Betsy Was a Junior / Betsy and Joe

by Maud Hart Lovelace

  The Rays and the Slades always had Thanksgiving dinner together. It was at the Ray house this year and was followed about twilight by Mr. Ray’s turkey sandwiches and coffee, and Grandma Slade’s stories.

  Listening to these from a pillow in front of the fire, Betsy saw canoes on the river, the raw log cabins of the earliest settlers straggling along the river bank, the Indian Agency at the top of Agency Hill and the Indians coming to take possession of it. They had come in canoes and in dog carts, riding ponies and on foot; a picturesque invasion; not terrifying like the one some years later, when red men came down the Valley pillaging, burning and killing. Deep Valley, now so peaceful, had been a perilous frontier.

  The day after Thanksgiving Roger arrived. With his padded shoulders and condescending air, he cut a swath in Deep Valley. Betsy didn’t like him very well, although he brought her a fraternity pennant. Julia still gazed at him with the soulful look her sister tried to imitate, yet Betsy felt sure his time was running out.

  He and Julia talked about Greek letter organizations. Four sororities were rushing Julia now, but she still preferred Epsilon Iota.

  “You’re an Epsilon Iota type,” Roger assured her profoundly.

  Of course, she couldn’t be asked to join until spring, but the girls were still showering her with subtle attentions—sweet notes, wee bouquets, affectionate strolls on the campus.

  Roger had asked her to wear his fraternity pin. Julia explained this college custom to Betsy.

  “It’s almost like being engaged to wear a man’s fraternity pin. I won’t wear Roger’s—I don’t like him well enough. But pins certainly change hands fast up at the U.”

  Betsy rushed to Tib, “Let’s let Cab and Dennie wear our Okto Delta pins. Just for a few days, to cause a sensation.”

  It caused a sensation indeed. Hurt and indignant, Lloyd wrote Tib a scathing note; she countered with a cold one; he wrote back terminating their romance.

  “Ain’t it awful, Mabel!” Tib said pertly.

  They made up, and Lloyd started wearing her pin. Squirrelly had acquired Winona’s and Tony was wearing Betsy’s now.

  The winter grew increasingly chaotic; it wasn’t at all what Betsy had planned.

  “My plans,” she told Tacy, without perceptible regret, “are going agley-er and agley-er.”

  13

  The Curling Iron

  IN DECEMBER THE SNOW deepened, the ice on the river thickened, trees snapped with cold and sleigh bells were heard in the streets. As always when winter set in, the tempo of life quickened. Just as people walked faster to stir up their blood against the cold, so they threw themselves, with a sort of defiance, into a host of activities—lodge dances, church bazaars and suppers, club affairs, thimble bees.

  Betsy and her mother went Christmas shopping. Betsy bought stickpin holders for the Okto Deltas, and her mother bought fine handkerchiefs on which she would sew lace for the High Fly Whist Club ladies.

  Betsy, Tacy and Tib too went on their traditional Christmas shopping trip. It was glorious to have Tib back for that. Three abreast they swung along a crowded, festive Front Street. Their laughter froze above their lips into white clouds.

  As when they were children, they shopped for everything: jewels, perfumes, toys, furs—especially furs this year. Yet they broke with the past. They made some purchases besides the Christmas tree ornaments which had once been the sole glittering purpose of the trip.

  “We’re growing up and I don’t like it,” said Tacy, as they sat in Heinz’s later, drinking coffee.

  “We are!” Betsy leaned forward suddenly, tense. “Look at us sitting here drinking coffee! Just look!”

  Tib and Tacy, moved by earnestness, looked into the mirror which ran along the wall.

  They saw three girls wearing big, stylish, top-heavy hats. Betsy’s was covered with green wings. They had laid off their coats and their shirt waists were trim and snowy. Their finger nails were polished.

  “I don’t see anything so special,” Tib remarked.

  “Why, we’re sitting here drinking coffee,” Betsy repeated somewhat lamely. “And not just for a lark.”

  Tacy’s thoughts followed hers.

  “We’re actually juniors,” she said, “stopping in for coffee after shopping, not freshmen or sophomores pretending to be juniors stopping in for coffee after shopping.”

