#118 – MORE GIRLS

Terri was not the only young summer lady coming into her own in the mountains. All our lives we had known the children of old Mrs. Gibbs who were close to our age, and they too were now in puberty. At a swimming hole I gently teased Molly from Boston, who was stately and tanned, and I also flirted with a pretty, open faced blonde girl, Mary from Baltimore, who had been my favorite in our early days. Mary and I had been card carrying members of the Captain Marvel Club. Now Molly and I decided to write each other when we returned to our boarding schools. I was actually in the world – at last!

In the telephone room was that genealogy chart that, with a lot of “begats,” showed we were related to Mary and Molly. Above the phone there was that small framed reproduction of a painting of a naked woman rising from a huge clam shell. Something that, with all these new feelings, seemed urgent. A naked woman even in this house where sex was not mentioned any more than it had been in Gaga’s celebrated novels.

The phone, like so much else in the White Pines world, had seemed to be from another century. It included a polished wooden box attached to the wall above a desk-like shelf that held a note pad and the area’s tiny phone book. It had a crank handle on the side and what looked like a bicycle bell on top. You talked into a open cone on the front of the box, and listened with an ear piece that your took from a hook. You picked up the ear piece, turned the crank, which rang the bell and alerted the phone company, and the Sugar Hill operator would come on. She could get you anyone anywhere in Sugar Hill if you just gave the name, no number needed. Nana talked of how on any given night the operator knew who was having dinner at whose house.



There were other girls in addition to those on the genealogy chart. There were the Morris sisters, kind of pretty already but, unlike Terri, so undeveloped that they still had spindly legs. Nana invited the sisters to White Pines for an awkward lunch one day with Peter and me, the four of us being served by Nana’s garrulous maid Evelyn at the long table. We and the girls could not figure out what this was supposed to be about. But Terri! I knew what that was about. I had never in life seen a girl I thought so appealing, not even the gorgeous, precocious blonde girl in our 8th grade class who the previous winter had been exchanging letters with my more confident twin brother.

Up till now Peter had always been the focus of attention. One evening Terri’s father was giving us a ride back to White Pines from White Wings in their station wagon after we had spent a couple of hours with Terri and her little brother. I was in the back seat, and Peter for some reason in the area behind it. In the dark he began, in whispers, pleading with me, which was something new, and I could see he was crying. He was so justifiably upset that I had hogged Terri’s attention – though it seemed a fair balancing of our accounts in this hard world in which he had seemed so often to have all the attention, leaving nothing for me.

THE NEXT SUMMER.







Terri was not the only young summer lady coming into her own in the mountains. All our lives we had known the children of old Mrs. Gibbs who were close to our age, and they too were now in puberty. At a swimming hole I gently teased Molly from Boston, who was stately and tanned, and I also flirted with a pretty, open faced blonde girl, Mary from Baltimore, who had been my favorite in our early days. Mary and I had been card carrying members of the Captain Marvel Club. Now Molly and I decided to write each other when we returned to our boarding schools. I was actually in the world – at last!

In the telephone room I must was that genealogy chart that, with a lot of “begats,” showed we were related to Mary and Molly. Above the phone there was that small framed reproduction of a painting of a naked woman rising from a huge clam shell. Something that, with all these new feelings, seemed urgent. A naked woman even in this house where sex was not mentioned any more than it had been in Gaga’s celebrated novels.

The phone, like so much else in the White Pines world, had seemed to be from another century. It included a polished wooden box attached to the wall above a desk-like shelf that held a note pad and the area’s tiny phone book. It had a crank handle on the side and what looked like a bicycle bell on top. You talked into a open cone on the front of the box, and listened with an ear piece that your took from a hook. You picked up the ear piece, turned the crank, which rang the bell and alerted the phone company, and the Sugar Hill operator would come on. She could get you anyone anywhere in Sugar Hill if you just gave the name, no number needed. Nana talked of how on any given night the operator knew who was having dinner at whose house.



There were other girls in addition to those on the genealogy chart. There were the Morris sisters, kind of pretty already but, unlike Terri, so undeveloped that they still had spindly legs. Nana invited the sisters to White Pines for an awkward lunch one day with Peter and me, the four of us being served by Nana’s garrulous maid Evelyn at the long table. We and the girls could not figure out what this was supposed to be about. But Terri! I knew what that was about. I had never in life seen a girl I thought so appealing, not even the gorgeous, precocious blonde girl in our 8th grade class who the previous winter had been exchanging letters with my more confident twin brother.

Up till now Peter had always been the focus of attention. One evening Terri’s father was giving us a ride back to White Pines from White Wings in their station wagon after we had spent a couple of hours with Terri and her little brother. I was in the back seat, and Peter for some reason in the area behind it. In the dark he began, in whispers, pleading with me, which was something new, and I could see he was crying. He was so justifiably upset that I had hogged Terri’s attention – though it seemed a fair balancing of our accounts in this hard world in which he had seemed so often to have all the attention, leaving nothing for me.