Standing in the Rainbow - Fannie Flagg [21]
That was the summer Bobby found out her secret. Something that most people just looking at this sweet, serene, almost ethereal person would never have guessed in a million years. Beatrice Woods had a wild streak. She longed for romance and adventure. And more than anything in this world, she loved to ride.
Anna Lee
BOBBY’S SISTER and her two best friends, Norma and Patsy Marie, were growing up together. Norma was a pretty brunette girl whose father ran the only bank in town. Patsy Marie’s parents, Merle and Verbena, owned and operated the Blue Ribbon Cleaners. Patsy Marie made the best grades of the three but was not a beauty. As her aunt put it, “She had old-maid schoolteacher written all over her from the time she was six,” but she was sweet. All three were nice girls and if they had a fault it might have been that at present they were right in the middle of their movie-star phase.
Every time the feature at the Elmwood Theater changed they were there in the twelfth row center. Each had a different movie actor they adored. Anna Lee’s major heartthrob this month was Dana Andrews. She filled piles of scrapbooks with pictures of him cut out of movie magazines. Patsy Marie’s current crush was Alan Ladd, whom she had just seen in The Blue Dahlia. But Norma’s movie star du jour was a puzzlement to both the other girls. She chose a lesser-known actor named William Bendix. They asked her why him; he wasn’t even good-looking. “Well, that’s the point,” she said. “Somebody’s got to like him.”
However, as the school year grew closer to the end they concentrated on the upcoming high school prom and movie stars took a backseat. Norma would be going with Macky, of course, and Patsy Marie would go with her cousin, as usual. Anna Lee was the only one who had not committed to any of the boys who had asked her so far. The really overriding question was what they were going to wear. All the girls in high school, no matter who they were, wanted store-bought prom dresses. Wearing a “homemade” prom dress would be akin to sprouting a big red H on your forehead. Although Neighbor Dorothy had a degree, made her own patterns, and was one of the best dressmakers in the state, she knew that nothing would do but to let Anna Lee go down to Morgan Brothers department store with the rest of them and buy her dress off the rack. It would cost about three times as much as it would for her to make it, but her daughter had to have a store-bought dress or die of humiliation. At least that’s what she said.
One of the other lures of buying a dress at Morgan Brothers department store was the saleslady, Mrs. Marion Nordstrom, who was in charge of the Better Dresses Department. If Mrs. Nordstrom helped you pick out your dress, then you had arrived. All the girls in Anna Lee’s group thought she was one of the most exquisite creatures who had ever lived. Tall and aloof, always impeccably dressed in the latest fashions, she was their ideal. A war widow, she had come all the way from San Francisco, California, and the wardrobe she had brought with her was the constant topic of all the high school girls. “She never wears the same thing twice,” they declared in admiration. After school Anna Lee and Patsy Marie would stroll into the store and pretend to shop just to see what she had on that day.
Anna Lee even copied the way she wore her hair piled high up on her head. The hairdo, Dorothy suggested, might be a little mature for a girl who still wore bobby socks and penny loafers but Anna Lee thought it was the last word in sophistication. The only concern Dorothy ever had about Anna Lee was that she might be getting a little spoiled. In every school there is always one girl that all the boys are crazy about and from