An American Childhood - Annie Dillard [78]
Where had they learned all this, or, more pertinently, why had they remembered it? We girls knew precisely the limits of the possible and the thinkable, we thought, and were permanently astonished to learn that we were wrong. Whose idea of sophistication was it, after all, to pay attention in Latin class? It was the boys’ idea. Everything was. Everything they thought of was bold and original like that. While we were worried about sending valentines, they were worried about sending troops.
Plus their feet were so big. You could look at the boys’ sheer physical volume with uncomprehending astonishment forever. Had the braces on their teeth been restraining their very bones? For look at them. You would never tire of running your wondering eyes over the mystery of their construction, so plain, and the mystery of their bulk, and the mystery of their skin, and even their strange boxy clothes. The boys.
We ran, we fancied, to sweetness, we girls. The boys, as we got to know them, were cynical. They addressed each other out of the corners of their mouths in cryptic staccato phrases, all clever references to that larger world wherein they dwelt and where we longed to go ourselves. If you got to know them, apparently, they would tell you about their teachers at Shady Side Academy—teachers my own father had studied under, but about whom, alas, he could come up with precious little.
We girls chafed, whined, and complained under our parents’ strictures. The boys waged open war on their parents. They cursed their fathers, and disobeyed them outright. (“What can they do? Throw me out?”) Was this not breathtakingly bold? The boys’ pitched battles with their parents were legendary; the punishments they endured melted our hearts.
Each year as we rose through the grades, dancing school met an hour later, until one year it vanished into the darkness, and was replaced by, or transmogrified into, another institution altogether, that of country-club subscription dances.
The engraved invitation came in the mail: The Sewickley Country Club was hosting a subscription dinner dance several weeks thence. Each of several appropriate country clubs, it turned out, gave precisely one such dance a year, at a time that coincided with boarding-school vacations. I knew Sewickley children, having opposed on playing fields their school’s ferocious field hockey team. The old village of Sewickley had come to prominence late in the nineteenth century when some families quit their grandparents’ mansions on Fifth Avenue and moved in a body to that green and pleasant land. They zoned it to a fare-thee-well and furnished it with a country club, a Presbyterian church, and a little expensive school. Now they were asking us to a dinner dance.
We showed up at our own country club in pale spaghetti-strap dresses and silk shoes, to board a yellow bus in the snow. There we all were: the same boys, the same girls. How did they know? I wondered which of those remote country-club powers, those white-haired sincere men, those golden-haired, long-toothed, ironic women, had met on what firm cloud over western Pennsylvania to apportion and schedule these events among the scattered country clubs, and had pored over what unthinkable list of schoolchildren to discuss which schoolchildren should be asked to these dances they held for what reason. If you were part Jewish, would they find you out, like Hitler? How small a part could they detect? What was at the end of all this novitiate—solemn vows?
We dined that night in faraway Sewickley, at long linen-covered tables marked by place cards. Our shrimp cocktails were already at our places. We were like Beauty in the castle of the Beast: that is, I, at least, never laid eyes on the unknown adult or adults who had presumably invited us, designed and ordered the invitations, secured a room and a band, and devised the menu. There were some adults against the walls, all dressed up,