An American Childhood - Annie Dillard [79]
My dinner partner was a fragile redhead from Sewickley, a Paulie—from St. Paul’s School—whose hulking twin sisters had several times mown me down on the hockey field. From him I learned that some girls my age voluntarily played golf. Like many of the boys, he was good-natured, polite, somewhat cowed, and delicately handsome. One was not, however, thank God, required to fall in love at a subscription dance, although it had been known to happen.
We ate chicken breast in velvet sauce on ham. We ate wild rice, tomato aspic, and, as a concession to our being in fact children, hot fudge sundaes or green peppermint parfaits.
During dessert the band straggled in and set up by the freezing French doors to the terrace. The band was an unmatched set of bored men in dark suits and red carnations. The only bands that counted in our book were Lester Lanin’s and Eddy Duchin’s. These men, as at all subscription dances, were merely locals: a drum, a bass, a piano, a clarinet. Their boredom, and the possible death of their musical ambitions, and the probable complete disregard of everyone with whom they had dealt over this engagement, unless they had had the good fortune to run into my mother, had drained all the expression from their faces. Sometimes, though, on a jitterbug or a Charleston, you could pry a wink out of the drummer.
The band struck up, not surprisingly, “Mountain Greenery.” This frenzied sequence of notes had been our cue conditioned since we were ten. We danced.
There were boys here from far away—not only from familiar Fox Chapel and expected Sewickley, but also from Ligonier, that pretty village in the distant mountains where the Mellons lived. There were older boys here, who had already been to deb parties. And there were some very tall boys—some of ours and some of theirs—whose shoulders rose above our heads like those few lone trees which burst through the canopy in a rain forest. Although these big boys’ status was as great as their stature, they rarely smiled or relaxed, but instead looked worriedly around over our head-tops, frowning, earnest, always at the edge of a wince.
“Isn’t he cute?”
In the densely carpeted ladies’ rooms we all hurried. We didn’t meet each other’s eyes in the long mirrors.
“Which?”
“Which what?”
“Which is cute?”
It was always one of the wincing giants who was cute. We ran combs through our hair and pounded back along the labyrinthine club corridors to the dance floor. Yes, very cute.
One blond, sharp-toothed boarding-school boy, a famously witty chess player, was wearing patent-leather pumps. On his feet, that is, where his shoes should be, he was wearing low-slung, dainty, shiny pumps, like ballet practice shoes, with satin bows at the toes—and he carried it off. Thus I learned yet again that more things were possible in the world than I had dreamed. He and a friend had driven a car through the snow to this dance. The friend was a sarcastic boy, narrow-skulled and overbred as a collie, who said he hung around in the Hill District. The Hill District was Pittsburgh’s cruelest and coolest black ghetto, where more babies died than anywhere else in the United States. Up on the Hill, he went to whorehouses. Was this not bold, evil, original? Our own boys would never think of that.
I had sat near these two at dinner. They had traveled. From their boarding school they had walked, loose, in the towns of Connecticut, and knew them well enough to dismiss them. I danced with each of them. How light the blond boy’s shoulders felt! With what smooth disdain did the blond boy lead me walking beside him four steps before he pulled me in again to him, as easily as if my arm had been the bowline of a boat!
And we were buoyant when we danced, we two, were we not? Had he noticed?
This light-shouldered boy could jitterbug, old style, and would; he was more precious than gold, yea, than much fine gold. We jitterbugged. There was nothing flirtatious about it. It was more an exultant and concentrated collaboration, such as aerialists enjoy—and I hope they enjoy