The wooden footbridge over the ravine is torn down. Everyone says it’s about time, it was getting so unsafe. They’re going to replace it with a bridge made of concrete. I go one day and stand at the top of the hill on our side of the ravine, watching the bridge come down. There’s a pile of rotten boards down by the creek. The vertical piles are still standing, like the trunks of dead trees, and part of the cross-planking is attached to them, but the railings are gone. I have an uneasy feeling, as if something’s buried down there, a nameless, crucial thing, or as if there’s someone still on the bridge, left by mistake, up in the air, unable to get to the land. But it’s obvious there’s no one. Cordelia and Grace graduate and go elsewhere; Cordelia, it’s rumored, to St. Sebastian’s, a private school for girls, Grace to a high school farther north which emphasizes math. She’s good at adding things up in neat little rows. She still has her long braids when she graduates. Carol hangs around near the boys at recess, and is often chased by two or three of them. They like to throw her into snowbanks and rub snow into her face, or, when snow is lacking, to tie her up with skipping ropes. When she runs away from them she flings her arms around a lot. She runs in a funny wiggling way, slow enough to be caught, and screams loudly when she is. She wears a training bra. She isn’t much liked by the other girls. For Social Studies I do a project on Tibet, where there are prayer wheels and reincarnation and women have two husbands, and for Science I do different kinds of seeds. I have a boyfriend, as is the fashion. Occasionally he sends me a note across the aisle, written in very black pencil. Sometimes there are parties, with awkward dancing and clumsy guffaws and horseplay by the boys, and wet, inexpert, toothy kisses. My boyfriend carves my initials into the top of his new school desk and gets the strap for it. He gets the strap for other things too. This is admired. I see my first television set, which is like a small black-and-white puppet show of no great interest.
Carol Campbell moves away and I hardly notice. I skip Grade Seven and go straight into Grade Eight, missing the Kings of England in chronological order, missing the circulatory system, leaving my boyfriend behind. I get my hair cut. I want to do this. I’m tired of having long wavy hair that has to be held back by barrettes or hairbands, I’m tired of being a child. I watch with satisfaction as my hair falls away from me like fog and my head emerges, sharper-featured, more clearly defined. I’m ready for high school, I want to go there right away.
I reorganize my room in preparation. I clear old toys out of my cupboard, I empty out all the drawers in my bureau. I find a solitary cat’s eye marble rolling around at the back of the drawer, and some old dried-up chestnuts. Also a red plastic purse, which I remember getting for Christmas once. It’s a babyish purse. It rattles when I pick it up; inside there’s a nickel. I take the nickel out to spend, and put the marble inside the purse. I throw out the chestnuts.
I find my photo album with the black pages. I haven’t taken any pictures with my Brownie camera for a long time, so this album has slipped from view. Stuck into it with the black triangles there are pictures I can’t recall taking. For instance, there are several pictures of what look like large boulders, beside a lake. Underneath is printed, in white penciclass="underline" Daisy. Elsie. It’s my writing, but I don’t remember printing this. I take these things down to the cellar and put them into the trunk, where old things go that are not thrown out. My mother’s wedding dress is in there, several pieces of ornate silver, some sepia-toned portraits of people I don’t know, a packet of bridge tallies with silk tassels on them, left over from before the war. Some of our old drawings are in there, my brother’s spaceships and red and gold explosions, my delicate, old-fashioned little girls. I look at their pinafores and hair bows and their rudimentary faces and hands with distaste. I don’t like looking at things connected so closely with my life as a child. I think these drawings are inept: I can do much better now.
The day before the first day of high school the telephone rings. It’s Cordelia’s Mummie; she wants to speak to my mother. I assume it’s boring grown-ups’ business and go back to reading the newspaper on the living room floor. But after she puts the phone down, my mother comes into the room.
“Elaine,” she says. This is unusual, as she doesn’t often use my name. She sounds solemn. I look up from Mandrake the Magician. She looks down. “That was Cordelia’s mother,” she says.
“Cordelia will be going to your high school. Cordelia’s mother wonders whether you girls would like to walk to school together.”
“Cordelia?” I say. I haven’t seen or spoken to Cordelia for a whole year. She has vanished completely. I’ve chosen that school because I can walk to it, instead of going on a bus; so why not walk with Cordelia? “Okay,” I say.
“Are you sure you want to?” my mother says, a little anxiously. She doesn’t say why Cordelia will be coming to my school now and I don’t ask.
“Why wouldn’t I?” I say. I’m already sliding into flippancy, which goes with high school, but also I can’t see what she’s getting at. I’m being asked to do Cordelia, or Cordelia’s mother, some kind of a minor favor. My mother’s usual line is that you should do these favors when asked, so why is she hedging on this one?
She doesn’t answer this. Instead she hovers. I go back to reading the comics. “Shall I call her mother back, then, or would you like to speak with Cordelia yourself?” she says.
“You can call her,” I say. I add, “Please.” I have no particular wish to speak to Cordelia right now. The next morning I go to Cordelia’s house, which is on the way to school, to pick her up. The door opens and Cordelia is there, but she is no longer the same. She’s no longer angular and rangy; she’s grown full breasts and is heavier in the hips and face. Her hair is longer now, not a pageboy. She wears it in a ponytail with small white cloth lilies of the valley wired around the elastic band. She’s bleached a peroxide streak into the bangs. She has orange lipstick, and orange nail polish to match. My own lipstick is pale pink. Seeing Cordelia, I realize that I don’t look like a teenager, I look like a kid dressed up as one. I am still thin, still flat. I have a ferocious desire to be older. We walk to school together, not saying much at first, past a gas station, a funeral parlor, then a mile along a strip of shops, a Woolworth’s, an I.D.A. drugstore, a fruit and vegetable shop, a hardware store, all of them side by side in two-story flat-roofed yellow brick buildings. We hold our schoolbooks up against our chests, our full cotton skirts brushing against our bare legs. Right now it’s the end of summer, when all the lawns are dull green or yellow and used up.
I’ve assumed Cordelia would be a grade ahead of me. But she isn’t, she’s in the same grade now. She’s been expelled from St. Sebastian’s for drawing a penis on a bat. Or this is what she says. She says there was a large drawing of a bat on the blackboard, with its wings outspread and just a tiny bump between its legs. So she went up to the blackboard when the teacher was out of the room and rubbed out the little bump and made a bigger, longer one—“Not that much bigger”—and the teacher came into the room and caught her doing it.
“Is that all?” I say.
Not exactly. She also printed Mr. Malder, neatly, underneath the bump. Mr. Malder was the teacher’s name.