Sarah Phillips by Andrea Lee (beach books .TXT) 📗

crowd of white students, a policeman at her side. Prescott didn’t jeer at me—it had, after all, invited me—but it shut me off socially with a set of almost imperceptible closures and polite rejections. If one waves a hand through a tidal pool, one finds the same kind of minute and instantaneous retreat. The first time I recognized it was in the seventh-grade locker room; I came in to change out of my sneakers and heard a cheerful din of questions and answers: “What are you going to wear?” “My blue!” “My green!” “The pink satin sash!” “The patent pumps from Altman’s!”

“Where is everybody going?” I asked Nan Mason, who had the locker next to mine.

Nan had pinkish hair, pale freckles, and the white eyelashes of a rabbit. I had often pitied her for being so ugly, but now she looked as if she pitied me. “To Friday Evening,” she said, and had the grace to drop her eyes. “The dancing class.”

“Friday Evening?” I asked, but Nan was looking for something in her locker. For several weeks after that I was certain that the mothers who organized the Friday Evening dancing classes for Prescott girls and Newbold Academy boys had simply forgotten to invite me.

Gretchen Manning, my closest friend at school, didn’t attend Friday Evening, either; it was not because she wasn’t invited but because her father, Oswald Manning—famed ban-the-bomb curmudgeon of the Penn history department—thought it was nonsense and refused to pay the fee. Gretchen, whose real name was Margarita, after Bulgakov’s heroine, was tall and plump, with waist-length flat black hair, which she seldom washed, a luminous pink complexion, and a pair of small, sharp hazel eyes. Her uniform tunic, faded and too tight over her expanding breasts, was generally covered with spots of food and of paint from art class and she was lamentably bad at sports. We became friends when we were both assigned to Squad Six, the hockey team for athletic pariahs. In the free-and-easy atmosphere of my former school, I had been considered somewhat of a star of girls’ gym, but at Prescott, on the verge of what was to be a quirky and secretive adolescence, I turned into a willful misfit on the playing field, hungry for glory but unwilling to exert myself. I looked with interest at Gretchen, who made her way down the field with a certain monumental grace but a dead slowness.

“I’m an endomorph,” she announced the first time she sat down next to me on the leaf-strewn grass (we were awaiting our turns at an exercise—dribble, dribble, dribble, pass). “And you’re an ectomorph. That means that no matter what we do we’ll never have muscles like those cows out there. What I’d like to do is to join a harem and do nothing but eat Reese’s Cups and make love with the caliph once in a while.”

“I’d rather join the Navy,” I said.

Gretchen stretched out on the grass, propping herself on one round elbow, and peered at me through an oily fall of hair. “My father knows yours,” she said. “Your father is James Forrest Phillips, the civil-rights minister. My father is very interested in civil rights, and so am I.”

“Don’t do me any favors,” I said in a tough, snappish voice I had learned from Dragnet.

Gretchen looked at me admiringly. “Don’t you think it’s rather romantic to be a Negro?” she asked. “I do. A few years ago, when Mama and Daddy used to talk to us about the Freedom Riders in the South, my sister Sarabeth and I spent a whole night up crying because we weren’t Negroes. If I were a Negro, I’d be like a knight and skewer the Ku Klux Klan. My father says Negroes are the tragic figures of America. Isn’t it exciting to be a tragic figure? It’s a kind of destiny!”

For the rest of seventh grade, Gretchen and I made a comic duo: the fat and the lean. We were close with the cranky, stifling closeness possible only to a pair of hyper-educated pre-adolescent misfits. We jockeyed for supremacy in the English class taught by the red-haired Miss Whitaker, fresh from Bryn Mawr, and we determined that Gretchen was the philosopher, I the poet. We wept together over Katherine Mansfield stories and, having studied my mother’s copy of Summerhill, introduced profanity into our conversation so that we could be free children. (“I’m afraid it’s too late,” said Gretchen. “We’re both doomed to frigidity.”) We formed a two-member society of revolutionaries, who sang a backward version of the school song and with private signals indicated which members of the Prescott Athletic Association and Charity League would be executed in the first round of purges. Gretchen despised the school and often condemned it, using what she knew of her father’s Marxist rhetoric. I aped her, but I had a secret: I wanted to fit in, really fit in, and if Lissa Randolph or Kemp Massie, rulers of the Olympian band of suntanned, gold-bangled popular girls, shimmering in their Fair Isle sweaters, had so much as crooked a finger at me, I would have left Gretchen and followed the way the apostles followed Christ. No one knew my secret—not my parents, who bragged with relief about my levelheaded adjustment; not my brother, Matthew, who might have understood. At night I gloated over a vision of myself transformed by some magical agency into a Shetland-clad blonde with a cute blip of a nickname; reading the Sunday paper, I searched out references to Prescott in the society wedding announcements.

It was Gretchen who introduced me to the secret places at the school: the dusty caverns behind the Flemish tapestries in the Assembly Hall; the muddy bank, downstream from the boathouse, where you could find arrowheads; the heap of fieldstone near the crafts barn that was supposed to cover an Underground Railroad tunnel; the basement under Carroll Theater that held the remains of Prescott stage sets from the twenties and thirties.

After lunch one afternoon, we dared each other