  Tib looked confused. “You usually take chocolate,” she said. “I’ve just got you in the habit of coffee because I come from Milwaukee.”

  “But Tib!” Betsy cried. “That isn’t the point. The point is that we’re so frightfully old.”

  “We might have husbands waiting at home,” said Tacy.

  “Wanting their suppers,” added Betsy.

  “Oh, it’s not that bad!” answered Tib and they all began to laugh.

  “Anyway, we have packages to carry,” said Tacy, reaching for her coat.

  Packages began to pile up in drawers and closets at the Ray house. Carols were being practised by the choir. Betsy wondered what gave these songs their magic. One strain could call up the quivering expectancy of Christmas Eve, childhood, joy and sadness, the lonely wonder of a star.

  Tacy sang at Rhetoricals, too full of Christmas spirit even to be very frightened. She looked beautiful, Betsy thought, her head, with its heavy auburn braids, thrown back, her blue eyes luminous.

  “I heard the bells on Christmas day,

  Their old familiar carols play,

  And wild and sweet the words repeat,

  Of Peace on Earth, Good Will to men.”

  Betsy and Tib were very proud of her.

  The Domestic Science class roasted a chicken. The girls gathered around Miss Benbow while she made the dressing, singed and washed the bird, stuffed it and sewed it up. She slid the pan expertly into the oven.

  “Now, while it’s roasting, I’ll dictate general directions for roasting poultry.”

  Her voice was monotonous, her treatment of the subject less persuasive than the savory odors emanating from the oven. Betsy’s thoughts drifted away.

  “Betsy Ray.”

  “Yes, Ma’am.” She roused herself quickly.

  “Will you baste the chicken, please?”

  Betsy rose slowly. “Baste the chicken!” What did that mean? She knew little about cooking. She walked to the stove slowly and pulled open the oven door.

  “Baste the chicken!” But baste was something you did with a needle and thread. Miss Benbow had used a needle and thread when she sewed up the chicken. She wouldn’t want it sewn up again though. Anyway, it would be too hot to touch.

  Betsy looked around frantically, and Winona mouthed instructions. Tacy lifted an imaginary object, dipped it down and raised it up, over and over again.

  “She must mean sewing,” Betsy thought desperately.

  Her immobility and all the gesturing attracted Miss Benbow’s attention.

  “What is it, Betsy? Why aren’t you basting the chicken?”

  “How can I?” Betsy blurted. “I haven’t a needle and thread!”

  Laughter broke over the classroom. Betsy turned scarlet but she laughed, too, and so did Miss Benbow.

  “Tacy,” she said. “Show her!”

  So Tacy came forward and the gesture which Betsy had interpreted as sewing proved to be spooning delicious juices over the crisply browned bird. Later this provided chicken sandwiches for the first of the Christmas parties.

  A bigger one, a dance in Schiller Hall, was planned for the last night of school. Boys were maddeningly slow with their invitations as usual, and the Social Room buzzed with speculation when the last week began.

  Betsy revolved her chances. They were fairly good, she thought. But she must look pretty tomorrow. She would wear her new Dutch collar. She was so absorbed in plans when the bell rang and they all marched into the assembly room that she gave only a careless glance to the note lying on her desk.

  It was written in pencil on a sheet of notebook paper; it looked ordinary enough. But it sho
uld have been illuminated on parchment:

  “Dear Betsy: How about the dance next

  Thursday night? Yrs, Dave.”

  Betsy read it through and immediately read it through again. She read it once more to savor the heavenly sensation of triumph which filled her. This was nice; it was very nice; it was grand; it was swell.

  Fortunately Miss Clarke was in charge of the assembly room. Betsy sped a note of acceptance on its way. She asked permission to speak to Tacy, who hugged her, and to Tib, who smothered a squeal.

  All the girls were congratulatory but more than one reminded Betsy that Dave Hunt never spoke.

  “I know. I know,” she told them blithely. “I’m memorizing David Copperfield. I’m going to recite it to him all the way down to the hall and all the way back.”

  Tib was going with Lloyd, and Tom, home from Cox Military for vacation, invited Tacy. She didn’t accept immediately.

