by Philip Roth
She had freckles too, but no pimples—her only physical blessing.
She stepped backward so as to see all of herself again. All she ever wore was that plaid skirt with the big safety pin in front, and her gray sweater with the sleeves pushed up, and her ratty loafers. She had three other skirts, but they were even older. And she didn’t care about clothes. Why should she? Oh, why had she quit band?
She clutched at the back of her blouse so that it pulled tight across her front. Her breasts had started growing when she was eleven; then to her relief, a year later, they had just stopped. But weren’t they going to start again? She did know an exercise that supposedly could enlarge them. The health teacher, Miss Fichter, had demonstrated it to them in class. It was out of American Posture Monthly, a magazine with a picture on the cover of little twin boys in white briefs, standing on their heads and smiling. There was nothing there to cause giggling, as far as Miss Fichter could see, and that went for the exercise as well, whose purpose was all-around health and attractiveness. If only they got into the habit of exercising their muscles when they were young, they would always be proud of themselves physically. Too many teen-age girls in this school slouch, said Miss Fichter, and she said it as though she really meant lie or steal.
You did the exercise with your hands out in front of your chest: first you pushed the right fist into the open left palm, and then the left fist into the open right palm. You did this twenty-five times, each time chanting in rhythm, as Miss Fichter did, “I must, I must, I must respect my bust.”
In front of her mirror, behind the locked door, and without the words, Lucy gave it a try. How long before it began to work? “Da dum,” she said, “da dum … dz-dum, dz-dum, da-dum.”
Oh, how she would miss band! How she would miss Mr. Valerio! But she simply couldn’t march any more with those girls—they were freaks. And she wasn’t! And nobody was going to say she was either! From now on it would just be her and Eleanor Sowerby together. In Ellie’s room was a bed with a white organdy canopy and a dressing table with a mirror top, where they would do their homework on the afternoons when it rained; on nice afternoons they would sit out in the back, reading together in the sun, or just walk around The Grove, doing nothing except looking at lawns and gabbing. If by the time they got back it was dark, most likely the Sowerbys would invite her to join them for supper. On Sundays they would ask her to come with them to church, and stay on afterward for dinner. Mrs. Sowerby was so soft-spoken and attentive, she had called her “dear” the very afternoon they were introduced—to which Lucy had nearly, idiotically, responded with a curtsy. And Mr. Sowerby had come noisily into the house at five—“Pappy Yokum’s home!” he’d called, and then had given his wife a loud wet kiss right on the mouth, even though she was a plump woman with gray hair who, Ellie said, had to wear rubber stockings to keep her veins in. It was Ellie’s current joke to call him Pappy Yokum, and his to call her Daisy Mae, and silly as this struck her, Lucy had nonetheless found herself very much in awe of what appeared at last to be a happy family.
So she quit band. And Ellie dumped her. “Oh, hi there,” Ellie would say as they passed in the corridors, and then just keep walking. For a week Lucy was able to tell herself that Ellie was only waiting for her to return the invitation. But how could she invite her home if she didn’t even get a chance to talk to her? And even if she was able to, did she want to? One day, after two solid weeks of being ignored, she saw Ellie sitting in the cafeteria at the same table with some of the shallowest and silliest girls in the entire school, and so she thought to herself, well, if those are the kind of girls she really prefers, et cetera, et cetera.
Then in late February she found the note slipped down through the air vents into her locker.
Hi, Stranger!
I’ve been accepted at Northwestern (big deal) so the pressure is off, and I can relax now. Meet me at the flagpole at three-thirty (please please).
Your fellow suffering senior,
Ellie
LCCHS, Class of ’49
Northwestern ’53 (!)
