Free My Own Two Feet by Beverly Cleary Page A

laugh heartily from time to time so Mrs. Tuckness would not be alarmed by silence overhead. Once the boys drove us to a movie in Pomona in the topless Rickenbacker. They sat in the front seat while we sat in the back with our hair tousled by the wind. They paid our admissions, but they refused to be seen sitting with us. What could we expect of sixteen-year-old boys?
    The Clapps invited us to dinner and so did Norma’s friends. Connie, a bright-eyed sparrow of a girl who was to be my friend all her life, often dropped in for supper after stopping at the A&P to buy “whatever meat the girls were having.” In my Argus at the end of the year she reminded me of “dinners at your apartment when we could not eat for laughing.” We went to football games in Connie’s family car and to YWCA suppers where Norma and I were usually given leftover casserole dishes to take home. We went to school dances, Norma and I, each with somebody’s brother, while Connie went with Park, a minister’s son, whom she was pursuing and appeared to be gaining on.
    One spring day, as I ate my lunch on Chaffey’s lawn, I came to know a freshman, Frank, whom I treated with a touch of condescension because I assumed he was younger than I. At least, that was how he seemed after Gerhart and Paul until he admitted with amusement that he was a year older. His ambition was to become a politician, and he treated me with such formality that I felt I had to behave with unnatural dignity. This did not prevent us from having some pleasant times together. We went to a dance at the Red Hill Country Club, where he looked handsome in what every young man aspired to own, a white jacket, which I was pleased to be seen with, but Frank was tall, and I worried about smearing lipstick on his white shoulder as we danced. One day we drove in a borrowed car to Los Angeles to see The Great Ziegfeld at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and to admire the footprints of movie stars in concrete. Could Gloria Swanson’s feet really have been that small? We finished the day with dinner at Lucca’s—the first Italian meal I had ever eaten. I liked Frank but somehow could never get over feeling we were both pretending to be something we were not. Probably I waswrong and was only responding to Frank’s natural reserve.
    Norma had another source of recreation, which was exhilarating to her but would have been misery to me. These were Play Days, when she went off with a group of P.E. majors to other schools where they spent happy, for them, days of sports: baseball, archery, swimming, hockey, and tennis. Norma returned glowing with health and always went through her program of exercises while we listened to the news and I lay lazily on my low half of the couch. Norma followed events in Europe closely. She was afraid her brothers might have to go to war.
    Norma studied at the kitchen table and solved math problems in ink on the oilcloth, which she scrubbed off before she went to bed. Now the icebox was her problem. The steady drip-drip of melting ice irritated her, so she put our dishcloth in the pan to muffle the drips, a nuisance because she had to fish it out, cold and sopping, before we could wash our breakfast dishes. Except when Atlee and Harold dropped in, I studied in the living-bedroom, sitting in the rocking chair with my feet up on the gas heater, which we never turned on.
    We were both getting laboratory sciences “out of the way.” Norma was studying zoology, whichrequired dissecting a rabbit that she fished out of a barrel of formaldehyde on lab days. We joked about serving it for dinner when she finished dissecting it. While Norma was studying the anatomy of her pickled rabbit, I was studying botany because I had enjoyed the study of plants in my high school biology course. I was also taking psychology and two English courses from Mr. Palmer and two units of conversational French from Dr. Miller.
    And then there was P.E. in