  “I’m not sure I want to go,” she told Betsy and Tib who leaped upon her indignantly.

  “You do too want to go!”

  “What’s the matter with Tom? He looks stunning in his uniform.”

  “Oh, I like Tom all right. I just don’t like dances.”

  “You like them when you get there. You accept!”

  Tacy was indifferent about the whole affair, but Tib was almost as jubilant as Betsy. This was her first high school dance. Again she came to the Rays for supper, bringing a suitcase. They refused dessert and hurried upstairs, followed, of course, by Margaret and the cat, to dress in a giddy whirl.

  They pinned starched ruffles under their corset covers and put on their prettiest petticoats. Petticoats this year were sheath-fitting to the knees, then foamed out into lace. Tib wore peach-colored stockings and Betsy wore red ones. The coveted new princesse dresses, peach-colored and red, were laid out on the bed.

  “Now,” said Tib. “I’m ready to do your hairs.”

  “Just a moment,” said Betsy. “The bathroom was so steamy that my curls are coming out. I’ll freshen them up a bit.”

  Slipping into a kimono she raced downstairs.

  She chattered gaily to Anna while she heated her curling iron over the gas flame. Still chattering, she wound the front middle strand of hair firmly over the iron.

  “Lovey!” Anna interrupted. “What’s that I smell?”

  “Nothing. There’s always a little smell when I curl….” But Betsy lowered the iron quickly and Anna cried “Stars in the sky!” For the front middle strand of hair came along with the iron. It was tightly and beautifully curled around the smoking tongs. On her forehead there was only a charred fringe.

  With a scream Betsy ran out of the kitchen. Her father rushed in from the parlor holding his newspaper and Margaret, Mrs. Ray and Tib clattered down the stairs.

  “My hair! My hair! I can’t go to the party!” Betsy burst into tears.

  Her mother embraced her. “Of course, you can go.”

  “No, I can’t. I know I can’t.”

  “Let me look, Liebchen,” Tib commanded.

  Mrs. Ray stepped back and Tib smoothed the singed ends with small, artistic fingers.

  “I know what we can do. We’ll part your hair in the middle and make the pompadour on either side and in back. That’s the very newest fashion. The burned part will make sort of a bang.”

  “This reminds me of Little Women,” said Margaret. “Remember how Jo burned Meg’s hair?”

  Betsy blew her nose and wiped her eyes, and they all went back to the kitchen where Tib, standing on tiptoe, took personal charge of the curling. Anna kept saying consolingly that Betsy was going to look puny—her own baffling word for pretty—and Mrs. Ray declared that it wouldn’t surprise her at all to see Betsy start a fashion for bangs.

  Betsy was laughing now.

  “I doubt that,” she said, “but at least it will give me something to talk about to Dave.”

  She was glad to have an anecdote in reserve when Dave strode in at eight o’clock. There wasn’t a trace of a smile on his sober, hollow-eyed face.

  “He must admit I look nice,” Betsy thought, stealing glances in the music room mirror at a vivid, slender, dark-haired girl in a new red princesse dress.

  He shook hands with her parents, held her coat and took her party bag, all in silence. Lloyd arrived but the weather was too cold for an automobile, so the two couples started off, walking. Lloyd and Tib soon dropped behind leaving Betsy to her fate.

  There wasn’t a word from the towering figure that moved in the darkness beside her. She mentioned Murmuring Lake. No response. She tried to draw him out about the night he put the pennant on the roof. No success. Direct questions received laconic monosyllables.

  “All right,” thought Betsy, “if he wants me to do all the talking I’ll do it.” And she started talking about how she had burned her hair. She made it sound as funny as she could, but he didn’t laugh. He was as mute as a post. She spun the subject out vivaciously with comparisons of girls’ hair and boys’ hair, girls’ clothes and boys’ clothes, and they found themselves at Schiller Hall.

  “How did you get along?” Tacy and Tib whispered in the dressing room.

  “Why it’s unbelievable!” Betsy gasped. “He never said one word! Not a syllable!”

  “But you can always talk, Betsy. You’re an awful talker and he’s so good-looking.”

