slippers held on by a one-button strap and white socks held up by a dab of soup. She was wearing a white linen dress, cut very straight, and the straightness of the cut and the stiffness of the linen did nothing in the world by suggest by a kind of teasing paradox the curves and softness sheathed by the cloth. She had her hair in a knot on the nape of the neck, and a little white ribbon around her head, and she was smiling at me with a smile which I had known all my life but which was entirely new, and saying, “Hello, Jack,” while I held her strong narrow hand in mine and new that summer had come.
It had come. And it was not like any summer which ever had been or was to be again. During the day I would be with Adam a lot, like always, and a lot of the time she would tag along, for that was the way it had been before, she’d tag along for she and Adam were very close. That summer Adam and I would play tennis in the early morning before the sun got high and hot, and she would come to the court with us and sit in the dappled shade of the mimosas and myrtles and watch Adam beat the tar out of me as usual and laugh like bird song and mountain brooks when I got my feet tangle up in my own racket.