Free Boys in the Trees: A Memoir by Carly Simon Page A

extra in the bangs, my quixotic hope being to create a dip à la Rita Hayworth.
    For twenty minutes, I sat under the hair dryer reading an Archie comic book, the machine so noisy that I couldn’t hear Joey pounding on the door. From experience I knew that my own hair would likely either unravel or frizz up fast, but Seventeen magazine had taught me a few insider’s tricks. I removed the pin curls and let them dance damply and loosely on my head before combing them into what I hoped would resemble Rita’s hairdo. I then found a scarf to keep everything in place while it dried. Hair. Hair was everything. Finally, I heard the pounding and let Joey in. She was all red with anger. I said I was sorry and we exchanged places.
    Next, I applied makeup before the bedroom mirror. Joey and Lucy had taught me well. First came Persian Melon lipstick, followed by a midcoat of Pink Innocence, and at last, the crucial finale: a lip blender, Nude Spring Dance. My salty, damp, oily skin tended to make the acne I was trying so hard to cover over look like a miniature volcano about to erupt, so I added Clearasil over my breakouts, reapplying it every few minutes, as it had a tendency to melt. Next, remembering a scene from Gone with the Wind , I had the brilliant idea of putting powder over those spots. I called out to Joey, asking her if she had some talcum powder, but she was still peeved at me for taking so long in the bathroom and didn’t answer.
    I put on “Moonglow,” my favorite song that year, the beguiling string parts humming and crackling through the speakers of my portable record player, turning up the volume as loud as it would go and dancing as Joey continued to ignore my pleas for talc. I moved my hips and watched myself in the mirror thinking that this is what Davy and Jamie might have seen if they’d followed me with their gaze.
    Earlier that day, I’d decided to wear the blue sleeveless dress that Lucy had passed down to me. Not wanting to disturb the turban holding in the pin curls, I put it on feet first, pulling it up carefully, negotiating the arm holes, angling it onto my body, coercing it into a strange, unfamiliar shape. After two summers clinging to Lucy’s body, it would forever hold her particular camber. I was hoping that my bust would be almost as curvy, sexy, and grown-up as Lucy’s, but when I stood up straight, instead of a bust there were two puckers that looked as if I’d been punched twice from the inside, by a baby’s fists.
    When Joey finally opened the bathroom door, holding the talc, she found me with my back to her, stiff-shouldered, still trying to maneuver Lucy’s dress around my gangling, resistant shape. I couldn’t help but gaze at Joey’s chest, from which protruded an infuriatingly grown-up pair of what were then politely called “bosoms,” or more alluringly, “breasts.” Looming from inside Joey’s white slip, floating just above the waterline, they were Hallelujah breasts, breasts that belonged to the climax of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and I couldn’t have been more fascinated, nor hated her more.
    From behind the bedroom door, we both heard my mother’s voice rushing us, calling from the bottom of the stairs. The two of us exchanged a fast, nervous glance. “I know a trick,” Joey said suddenly, and in her voice was now a distinct tone of compassion. Opening up her sock drawer, she took out a pair of white cotton tennis socks, balling them up in her hand and rolling them out as flat as she could. Once they were in position on my chest, Joey rezipped my dress and we both surveyed the results: two points of uneven, lumpy, linen shapes, jutting out into the room, again like babies’ fists punching from within.
    Joey tried hard not to laugh, even though by now I was crying, convinced nothing in my life would ever work again. But Joey knew another ruse. Tearing off a piece of tissue, she spread it so it leveled the lumps in the socks, pushing and mashing the sock-tissue