Free The Temple of Gold by William Goldman

with Helen Twilly.
    Who was a freshman in the college when I first knew her, and a very easy person to describe. Helen Twilly had huge cans. Now ordinarily, in this day and age, that should be enough to make a girl reasonably popular. But not Helen. For her face wasn’t much and neither was her figure, her butt also being very large. Her cans were so big, though, that it made you forget most of the rest. Zock and I used to refer to other girls’ with her name. “Twillies,” we called them. But that was later.
    The reason I met her at all was because of my mother. I was in the seventh grade at the time, when, out of the blue, my mother decided that I should have piano lessons. It was, I suppose, a last-ditch attempt on her part to bring some culture into my life. Culture, even today, is not one of my strongest points and I had less of it then. Anyway, my mother had a long talk with me one night at supper, beating around the bush, going on about the importance of the arts, especially music. Finally, she came out with it: I was to take piano lessons. My father had asked at the college for someone who might give them to me and had come up with Miss Twilly. So, in spite of anything I could do, the lessons began.
    The first one was the worst. Mainly because my mother insisted on staying in the room while Miss Twilly gave me the business about scales. They were as far as I ever got, scales, but nobody knew it then. I sat there, sweating, pounding away on our little upright piano with Miss Twilly beside me, smiling over at my mother who smiled back, and I don’t know how. For my ear has never been very good as far as music is concerned. The reason I stopped taking piano was because it turned out I was tone deaf. This has never been a heavy cross for me to bear, but it did come as a blow to my mother who, I think, honestly had visions of me being a child prodigy and knocking them dead at Carnegie Hall.
    “You must cup your hands, Raymond,” Miss Twilly said to me that day. “Cup them over the keyboard.”
    “Sure thing,” I said, doing as I was told. Which didn’t make the scales sound any better since, being tone deaf, I was never sure when I did something right or not.
    “Do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do,” Miss Twilly sang along. “No, Raymond. La. La.” And she hit the correct note.
    “La,” I said. “La, la, la.” And I pounded away on that poor key.
    “Not so hard, Raymond,” Miss Twilly pleaded, smiling at my mother. “Gently. We must learn to caress the keys. As though they were our friends.”
    And that was how it went for the first lesson. I wasn’t as unhappy about it as I might have been, for I knew from the start that I was never going to play at Carnegie Hall or any place else. Some things you take to right away, but to the piano I never did. It was all a joke, my only worry being that the news might spread around school. Which never happened, since Zock was always a good man at keeping a secret.
    I told him right after it was over. Mother and Miss Twilly were having a whispered conversation so I slipped on by them to Zock’s house. He was waiting to hear, but what I talked about was not so much the music as Miss Twilly’s cans. I was so expressive that he asked if he could see them.
    And the next time she came, the following Tuesday, he was there, waiting. She walked in and smiled at me. He just stared. Then, before the lesson started, he got up to go.
    “They’re big all right,” Zock said, and he took off.
    Which threw Miss Twilly. “What are big?” she asked me.
    “I don’t know,” I answered. “Sometimes it’s very hard to figure just what he’s talking about.”
    But all the same, she knew. She was a little flustered during the lesson. Not really embarrassed, just flustered. She kind of hunched her shoulders forward, trying to make them seem not so noticeable, which in her case was an impossibility.
    After that, I began to like her. I think she knew about my being tone deaf from