The Finishing School by Gail Godwin Page B

all—and still Craven Ravenel had not asked me for one of the dances. We hadn’t even been introduced yet, and I was getting worried. So you know what I did? When nobody was looking, I wrote his name in for the last dance.”
    “But what if he’d asked some other girl for the last dance?” asked Becky, swishing back and forth in front of the mirror with one of her ballerina poses. I knew this story well, but this was Becky’s first time hearing it.
    “I’m coming to that,” said my mother, smiling at Becky. “What happened was, when other boys came to ask me for the last dance, I would look down at my card and say, ‘Oh, I believe I’ve already given that dance to someone called Craven Ravenel.’ And the news got back to him, because, when the last dance came, suddenly there he was. ‘Miss Louise Justin,’ he said formally, ‘I hear you have given me the honor of the last dance.’ And so I danced the last dance with Craven Ravenel.”
    “But what would you have done if he
had
already asked some other girl for the last dance?” persisted Becky, who had listened intently to the story.
    “Oh, I had prepared for that, too,” said my mother. “If he hadn’t shown up before the band started playing, I was going to tell my cousin I had a headache and had to go upstairs and lie down. The dance was being held at her house. And then everybody would have assumed that poor Craven Ravenel had had to find another dance partner at the last minute.”
    As Mr. Mott had predicted, the rain stopped. Shortly before lunchtime, the sun came out, and my mother said, “Well, Ladies and Gentlemen, what is your pleasure for lunch?” Telling the oldstory had restored some of her former jauntiness. Jem said he’d like a tuna casserole, and after my mother, with just a touch of humor in her solicitation, had ascertained that Becky had nothing against tuna, cream of mushroom soup, potato chips, or a combination of those ingredients, I volunteered to ride down to Terwiliger’s to pick up the needed can of soup. After my refusal to try on the dress, I thought it would become me to make this small peace offering.
    Terwiliger’s was a country store, run by an old farmer. It smelled of animal feeds and fertilizers and catered to people who grew things; but it suffered consumers like ourselves when we ran out of eggs or forgot some staple from the big Kingston supermarket.
    I had just located the only can of cream of mushroom soup on the depleted shelf and was blowing the dust off it, when Ursula DeVane came sauntering toward me. She was wearing Army fatigue clothes (my father had brought home some like that) and her hair was quite damp and curled all around her face. She balanced a little box of green-leafed plants on the tips of her forefingers, as if she were a waiter about to serve them.
    “You know, I’ve been thinking about you.” she began, as if we were simply continuing our conversation from several weeks before. “I’ve been thinking about why you never came back for that swim.” She brandished the little box close to my nose. The leaves emanated a smell like licorice. “Isn’t it a wonderful smell, basil? I planted our vegetable garden this morning. Just put on my slicker and planted everything in the rain. It’s the ideal way, in a soft rain. You don’t have to water afterward. Then I went in and was running my hot bath and was just about to pour the bubbles in, when I remembered I’d forgotten the basil! Do you know what I concluded when you didn’t come back?”
    “What?”
    “I concluded”—and the smile that was hers alone made its irrepressible way over her features—“that you were afraid of snakes.”
    I must have answered something. I had forgotten how compelling her voice could be, with its low, rich timbre that was both intimate and ironic. Then we were walking together to the cash register, where the dour old farmer, Mr. Terwiliger, waited.
    “Would you believe it, Twiggy,” said Ursula,