  He was. When the girls came out into the shining ballroom, Dave was waiting, and Betsy’s heart leaped up when she saw him, so tall, so straight, so dramatically stern. Without speaking, of course, he wrote his name three times on Betsy’s program.

  Mamie Dodd, who always played the piano for high school dances, was warming up her fingers with preliminary chords. These intensified the excitement as boys scurried about, seizing girls’ programs and scribbling down their names.

  Mamie Dodd swung into the opening waltz.

  “You are my Rose of Mexico,

  The one I loved so long ago….”

  Everyone began to dance and Betsy discovered that Dave was a very good dancer. Floating across the floor in his strong, masterful arms, she forgave him for his silence.

  Was there anything in the world, she wondered, so much fun as a dance? She two-stepped happily with Cab to “School Days, School Days, Dear Old Golden Rule Days.” Tony had asked her for the barn dance. They ran, kicked and sang:

  “Morning Cy,

  Howdy Cy,

  Gosh darn, Cyrus, but you’re

  Looking spry….”

  She and Dennie sang too:

  “O’Reilly, O’Reilly,

  It’s a name that is spoken of highly….”

  Betsy often sang as she danced, which helped out now with Dave.

  When Mamie Dodd started to play “The Merry Widow Waltz” Phil glanced across the room. Betsy smiled at him sadly. Later they had a schottische together and talked of the old days.

  Betsy hardly saw Tib. They were both far too busy for feminine society.

  Joe and Phyllis dropped in late, as though at a casual afterthought. Phyllis wasn’t dressed for a dance; she was wearing a suit and hat. The other girls’ programs had all been filled, of course, so they had to dance exclusively with each other, but they didn’t seem to mind.

  Betsy watched them over her partner’s shoulder. Joe danced springily, as though he were enjoying himself. Phyllis was languid; her upturned smile was teasing.

  Betsy rejoiced fiercely that she had come with Dave Hunt…“an outstanding boy, a star athlete. Every girl in school has been hoping he would take her out, and for his first date he chose me.”

  But she saw no indication that Joe Willard knew or cared with whom she had come. He smiled at her. He even waved in high good humor. Betsy waved back radiantly.

  After the dance everyone went to Heinz’s. The Okto Deltas and their escorts pulled four tables together. They made a joyful racket. Dave Hunt’s silence was drowned out, but parting from Tib, Betsy whispered, “Now for David Copperfield.”

  She wasn�
�t quite reduced to David Copperfield. By discussing every person at the party, every single boy, girl, and chaperone, dancing in general and barn dancing in particular, Schiller Hall as a place in which to dance and Mamie Dodd as a musician, she managed to talk steadily to the steps of her own porch.

  When they parted there, she was rewarded. She gave Dave her hand and said, “I had a very nice time.” He didn’t answer but he held her hand firmly, and his fascinating, unexpected smile flickered across his face.

  “So did I. I’ll take you to the next dance,” he announced.

  “Oh—will you?” Betsy cried joyfully. The absurdity of her response didn’t dawn on her until she was telling Tib after the boys had left. Then they went off into peals of laughter.

  “Oh—will you?” Betsy mimicked, dropping to her knees, lifting her arms beseechingly.

  “Betsy! You dumm kopf! You are very lucky that he wants to take you again.”

  School next day was given over to skylarking. Boys were waving mistletoe; the blackboards were decorated with cartoons, slams and jokes. Assembly included a Christmas tree, with Mr. Gaston acting as Santa Claus. One after another various students were called to the platform to receive joke presents.

  Suddenly Betsy heard her name. “Will Miss Betsy Warrington Ray Humphreys Markham Edwards Brandish Hunt and so forth please come forward?” She had started down the aisle with the first name. A new one thundered out with every step she took. She reached the platform covered with blushes while the assembly room roared with laughter.

  Mr. Gaston, grinning broadly, held a curling iron.

  “This,” he read loudly, “is to curl the bang now growing on your lily-white, intellectual brow.”

  Betsy accepted it to hilarious applause.

  She acted plagued, of course, and ran down from the platform, ducking her head. But she was really thoroughly pleased. She must be that most desirable object, a “popular” girl. “Popular” with boys, of course.

  Before she dropped off to sleep that night, she relived the whole scene, smiling in the darkness.