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Show dress. Outside it might be 10° or 20 below and we did push and shove a little, jockeying for position close to the heat, the twins contorting themselves to get out of night clothes and into dresses without showing too much skin. It was that stove which, overheating the pipe, burned the house down, though for years I believed I had caused the fire because it happened on the night of my sixth birthday, the longest night of the year, December 21st, and I thought the fire had started from the candles on my cake. The older I got the more that seemed natural, that I should be some kind of disaster. What a mess. We had to rent a house in town from which my father commuted to the farm. The school there was immense, with two entire rooms devoted to first grade, and not one Katie Cannon. For the next eight years I kept expecting to see her on a Saturday afternoon in town, and maybe I did glimpse her black hair once or twice at moving picture matinees, at a distance and in that dark I could not be sure, but not once did I see her up close enough to recognize those smiling eyes. Yet when I started high school and she turned up in the same English class, I knew instantly who she was. Constant for eight years, my heart wasn't about to make a mistake. My first grade teacher in town was Miss Nailes, a tiny woman about four-six who with her erect bearing and stern face looked like a giant to me, a midget giant, a spinster who wore black button shoes up over her ankles and black full skirts down over her ankles. Her unhappy face disapproved of everything. I did not fall in love with her. She terrified me, the new world terrified me, and I didn't fall in love until the second grade and Miss Turner, who was young, golden, pretty, happy, voluptuous. When she smiled I loved arithmetic and writing and especially reading in the reading circle where I sat on one end of the horseshoe of kids, near her. Across |