An American Childhood - Annie Dillard [80]
The last dance was slow; the lights dimmed. The light-shouldered blond boy moved me over and across the golden dark floor and in and out of his arms. He released me and caught me, slowly, and turned me and spun me, and paused on the odd long note so I had to raise a leg from the hip to keep us afloat, and I held him loosely but surely for the count of four, amazed.
He was bare-handed, as were all the boys at these dances. We retained our white cotton gloves. It was easier now to imagine his warmth, the heel of his naked left hand on my glove. But it still required imagination. The thick cotton stretched flat across the dip of my palm like a trampoline; it repelled the bulge of his hand and held away his heat.
“Keep your back straight,” my mother had told me years ago. “Don’t let your arm weigh and drag on a boy’s shoulder, no matter how tired you are. Dance on the balls of your feet, no matter how tall you are. Chin up.”
The drummer stretched in the dark and rubbed the back of his neck. He began packing up, retaining, however, his brushes for “Good Night, Ladies,” at whose opening bars we all groaned.
We groaned because we had to part and lacked the words to manage it smoothly. We groaned because we had to ride back through the snow for an hour and a half with our boys on a bus, and we never figured out how to conduct ourselves on this bus. Were we to kiss, or sing camp songs?
“How was it?” my mother asked the next morning. She lowered the Sunday paper she’d been paging through. How was what? I could barely remember. Someone’s father had picked us up at our club and driven us another hour home. I didn’t get in till after two. Now it was Sunday morning. I was dressed up again and looking for a pair of clean white cotton gloves for church. So was Amy. If there was such a pair, I wanted to find it first.
“How was it?” she asked, and then I remembered and began to understand how it was. It was wonderful, that’s how it was. It was absolutely wonderful.
THAT MORNING IN CHURCH after our first subscription dance, we reconvened on the balcony of the Shadyside Presbyterian Church. I sat in the first balcony row, and resisted the impulse to stretch my Charleston-stiff legs on the balcony’s carved walnut rail. The blond boy I’d met at the dance was on my mind, and I intended to spend the church hour recalling his every word and gesture, but I couldn’t concentrate. Beside me sat my friend Linda. Last night at the dance she had been a laughing, dimpled girl with an advanced sense of the absurd. Now in church she was grave, and didn’t acknowledge my remarks.
Near us in the balcony’s first row, and behind us, were the boys—the same boys with whom we had traveled on a bus to and from the Sewickley Country Club dance. Below us spread the main pews, filling with adults. Almost everyone in the church was long familiar to me. But this particular Sunday in church bore home to me with force a new notion: that I did not really know any of these people at all. I thought I did—but, being now a teenager, I thought I knew almost everything. Only the strongest evidence could penetrate this illusion, which distorted everything I saw. I knew I approved almost nothing. That is, I liked, I adored, I longed for, everyone on earth, especially India and Africa, and particularly everyone on the streets of Pittsburgh—all those friendly, democratic, openhearted, sensible people—and at Forbes Field, and in all the office buildings, parks, streetcars, churches, and stores, excepting only the people I knew, none of whom was up to snuff.
The church building, where the old Scotch-Irish families assembled