American Childhood by Annie Dillard

silver-maple and black-oak leaves, or pale cottonwood leaves and aspen, slipped down to the tight surface of the moving water. A few leaves fell on the decks of Father’s boat when he tied up at an Ohio island for lunch; he raked them off with his fingers, probably, and thought it damned strange to be raking leaves at all.
    Molly, the new baby, had grown less mysterious; she smiled and crawled over the grass or the rug. The family had begun spending summers around a country-club pool. Amy and I had started at a girls’ day school, the Ellis School; I belted on the green jumper I would wear, in one size or another, for the next eight years, until I left Pittsburgh altogether. I was taking piano lessons, art classes. And I started dancing school.
     
    The dancing-school boys, it turned out, were our boys, the boys, who ascended through the boys’ private school as we ascended through the girls’. I was surprised to see them that first Friday afternoon in dancing school. I was surprised, that is, to see that I already knew them, that I already knew almost everyone in the room; I was surprised that dancing school, as an institution, was eerily more significant than all my other lessons and classes, and that it was not peripheral at all, but central.
    For here we all were. I’d seen the boys in, of all places, church—one of the requisite Presbyterian churches of Pittsburgh. I’d seen them at the country club, too. I knew the girls from church, the country club, and school. Here we all were at dancing school; here we all were, dressed to the teeth and sitting on rows of peculiar painted and gilded chairs. Here we all were, boys and girls, plunged by our conspiring elders into the bewildering social truth that we were meant to make each other’s acquaintance. Dancing school.
    There in that obscure part of town, there in that muffled enormous old stone building, among those bizarre and mismatched adults who seemed grimly to dance their lives away in that dry and claustrophobic ballroom—there, it proved, was the unlikely arena where we were foreordained toassemble, Friday after Friday, for many years until the distant and seemingly unrelated country clubs took over the great work of providing music for us later and later into the night until the time came when we should all have married each other up, at last.
     
    “Isn’t he cute?” Bebe would whisper to me as we sat in the girls’ row on the edge of the ballroom floor. I had never before seen a painted chair; my mother favored wood for its own sake. The lugubrious instructors were demonstrating one of several fox-trots.
    Which?
    “Ronny,” she whispered one week, and “Danny,” the next. I would find that one in the boys’ row. He’d fastened his fists to his seat and was rocking back and forth from his hips all unconsciously, open-mouthed.
    Sure.
    “Isn’t he cute?” Mimsie would ask at school, and I would think of this Ricky or Dick, recall some stray bit of bubbling laughter in which he had been caught helpless, pawing at his bangs with his bent wrist, his saliva whitening his braces’ rubber bands and occasionally forming a glassy pane at the corner of his mouth; I would remember the way his head bobbed, and imagine those two parallel rods at the back of his neck, which made a thin valley where a short tip of hair lay tapered and curled; the way he scratched his ear by wincing, raising a shoulder, and rubbing the side of his head on his jacket’s sleeve seam. Cute?
    You bet he was cute. They all were.
     
    Onstage the lonely pianist played “Mountain Greenery.” Sometimes he played “Night and Day.” It was Friday afternoon; we could have been sled riding. On Fridays, our unrelated private schools, boys’ and girls’, released us early. On Fridays, dancing school met, an hour later each year, until at last we met in the dark, disrupting our families’ dinners, and at last certain boys began to hold our hands, carefully looking away, after a given