This time Lucy was far less impressionable. Thinking back to September, to the sheer idiocy of quitting band so as to be Ellie Sowerby’s friend—well, it was as though she had been ten years old. She had really gone against every principle she had. It had been weak and stupid and childish, and though in the interim she had despised Ellie, and plenty, she had despised herself no less. For one thing, it was a matter of absolute indifference to her who lived in The Grove—that was the truth. Nothing used to infuriate her more than to take a drive with her family on Sunday (back when she was young enough to have to go where they wanted her to) and have her mother point out the house up in The Grove that her father had once almost bought. As if where you lived or how much money you had was what was important, and not the kind of human being you were. The Sowerbys had a full-time maid, and a $30,000 house, and enough money to send a daughter off to a place like Northwestern for four years, but the fact remained that Lucy Nelson was still more of a person than their own daughter would ever be.
To Ellie the biggest thing in life was clothes. Outside of Marshall’s store in Winnisaw, Lucy had never seen so many skirts in one place as Ellie had hanging in her big wall-length closet with the sliding doors. Some afternoons, when it rained and they studied together in Ellie’s room (exactly as she had imagined they would), she looked up to discover the closet doors ajar; whole minutes often passed before she was looking down into her book again, trying to find her place. When the weather began to turn warm and by three o’clock it was suddenly too hot for the coat that Lucy had worn to school that morning, Ellie would tell her just to pull any old sweater out of the bureau drawer and wear it for the rest of the afternoon. Only there weren’t any old sweaters in there.
One afternoon the sweater she put on turned out to be one hundred percent cashmere. She didn’t realize this until out on the lawn, she took a quick look at the label and went breathless at what she had done. By this time, however, Ellie was calling for her to help pound in the croquet wickets, and Mrs. Sowerby had already seen her pass through the living room. And she had already seen the look of disapproval move across Mrs. Sowerby’s face, at the first glimpse of the sagging plaid skirt coming down the stairs topped by Ellie’s lemon-colored sweater. “Have a good game,” Mrs. Sowerby had said, but that, Lucy realized too late, wasn’t at all what she had been thinking. To go back upstairs, however, to change the cashmere for cotton, or even lamb’s wool, would be to admit that she was indeed guilty of choosing it deliberately, when in actuality she had taken it in all innocence. Upon lifting it from the overstuffed drawer she had not thought cashmere, she had only thought how soft. It had nothing to do with being covetous and she would not give credence to any such suspicion by traipsing all the way past Mrs. Sowerby a second time. She had no intention of ever being made to feel inferior again, not by Ellie, and not by any member of her family … and that was the reason she gave herself for keeping the soft lemon-colored sweater on her back until the very minute that she changed back into her heavy winter coat and left for home.
Shortly thereafter Ellie trimmed her bangs for her. Lucy kept saying, “Not too much. Really. My forehead, Ellie.”
“What a difference!” Ellie said when they looked at the results in the bathroom mirror. “I can see you now.”
“You took too much off.”
“I didn’t. Look at your eyes.”
“What’s wrong with them?”
“They look great. They’re really a great color if you could ever see them.”
“Yes?”
“Hey, what about wearing it up? Let’s see what it looks like up.”
“My head’s too square.”
“Let’s just see, Lucy.”
“Don’t cut anything.”
“I won’t, jerk. I just want to see.”
So, too, Ellie just wanted to see what Lucy’s plaid skirt would look like if they let down the hem three inches to give it “The
New Look.”
It seemed so silly to be allowing this to happen to her, so incredible that it was happening. She didn’t even respect Ellie, so where did she get off treating Lucy like her stooge? And she didn’t respect Ellie’s parents that much any more either. What was Mrs. Sowerby but a social snob? As for Mr. Sowerby—well, she hadn’t figured him out yet. Daddy Will liked to crack corny jokes, and her father used to think he was being funny when she was small and he called her “Goosie,” but Mr. Sowerby was almost always joking, and was almost always loud. Whenever he was down in the living room, Lucy took her time going between Ellie’s bedroom and the bathroom at the end of the hall. “Pike this,” he’d call to his wife in the kitchen. “Just pike this!” And then at the top of his voice he would read from the newspaper something that Harry Truman had done which just infuriated him. Once he called, “Irene, come here, Irene,” and when she came into the living room, he put a hand on her behind and said (softly now, but Lucy, frozen in the upper hallway, could hear by holding her breath), “How’s the health, tootsie?” How could she approve of the way he talked to Mrs. Sowerby, or the kind of language he used? She certainly didn’t believe that Mrs. Sowerby did, what with all her airs. She had the distinct feeling that all this hugging and kissing was something Mrs. Sowerby simply had to endure. It almost made Lucy feel sorry for her.
