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9. The Queen of Hearts
- University of Missouri Press
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117 9 The Queen of Hearts Shetland sweaters were a must, but they were expensive, especially at Steve and Anna’s, the select little shop in Westhampton where St. Catherine’s girls bought their clothes. My mother rummaged in an attic trunk and found a sweater, dusky rose in color, with the large-yarn look of a Shetland, and she gave it to me. She had worn it in college, she said proudly, and since I was tall, it just might fit me. Wearing it and my fashionable new shoes—clunky boats of brilliant white leather with saddles of brown and broad white laces—I made my way toward my assigned desk in the Middle School’s study hall, avoiding the ring-binder notebooks that edged into the narrow aisle as a few intent girls finished their homework assignments. There was no talking in study hall, except during morning announcements and morning chapel, when only the teachers talked. The seventh graders sat one behind another in long rows that abutted matching rows of eighth graders. My desk was next to eighth grader Armistead Merriweather, to whom I had never spoken because I saw her only in study hall. Armistead was as exotic to me as a movie star. Her skin looked velvety, tawny. Hers were the largest, most liquid brown eyes I had ever seen. She had fingernails —polished—and a little gold ring. Her clothes came from Steve and Anna’s. Our teachers counted on their authority to keep the silence in study hall, but it also helped that, to a seventh grader, most eighth graders appeared to be unapproachably mature and experienced. I wouldn’t have dared begin a conversation with an eighth grader. When I looked at my seventh grade classmates, I saw the bodies of girls still coltish and unsure. The eighth graders wore their sweaters and skirts with grace and style. Lipstick wasn’t allowed at school, 118 The Prodigal Daughter but we knew that many older girls had a tube of lipstick hidden away in their pencil cases for a quick swipe once they were released onto Grove Avenue at three o’clock, when the eighth graders gathered at Doc White’s pharmacy on the corner of Grove and Maple to talk with the boys from St. Christopher’s. If a boy had a crush on you, he was “snowed.” From the bus stop on the opposite corner, I watched the crowd at Doc White’s, and like most of my friends, I was gawky, tongue-tied, and envious. In field hockey, an eighth grader’s body followed Miss Fleet’s instructions with apparent flawless ease. I stumbled over my stick, failing to send the ball with a confident crack to its destination in the field. How did they do it—Kitty Anderson, Marty Davenport, Lucy Day, Isabel Rawlings? In their short yellow uniforms with bloomers, they couldn’t have looked more comical, and yet, given their skill, they managed to give off a gritty allure. Studying them from a distance , I imagined my own body into existence, burgeoning toward a maturity that wouldn’t have to think about itself. With a swift, sidelong glance I studied Armistead Merriweather. She was perfect. Perfect, but not a top student or a top athlete. Perfect, but with a most peculiar manner during morning prayers, the time I had my best look at her. During chapel at our desks, I couldn’t take my eyes off Armistead, even though my head was bowed, and my mind supposedly focused on an omniscient Triune God with the same concentration I gave to ungovernable fractions. Together, both grades prayed what we had memorized from the Book of Common Prayer, reciting by heart the required General Confession: Almighty and most Merciful Father, We have erred and strayed from Thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. As she spoke the words softly, Armistead’s head bent so low to her desk that her mouth met the wood. Her full, generous mouth opened slightly, an open-mouthed kiss that skimmed the surface, not quite kissing—but what else was it? I heard small gasps of breath. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done. And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us. The desk was a dark mirror. I could almost see Armistead’s warm breath...