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

I had learned to laugh seemed to bring me closer to growing up than the small breasts that had appeared with such fascinating suddenness on my chest. In the weeks that followed the casting announcement, when Gretchen and I walked by the cook who waved to us I didn’t return his greeting as Gretchen did, but I looked seriously at him, as if he had something to teach me. Over his head, through the yellowing foliage of the chestnut trees, rose the brick towers of the Lodge. As girls’ voices floated faintly from the tennis courts and playing fields, I would look up past the top floor and imagine dark geese making a pattern on the sky.

Matthew and Martha

One Sunday there were six of us sitting around the dining-room table: Daddy, Mama, Matthew, Cousin Polly, Martha Greenfield, and me. We were eating one of the extravagant meals my mother could produce in fits of joy or pique, and because it was a warm spring afternoon we were drinking ice water from the crystal goblets that had belonged to Grandma Phillips. When I was very small, I had liked to tap the thin scrolled edges of those glasses gently and secretly between my teeth as I drank; the feel of the hard, impossibly delicate crystal seemed to me the feeling of everything fragile and elegant in the world. Once at Thanksgiving dinner, however, I had bitten down too hard and ended up with a mouthful of blood and glass that earned me a trip to the emergency ward and a stitch in the tongue. After that, nothing that happened at a family dinner could surprise me.

“Will you have another roll?” said Mama to Martha Greenfield. She had a way of looking past Martha when she addressed her, as if the actual person she was speaking to were standing six feet farther away.

“No, thank you,” said Martha. “They were delicious.”

“She eats nothing!” remarked my mother to the table at large, and Matthew flushed angrily. He opened his mouth to say something, but Martha Greenfield intercepted him, leaning forward with a smile that won no answer on my mother’s face.

“Oh, Mrs. Phillips, you mustn’t think that I don’t love your food. I’ve already had two helpings of everything, and I’m afraid a third might be fatal—I might eat four or even five! Matt can tell you that at school I can really make a pig of myself. Isn’t that right, Matt?”

“It all goes to your legs, and I hate fat legs,” said Matthew, scowling possessively at her across the table. “If you’re not careful, young woman, I’ll put you on a diet!”

Martha Greenfield made a little moue in Matthew’s direction, and I thought, oh, to look like that. She would never need to go on a diet: she was small and slight with a fascinating swiftness to her movements; a fierce vitality gave beauty to her thin face, where the features, taken separately, were a little too strong, too large. Her hair was chestnut-colored and her eyebrows were black, and when she came to visit us, she wore wonderful patterned stockings, bright-colored Italian shoes, and dresses with skirts much shorter than those worn in Philadelphia in the late sixties. She was from New York and, like Matthew, was a freshman at Swarthmore.

At the table she was seated with her back to a buffet that held an elaborate silver tea set. The set had been given to my father by the congregation of the New African Baptist Church to mark his tenth anniversary as minister; above it hung an enormous and hideous painting done in the twenties by an aunt of Daddy’s, who had claimed to be one of the lights of the Harlem Renaissance. The painting had a massive, faded gilt frame and depicted two French dolls—a black pickaninny and a white lady of fashion—lolling loose-jointedly against each other on a velvet stool. The effect was Gothic; Matthew had long ago named the picture “The Coon and the Courtesan,” and its somber presence had dominated the striped wallpaper of the dining room for as long as I could remember. Sitting in front of it in a short tuniclike spring dress printed with orange flowers, Martha Greenfield looked as if she belonged to a different universe.

“What did you kids do this afternoon?” asked my father, helping himself to more baked squash. Mama had provided a surfeit of vegetables, as if she wanted us all to die of apoplexy: besides the squash there were string beans, collard greens, asparagus, eggplant casserole, pickled cucumbers, and sweet potatoes.

“They didn’t go to church, that’s certain,” mumbled Cousin Polly, her mouth full of cucumber, which she was chewing cautiously. Cousin Polly was an ancient, opinionated, and nearly blind cousin of my mother’s, who came to Sunday dinner every week.

Matthew looked over at me and made the grimace with his mouth that in our private childhood language meant “Adults are idiots” or “Let’s get out of here” and usually signified both. I grimaced back at him, trying not to worship him too much. Since going away to college last fall he had changed from a round-cheeked kid who looked about twelve to a tall, bony young man with a mass of frizzy curls tumbling over his high forehead and a handsome thin face that was alternately tense and vibrant.

“Martha and I went with Sarah down to the art museum,” said Matthew in a patient voice. “There was a free concert down on the parkway.”

“A rock-and-roll concert?” asked Daddy, his little dark eyes gleaming with earnest interest. I had to admit that on these difficult weekends when Matthew brought Martha home, he really did try to make things pleasant. “Did you have a good time, Sair?”

“Yeah, it was great,” I said. Actually it had been a sort of misery for me to be there, a skinny overgrown fourteen-year-old among all the hippies and the dashing revolutionary types, and the loving couples kissing and smoking dope to the