On the other hand, Mr. Sowerby was Liberty Center’s outstanding war hero. On his return to town the Mayor had actually led a motorcade down to the train station to meet him. Lucy had only been a freshman when he came to the high school to talk, but she remembered that his speech had left a sobering impression on the people in the community who had thought the worst was now over. His topic had been, “How to Make This World a Better Place to Live In”—or, as some of the boys referred to it afterward, “How the Hell to Make This God Damn World a Helluva Better Place to Live In—Damn It!” It was mostly about remaining vigilant in the coming years against what Mr. Sowerby called the threat of atheistical Communism. The very next day there had been an editorial on the front page of the Winnisaw Leader calling upon Major Sowerby to run for Congress in the 1946 elections. Ellie said that he had decided not to only because her mother didn’t feel it would have been right to take Ellie out of her school once again, if they had had to move to Washington, D.C. Because of the war she had already had to attend schools in North Carolina and Georgia (which, said Ellie, accounted for her sometimes falling into a southern accent without even realizing it). Ellie loved to tell how the Governor had spoken to her father on the phone, and how her father had said he didn’t want the Governor to think he was putting responsibility to family above responsibility to country, and so on and so forth. The conversation came out different each time Ellie reported it; once it even occurred at the Governor’s “mansion.” Only the tone in which the story was told remained the same: smug.
Of course Lucy appreciated Ellie’s generosity with her possessions, and it was hard to say she wasn’t good-natured, but one thing that was unforgivable was being condescended to. The day that Ellie began to fuss with her clothes she got so furious that she wanted to leave right then and there; and she would have too, were it not that Ellie had already unstitched the hem and was busy pinning up a new one, and she herself was in her slip and blouse, sitting at Ellie’s dressing table and looking out between the curtains at Ellie’s cousin, the Army veteran, working on his Hudson.
Roy. She had never called him that, or anything. And he did not appear even to know her name, or even to associate her with the girl who worked behind the counter at Dale’s Dairy Bar. Between September, when she had caught her first glimpse of him at Eleanor’s, and February, when grace had fallen upon her a second time, she had observed him many times as he sat at the counter of the Dairy Bar; sometimes she had seen him headed down Broadway carrying his sketch pad. During those months without band and without Ellie, when she used to hole herself up every afternoon in the public library, there was a period of a few weeks when he always seemed to be coming out of the library just as she was going in. He was friendly with Dale, and once she’d seen him talking seriously with Miss Bruckner, the librarian. So it wasn’t shyness that explained his solitude; he just seemed to prefer to be alone—which was one of the things that had begun to make her think that he might be an interesting person. Also she knew who his father was—Mr. Bassart, who introduced the speakers at assembly programs, and was known to be one of the strictest though one of the fairest teachers in the entire school. And she knew he had recently returned from serving two years in the Army, overseas.
Ellie always made fun of him. “He thinks he looks like Dick Haymes. Do you think he does?”
“I don’t know.”
“If he wasn’t my cousin I suppose I’d think he was cute. But I know him,” she would add ominously. Then, out the window: “Roy, sing like Dick Haymes. Come on, Lucy never heard your imitations. Do Vaughan Monroe, Roy. You really look more like him anyway, now that you’re so mature. Sing ‘Ballerina,’ Roy. Sing, ‘There, I’ve Said It Again.’ Oh, please, Roy, please, we beg of you on bended knee.”
Lucy would go scarlet, and Roy would make a sour face, or say something like, “Act your age, will you?” or, “Really, Ellie, when are you going to grow up?”
