An American Childhood - Annie Dillard [36]
Soon they would enter investment banking and take their places in the management of Fortune 500 corporations. Soon in their scant spare time they would be serving on the boards of schools, hospitals, country clubs, and churches. No wonder they laughed so hard. These were boys who wore ties from the moment their mothers could locate their necks.
I assumed that like me the boys dreamed of running away to sea, of curing cancer, of playing for the Pirates, of painting in Paris, of tramping through the Himalayas, for we were all children together. And they may well have dreamed these things, and more, then and later. I don’t know.
Those boys who confided in me later, however, when we were all older, dreamed nothing of the kind. One wanted to be top man at Gulf Oil. One wanted to accumulate a million dollars before he turned thirty. And one wanted to be majority leader in the U.S. Senate.
But these, the boys who confided in me, were the ones I would love when we were in our teens, and they were, according to my predilection, not the dancing-school boys at all, but other, oddball boys. I would give my heart to one oddball boy after another—to older boys, to prep-school boys no one knew, to him who refused to go to college, to him who was a hood, and all of them wonderfully skinny. I loved two such boys deeply, one after the other and for years on end, and forsook everything else in life, and rightly so, to begin learning with them that unplumbed intimacy that is life’s chief joy. I loved them deeply, one after the other, for years on end, I say, and hoped to change their worldly ambitions and save them from the noose. But they stood firm.
And it could be, I think, that only those oddball boys, none of whom has inherited Pittsburgh at all, longed to star in the world of money and urban power; and it could be that the central boys, our boys, who are now running Pittsburgh responsibly, longed to escape. I don’t know. I never knew them well enough to tell.
AMY WAS A LOOKER; I privately thought she must be the most beautiful child on earth. She inherited our father’s thick, wavy hair. Her eyes were big, and so were her lashes; her nose was delicate and fluted, her skin translucent. Her mouth curved quaintly; her lips fitted appealingly, as a cutter’s bow dents and curls the water under way. Plus she was quiet. And little, and tidy, and calm, and more or less obedient. She had an endearing way—it attracted even me—of standing with her legs tight together, and peering up and around with wild, stifled hilarity and parodied curiosity, as if to see if—by chance—anybody has noticed small her and found her amusing.
At the top of Richland Lane lived Amy’s friend Tibby, a prematurely sophisticated blond tot, best remembered for having drawled conversationally to Mother, when she, Tibby, was only six and still missing her front teeth, “I love your hair, Mrs. Doak.” When Tibby and Amy were eight, Amy brought home yet another straight-A report card. Shortly afterward, Mother overheard Tibby say exasperated to Amy, “How can you be so smart in school and so dumb after school?” In fact, as the years passed, after school became Amy’s bailiwick, and she was plenty smart at it.
When Amy wasn’t playing with Tibby, she played with her dolls. They were a hostile crew. Lying rigidly in their sickbeds, they shot at each other a series of haughty expletives. She had picked these up from Katy Keene comic books; Katy Keene was a society girl with a great many clothes. Amy pronounced every consonant of these expletives: Humph, pshaw.
“I’ll show you, you vixen!” cried a flat-out and staring piece of buxom plastic from its Naturalizer shoe box.
“Humph!”
“Pshaw!”
“Humph!”
“Pshaw!”
We all suffered a bit for want of more of these words.
I had made several attempts to snuff baby Amy in her cradle. Mother had repeatedly discovered me pouring glasses of water carefully into her face.