dance, to secure us for the next one.
We all wore white cotton gloves. Only with the greatest of effort could I sometimes feel, or fancy I felt, the warmth of a boy’s hand—through his glove and my glove—on my right palm. My gloved left hand lay lightly, always lightly, on his jacket shoulder. His gloved right hand lay, forgotten by both of us, across the clumsy back of my dress, across its lumpy velvet bow or its long cold zipper concealed by brocade.
Between dances when we held hands, we commonly interleaved our fingers, as if for the sheer challenge of it, for our thick cotton gloves permitted almost no movement, and we quickly cut off the circulation in each other’s fingers. If for some reason we had released each other’s hands quickly, without thinking, our gloves would have come off and dropped to the ballroom floor together still entwined, while our numbed bare fingers slowly regained sensation and warmth.
We were all on some list. We were to be on that list for life, it turned out, unless we left. I had no inkling of this crucial fact, although the others, I believe, did. I was mystified to see that whoever devised the list misunderstood things so. The best-liked girl in our class, my friend Ellin Hahn, was conspicuously excluded. Because she was precisely fifty percent Jewish, she had to go to Jewish dancing school. The boys courted her anyway, one after the other, and only made do with the rest of us at dancing school. From other grades at our school, all sorts of plain, unintelligent, lifeless girls were included. These were quiet or silly girls, who seemed at school to recognize their rather low places, but who were unreasonably exuberant at dancing school, and who were gradually revealed to have known all along that in the larger arena they occupied very high places indeed. And these same lumpish, plain, very rich girls wound up marrying, to my unending stupefaction, the very liveliest and handsomest of the boys.
The boys. There were, essentially, a dozen or so of them and a dozen or so of us, so it was theoretically possible, as it were, to run through all of them by the time you finished school. We saw our dancing-school boys everywhere wewent. Yet they were by no means less extraordinary for being familiar. They were familiar only visually: their eyebrows we could study in quick glimpses as we danced, eyebrows that met like spliced ropes over their noses; the winsome whorls of their hair we could stare at openly in church, hair that radiated spirally from the backs of their quite individual skulls; the smooth skin on their pliant torsos at the country-club pool, all so fascinating, each so different; and their weird little graceful bathing suits: the boys. Richard, Rich, Richie, Ricky, Ronny, Donny, Dan.
They called each other witty names, like Jag-Off. They could dribble. They walked clumsily but assuredly through the world, kicking things for the hell of it. By way of conversation, they slugged each other on their interesting shoulders.
They moved in violent jerks from which we hung back, impressed and appalled, as if from horses slamming the slats of their stalls. This and, as we would have put it, their messy eyelashes. In our heartless, condescending, ignorant way we loved their eyelashes, the fascinating and dreadful way the black hairs curled and tangled. That’s the kind of vitality they had, the boys, that’s the kind of novelty and attraction: their very eyelashes came out amok, and unthinkably original. That we loved, that and their cloddishness, their broad, vaudevillian reactions. They were always doing slow takes. Their breathtaking lack of subtlety in every particular, we thought—and then sometimes a gleam of consciousness in their eyes, as surprising as if you’d caught a complicit wink from a brick.
Ah, the boys. How little I understood them! How little I even glimpsed who they were. How little any of us did, if I may extrapolate. How completely I condescended to
We all wore white cotton gloves. Only with the greatest of effort could I sometimes feel, or fancy I felt, the warmth of a boy’s hand—through his glove and my glove—on my right palm. My gloved left hand lay lightly, always lightly, on his jacket shoulder. His gloved right hand lay, forgotten by both of us, across the clumsy back of my dress, across its lumpy velvet bow or its long cold zipper concealed by brocade.
Between dances when we held hands, we commonly interleaved our fingers, as if for the sheer challenge of it, for our thick cotton gloves permitted almost no movement, and we quickly cut off the circulation in each other’s fingers. If for some reason we had released each other’s hands quickly, without thinking, our gloves would have come off and dropped to the ballroom floor together still entwined, while our numbed bare fingers slowly regained sensation and warmth.
We were all on some list. We were to be on that list for life, it turned out, unless we left. I had no inkling of this crucial fact, although the others, I believe, did. I was mystified to see that whoever devised the list misunderstood things so. The best-liked girl in our class, my friend Ellin Hahn, was conspicuously excluded. Because she was precisely fifty percent Jewish, she had to go to Jewish dancing school. The boys courted her anyway, one after the other, and only made do with the rest of us at dancing school. From other grades at our school, all sorts of plain, unintelligent, lifeless girls were included. These were quiet or silly girls, who seemed at school to recognize their rather low places, but who were unreasonably exuberant at dancing school, and who were gradually revealed to have known all along that in the larger arena they occupied very high places indeed. And these same lumpish, plain, very rich girls wound up marrying, to my unending stupefaction, the very liveliest and handsomest of the boys.
The boys. There were, essentially, a dozen or so of them and a dozen or so of us, so it was theoretically possible, as it were, to run through all of them by the time you finished school. We saw our dancing-school boys everywhere wewent. Yet they were by no means less extraordinary for being familiar. They were familiar only visually: their eyebrows we could study in quick glimpses as we danced, eyebrows that met like spliced ropes over their noses; the winsome whorls of their hair we could stare at openly in church, hair that radiated spirally from the backs of their quite individual skulls; the smooth skin on their pliant torsos at the country-club pool, all so fascinating, each so different; and their weird little graceful bathing suits: the boys. Richard, Rich, Richie, Ricky, Ronny, Donny, Dan.
They called each other witty names, like Jag-Off. They could dribble. They walked clumsily but assuredly through the world, kicking things for the hell of it. By way of conversation, they slugged each other on their interesting shoulders.
They moved in violent jerks from which we hung back, impressed and appalled, as if from horses slamming the slats of their stalls. This and, as we would have put it, their messy eyelashes. In our heartless, condescending, ignorant way we loved their eyelashes, the fascinating and dreadful way the black hairs curled and tangled. That’s the kind of vitality they had, the boys, that’s the kind of novelty and attraction: their very eyelashes came out amok, and unthinkably original. That we loved, that and their cloddishness, their broad, vaudevillian reactions. They were always doing slow takes. Their breathtaking lack of subtlety in every particular, we thought—and then sometimes a gleam of consciousness in their eyes, as surprising as if you’d caught a complicit wink from a brick.
Ah, the boys. How little I understood them! How little I even glimpsed who they were. How little any of us did, if I may extrapolate. How completely I condescended to
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