Roy was going to be twenty-one. What he was doing the times she saw him meandering slowly down Broadway, whacking his sketch pad against his thigh, or on the evenings when he sat at the Dairy Bar counter, rattling the ice round and round at the bottom of his Coke, or on the weekends he spent sunk down into the club chair talking with his Uncle Julian, was trying to decide just what to do with his life. He was at a genuine turning point: that was the expression she had heard him using one Saturday. And it had stayed with her.
What was Roy going to become? An artist? A businessman? Or was he going to ship out, and really give Sweden a chance? Or would he do something completely bizarre and unpredictable? Once she heard him remind his uncle that he didn’t only have the G.I. Bill, he had a G.I. home loan too. If he wanted to, he could actually go off and buy a house of his own, and then live in it. His Uncle Julian laughed, but Roy said, “Poo-poo my ideas all you want, kiddo, but it’s true. I don’t have to be anybody’s slave, not if I don’t want to be.”
From the bed where she was sitting hemming Lucy’s skirt, Ellie said, “What are you looking at?”
Lucy dropped the edge of the curtain.
“Not Roy, I hope,” Ellie said.
“I was just looking outside, Ellie,” she said coldly.
“Because don’t waste your breath on that one,” said Ellie, biting the thread. “You know who he likes?”
“Who?”
“Monkey Littlefield.”
To Lucy’s astonishment her heart made some sort of erratic movement.
“Roy’s major interest these days is s-e-x. Well, he’s picked the right girl, all right.”
“Who?”
“Littlefield.”
“… Does he take her out?”
“He’s still deciding whether to lower himself or not. Or so he says. He said to me, ‘Is she a kid, or has she got a brain in her head? Otherwise I don’t want to waste my time.’ I said, ‘Don’t worry, Roy. She’s no kid.’ So he said, ‘What is that supposed to mean?’ And I said, ‘I know why you like her, Roy.’ And he got all red in the face. I mean, everybody knows her reputation. But Roy pretended he didn’t.”
Lucy pretended by her expression that she did.
Ellie went on. “I said, ‘It isn’t her personality that makes her popular, Roy.’ So he said, ‘Well, that’s all I asked, Ellie, whether she even had a personality or not.’ ‘Well, ask Bill Elliott about her personality, Roy, if you haven’t already.’ So he said, ‘I didn’t even know she went out with him.’ ‘Not any more, Roy. Even he doesn’t respect her any more. I’ll leave the rest to your imagination,’ I said, and then you know what he said? ‘Go play with your jacks, Ellie.’ He tells my father all his big sex exploits in the Army, and
Daddy lets him, which he shouldn’t, either. You know when they start laughing down there together?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Well, they do. And what do you think they’re laughing about?”
“Sex?”
“He’s got it on the brain. Roy, I mean,” Ellie added.
By April the elastic at the top of Roy’s Army socks had begun to unravel. Every time the two girls stepped over him—“Excuse us, cousin, will you, please?” said Eleanor—Lucy saw, between the shrunken, fading khaki trousers and the drooping socks, the white and slender part of his leg. At the beginning of the month, a week of hot, wonderful, summery weather swept across the Middle West, pushing into bloom almost overnight the forsythia in the Sowerby garden; one afternoon, just as she stepped to Ellie’s bedroom window to take a quick look outside—at the new flowers—Roy began pulling his T-shirt off over his head. In only a matter of seconds she had turned back to Ellie, who was searching a drawer for an old pair of shorts for Lucy to wear, but the sight of his long smooth cylindrical upper half stretching down over the open hood of his car remained in her mind all afternoon.
Near the end of the month, when Roy bought the camera and began to get the photography magazines, he came to Eleanor and said that he wanted to do some studies in black and white down by the landing. He needed a girl to sit under the tree he’d picked out. It might just as well be Ellie.
Ellie’s color rose; she had auburn hair that shone, and hazel eyes that changed sometimes to cat-gray, and in repose she was not only one of the prettiest girls Lucy had ever seen, but also looked altogether poised and intelligent. She could easily have passed for nineteen or twenty, and she knew it.