8
8 Sunny days in October or November, Alex and Sharon liked to get off the school bus a few miles from home and walk the rest of the way. They found relief in swinging out their legs along the road. High school was an experience unlike anything Alex had ever imagined. How she survived it she didn’t know. It wasn’t only that she was a plump, plain bookworm in thick glasses, who actually liked an intellectual argument. It made her face hot with pleasure to think about the differences between the American Revolution and the French Revolution, just ten years later. Something else embarrassed her at high school, despite her efforts to ignore it. Something to do with her family. She told herself that everyone at this ridiculous school came from a dif‹cult background. It didn’t help. Alexandra Leader still felt like a sideshow. Her fatherless family was odd, living all winter in an empty resort, and they needed so much taking care of. And it seemed to fall to her to take the care, to mind the details. Meanwhile, her interest in school went beyond a desire to get good grades. She wanted to know things, and it made her a freak. She could be excited by classroom discussions long after other students in the room had fallen asleep. They resented her for it, or put her in a category off by herself. Sometimes it was just her and the teacher, like Mr. Berry in world history today, going on about the eighteenth century—while other kids watched or napped. Mr. Berry liked speculating as much as she did. When the bell rang and the other kids scooped up their books and were out the door, Alex was startled for an instant. Oh, we have to stop now, she realized. Now Sharon had joined her at Miltonia High School as a freshman , and Alex could see that Sharon ‹t in better. Sharon was calm and pretty, redemptive somehow. She sewed her own clothes and managed to use a six-dollar clothing allowance from Mom to build an acceptable collection of skirts, petticoats, and clean socks. She washed her sweaters and her new bra in Woolite every weekend, and she put her hair up in curlers every night. Alex did not know that Sharon carried the same sense of freakishness, the same longing to blend in. The two of them together did not go over their heartaches; they escaped them by talking about other things. Alex and Sharon would get off the bus at the top of Hebron Road, 62 two miles from home, and walk the unpaved county road up the hill toward Wilgosch’s farm, then leave the road for the winding sandy track across his farm down to the lake. Crossing Wilgosch’s land, you could stay in the shade of the ravine among the blazing maples and white ash, wading through leaves, and maybe startle a deer or some pheasants. Or you could leave the ravine for the high ground, walk over the tops of the small, rugged hills, almost as sharp as breaking waves, that Alex knew were glacial moraines and Sharon knew were good places to stop talking and just walk while reliving scenes from the movies she had seen at the Luna this year and couldn’t forget: Carousel, Picnic, and the reprise of Gone with the Wind. Such loneliness, such love. Someday she would have love in her life, just like that. Except that she’d do it right. He wouldn’t leave her, whoever he was, because she’d do it right. She’d be irresistible. She’d be so kind, so understanding, so unsel‹sh. Sharon couldn’t wait to stand up to a man’s insecurity and ill treatment . To conquer his doubts. Almost against his will he would take her in his arms, against his dusty, sweaty, ragged shirt (missing some buttons?), he would hold her against him . . . sometimes the two of them were in Alaska, and he would hold her against his dense fur parka. Until they got to the cabin. And then he would start a ‹re in the little barrel stove, take off his parka, give her a hard, cruel, desirous look. In this story he would be wol›ike and sel‹sh . . . something like the Sheik in that book that mom brought home from the St. Vincent de Paul in Miltonia, laughing because she liked it so much when she...
OR
