Free Wendy and the Lost Boys by Julie Salamon Page B

She’d been learning the importance of name brands and always made sure to note that she took lessons at June Taylor’s School of Dance, not just any studio. (Taylor’s choreography featured Rockettes’-style high kicks; her dancers were regular performers on The Jackie Gleason Show, a popular TV variety program in the 1950s and ’60s.)
    After sophomore year she attended the summer program at the Phillips Academy, Andover, in Massachusetts, where she succumbed to the lure of the New England countryside and the school’s exalted aura. That encounter began a lifelong infatuation with charming academic campuses situated in rarefied settings.
    She returned from Andover to Calhoun a better student but not good enough for the headmistresses, Cosmey and Parmelee. Midway through her junior year, they offered this guarded evaluation: “Wendy has produced a good report. We are especially glad to note that she is passing physical education. Comments should be studied carefully, for Wendy needs now to take giant steps in academic growth, to begin to prepare for greater challenges next year and in college.”
    The following summer she returned to New England for another summer program, this time at the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, where she was challenged by unsparing faculty. She took serious subjects—economics, philosophy, music appreciation—and wrote dull, lengthy papers in longhand. “Wendy, you have written over four thousand words when the assignment called for fifteen hundred,” wrote a testy professor. “You have too much bulk here—repetitious passages, excessively long quotations, redundancies, and superfluous sections. A good rewriting of the entire essay could reduce it by half without losing any essential material. I appreciate your industry and sincerity in this enterprise, but I urge you to be more efficient by being precise and concise.”
    Regular grade—B-minus.
    Grade due to penalty for lateness—C-plus.
    Despite the grueling assessments and the repeated grade reductions for sloppiness and turning her papers in late, she produced remarkable work for a fifteen-year-old. Her papers demonstrate great effort and a complex intellect; she struggled to grasp conventional wisdom and then put her own stamp on it. In a paper analyzing the work of George Bernard Shaw, she wrote a snappy opening line that could be seen as a guidepost for a future writer of provocative plays: “The saint does not bring peace on earth and good will among men. The saint, rather, makes the world uncomfortable to live in.”
     
    W hen Wendy applied to college, she had begun to think that the University of Michigan, which both Sandy and Bruce attended, wasn’t for her. She didn’t want to follow Georgette’s path either. Her middle sister had traveled in Europe after graduating from Hood College, then a small girls’ school in Maryland, and was back in New York, taking classes at the New School. In the fall of Wendy’s senior year, Georgette followed Marjorie Morningstar’s example. Marjorie had succumbed to a Jewish lawyer; Georgette married a Jewish doctor. Albert Levis didn’t exactly conform to the cliché; he was born in Greece, was studying clinical psychiatry at Yale, and exhibited an eccentric intelligence. Wendy didn’t find him dull, just weird.
    Georgette appeared rail thin and ethereal in her bridal gown. The wedding was a lavish affair at the Plaza Hotel, where Lola scandalized her more religious Schleifer relatives by serving shrimp. Wendy was reminded, looking at “Gorgeous,” of her own failings in the get-slim department. She was also concerned, wondering if Georgette hadn’t been cornered into making a wrong decision. Wendy discovered that the corollary to feeling superior and inferior was the unpleasant sensation of betraying a sister, whom she loved, by both mocking her choice yet in some ways envying her.
    Her own ambitions had begun to take amorphous shape during her sojourn in the Manhattan