An Anthropologist's Arrival: A Memoir

Picnics and Dances

78 Picnics and Dances sixteen! at that age a girl is at her loveliest. Mother used to bend on me one of her angel looks and say, “Standing with reluctant feet, where the brook and river meet.”* I was reluctant all right. My feet had not grown any smaller or my hair less lanky, even though it was now long and worn in a thick braid. God had not relieved me of the awful curse of being bright, and people talked about it in hushed voices. Mother gave me an autograph album on my sixteenth birthday and wrote on the first page, “Be good, sweet child. And let who will be clever.”† But how could you even tell what was going to sound clever? If I told a boy at one of the school dances that he was more like Maurice De Bracy than Reginald Front-de-Boeuf, he wasn’t flattered a bit.‡ The girls jeered at me for reading off the Latin translation. “Grind! Grind!” snickered Francine, but I hadn’t been grinding. I liked Latin, but I learned not to say so. It was Margaret who ought to have been sixteen first. She hadn’t had any awkward age. Her golden hair and her slender hands and feet carried her straight through the teenage years like Venus on her shell. “Cometh up as a flower,” Mother said, looking at her from the window.§ We were in the sewing room and our half-yearly seamstress, Abbie, was trying a new pink dress on me. It just wouldn’t seem to fit. “I guess I’m more like a weed,” I said with what I considered a hollow laugh. * See Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1842 poem “Maidenhood.” † See Charles Kingsley’s 1856 poem “A Farewell.” ‡ These are two characters from Sir Walter Scott’s 1820 historical novel Ivanhoe.§ Underhill is referring to Rhoda Broughton’s controversial 1867 novel Cometh up as a Flower, in which the protagonist, a young and brash woman named Nell LaStrange, is torn between conflicting commitments to family and her own passions. Picnics and Dances 79 “Ruth, darling, where do you get such ideas?” Mother’s eyes were on Margaret, but she put her arms around us both, as she so often did. “My darling girls,” said Mother, “I want you to know, you must always know, that I love you both equally.” When Mother said those words, I took them for gospel. Yet, long afterward, I came upon that sentence of Shakespeare’s, “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.”* Then I knew, but by then I had ceased to care. * See William Shakespeare’s (ca. 1600) The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, act III, scene 2. Figure 12. Ruth as a teenager, circa 1900. Becoming ruth underhill 80 • Mother went out of the room to call Margaret, who was to be fitted with a blue dress, all frills, and Abbie said to me, “Your mother is an angel.” I realized the awful implications. I was about old enough to be an angel myself, and there were no signs at all. I had, indeed, joined the church, and for a time, I had hoped a great deal of God, but he did not make my hair curl or unloosen my tongue. This sounds as though I was unhappy all the time, but actually those indigestion-like pangs were rare. The sky was so blue in that summer of my sixteenth year. The shadows of elms on the hilly streets of our town were entrancing. I knew that boys from the military school came to spend afternoons on the porches of other girls, but I could not imagine how that was brought about and did not want it. Mother now and then invited a boy to Sunday supper, and she and Father talked to him politely about his lessons. Then he went home, and the next guest would be a different one. I was much happier when it was not Sunday or a dance night, and I could take a book under the maples or just lie there without one. I had three or four serial stories running in my head, and sometimes I let them unroll during the afternoon as well as at night before sleeping. Margaret and I used to build up these stories together. Now Margaret had a best girlfriend at school, and they told secrets, even about boys...