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Show 26 outlined her legs with such clarity that my father stopped the car short of the back door, the sun just right. She glanced around with a sullen defiant look, then raised a piece of laundry to the line, legs spread. "That sure is a thin dress," said my father in a new tone, "for such a cold day." Pained by his coarseness I looked away, but quickly glanced back. I didn't find her beautiful. Her face didn't strike me as the movie star kind, and since she was around twenty I saw in it none of the pure girlish delicacy of Elizabeth Brown, yet she was pretty, and I remember a sullenness which I liked, a go-to-hell in her look at the world which was not exactly hostile, not aggressive, but the look of a person who expected to be preached to and wasn't having any of that crap any longer. Her hair was long when most young women were no longer wearing it long, and yellow, the pale yellow of good butter, that creamy yellow that's as soft as rainwater. Out hanging clothes she had it pinned up loosely in back, the fine ends curling and loose hairs rising everywhere, caught up by the sun into a soft golden cloud, almost a halo. But those legs! It was several weeks before I saw her again, me so criminally self-absorbed. Though my voice was becoming less hesitantly and more predictably baritone, my life was still swinging on its physiological axis so that sometimes I felt like a compass whose needle has decided to point south. How uncomplicated life was pre-puberty, when my big problem was bib overalls. I hated them. Popular for city kids now, they branded me a hick and when I took off my shirt in the summer to get a tan, I had those straps over my shoulders and my chest covered. I was losing my place in the neighborhood gang, and wearing them to school in the fourth, fifth and even unto the sixth grade was humiliating. I wanted Levis. After a two-year campaign |
