At four o'clock the chaperones served us punch and cookies and at quarter to five the dance was over and my mother picked me up in our new car. (My father gave in around Halloween when my mother explained that she couldn't even get a quart of milk because she had no car. And that Margaret couldn't possibly walk to and from school in bad weather and that bad weather would be coming very soon. My mother didn't like my father's suggestion that if she got up early and drove him to the station she could use his car all day long.) Our new car is a Chevy. It's green.
My mother was in a hurry to drive home from the square dance because she was in the middle of a new painting. It was a picture of a lot of different fruits in honor of Thanksgiving. My mother gives away a whole bunch of pictures every Christmas. My father thinks they wind up in other people's attics.
11
By the first week in December we no longer used our secret names at PTS meetings. It was too confusing, Nancy said. Also, we just about gave up on our Boy Books. For one thing the names never changed. Nancy managed to shift hers around. It was easy for her-with eighteen boys. But Janie and Gretchen and I always listed Philip Leroy number one. There was no suspense about the whole thing. And I wondered, did they list Philip Leroy because they really liked him or were they doing what I did-making him number one because he was so good-looking. Maybe they were ashamed to write who they really liked too.
The day that Gretchen finally got up the guts to sneak out her father's anatomy book we met at my house, in my bedroom, with the door closed and a chair shoved in front of it. We sat on the floor in a circle with the book opened to the male body.
"Do you suppose that's what Philip Leroy looks like without his clothes on?" Janie asked.
"Naturally, dope!" Nancy said. "He's male, isn't he?"
"Look at all those veins and stuff," Janie said.
"Well, we all have them," Gretchen said.
"I think they're ugly," Janie said.
"You better never be a doctor or a nurse," Gretchen told her. "They have to look at this stuff all the time."
"Turn the page, Gretchen," Nancy said.
The next page was the male reproductive system.
None of us said anything. We just looked until Nancy told us, "My brother looks like that."
"How do you know?" I asked.
"He walks around naked," Nancy said.
"My father used to walk around naked," Gretchen said. "But lately he's stopped doing it."
"My aunt went to a nudist colony last summer," Janie said.
"No kidding!" Nancy looked up.
"She stayed a month," Janie told us. "My mother didn't talk to her for three weeks after that. She thought it was a disgrace. My aunt's divorced."
"Because of the nudist colony?" I asked.
"No," Janie said. "She was divorced before she went."
"What do you suppose they do there?" Gretchen asked.
"Just walk around naked is all. My aunt says it's very peaceful. But I'll never walk around naked in front of anybody!"
"What about when you get married?" Gretchen asked.
"Even then," Janie insisted.
"You're a prude!" Nancy said.
"I am not! It has nothing to do with being a prude."
"When you grow you'll change your mind," Nancy told her. "You'll want everybody to see you. Like those girls in Playboy."
"What girls in Playboy?" Janie asked.
"Didn't you ever see a copy of Playboy?"
"Where would I see it?" Janie asked.
"My father gets it," I said.
"Do you have it around?" Nancy asked.
"Sure."
"Well, get it!" Nancy told me.
"Now?" I asked.
"Of course."
"Well, I don't know," I said.
"Listen, Margaret-Gretchen went to all the trouble of sneaking out her father's medical book. The least you could do is show us Playboy."
So I opened my bedroom door and went downstairs, trying to remember where I had seen the latest issue. I didn't want to ask my mother. Not that it was so wrong to show it to my friends. I mean, if it was so wrong my father shouldn't get it at all, right? Although lately I think he's been hiding it because it's never in the magazine rack where it used to be. Finally, I found it in his night table drawer and I thought if my mother caught me and asked me what I was doing I'd say we were making booklets and I needed some old magazines to cut up. But she didn't catch me.
Nancy opened it right up to the naked girl in the middle. On the page before there was a story about her. It said Hillary Brite is eighteen years old.
"Eighteen! That's only six more years," Nancy squealed.
"But look at the size of her. They're huge!" Janie said.
"Do you suppose we'll look like that at eighteen?" Gretchen asked.
"If you ask me, I think there's something wrong with her," I said. "She looks out of proportion!"
"Do you suppose that's what Laura Danker looks like?" Janie asked.
"No. Not yet," Nancy said. "But she might at eighteen!"
Our meeting ended with fifty rounds of "We must-we must-we must increase our bust!"
12
On December eleventh Grandma sailed on a three-week cruise to the Caribbean. She went every year. She had a bon voyage party in her room on the ship. This year I was allowed to go. My mother gave Grandma a green silk box to keep her jewelry safe. It was very nice-all lined in white velvet. Grandma said thank you and that all her jewelry was for "her Margaret" anyway so she had to take good care of it. Grandma's always reminding me of how nobody lives forever and everything she has is for me and I hate it when she talks like that. She once told me she had her lawyer prepare her funeral instructions so things would go the way she planned. Such as, the kind of box she wants to be buried in and that she doesn't want any speeches at all and that I should only come once or twice a year to see that her grave is looking nice and neat.
We stayed on the ship half an hour and then Grandma kissed me good-by and promised to take me along with her one of these days.
The next week my mother started to address her Christmas cards and for days at a time she was frantically busy with them. She doesn't call them Christmas cards. Holiday greetings, she says. We don't celebrate Christmas exactly. We give presents but my parents say that's a traditional American custom. My father says my mother and her greeting cards have to do with her childhood. She sends them to people she grew up with and they send cards back to her. So once a year she finds out who married whom and who had what kids and stuff like that. Also, she sends one to her brother, whom I've never met. He lives in California. This year I discovered something really strange. I discovered that my mother was sending a Christmas card to her parents in Ohio. I found out because I was looking through the pile of cards one day when I had a cold and stayed home from school. There it was-just like that. The envelope said Mr. and Mrs. Paul Hutchins, and that's them. My grandparents! I didn't mention anything about it to my mother. I had the feeling I wasn't supposed to know.
In school, Mr. Benedict was running around trying to find out what happened to the new choir robes. The whole school was putting on a Christmas-Hanukkah pageant for the parents and our sixth-grade class was the choir. We didn't even have to try out. "Mr. Benedict's class will be the choir," the principal announced. We practiced singing every day with the music teacher. I thought by the time Christmas finally rolled around I wouldn't have any voice left. We learned five Christmas carols and three Hanukkah songs-alto and soprano parts. Mostly the boys sang alto and the girls sang soprano. We'd been measured for our new choir robes right after Thanksgiving. The PTA decided the old ones were really worn out. Our new ones would be green instead of black. We all had to carry pencil-sized flashlights instead of candles.