9 1/2 Narrow by Patricia Morrisroe Read Free Book Online Page B

beeline to a pretty girl with blond hair. I was left sitting on the sidelines with someone who’d broken her leg in a riding accident. She was small and cute, so if she’d been able to walk, I’m sure she’d have been dancing too.
    Though it’s nice to be tall when you’re older, it’s a handicap when you’re towering above the majority of available partners. For the rest of the semester, I danced with other tall girls, or girls with premature acne, girls with weird hair, girls with thick eyeglasses, fat girls, skinny girls. We took turns leading so we wouldn’t alienate the boys even further when and if we ever got a chance to dance with them.
    We progressed from the waltz to the foxtrot and then to the rhumba. One afternoon, as a special surprise, we even learned the Mexican hat dance. During the last class of the semester, when I’d all but written off the whole experience, Nathan asked me to dance. I was over the moon. He only came up to my shoulder, but I tried through my untested powers of mental telepathy to convince him that I was cute and petite. After we finished the foxtrot, I thanked him for the dance. As we were all leaving, I saw him huddled together with his friends and I waved good-bye—a bold move for me. Afterward, I heard him say, “What a scarecrow!”
    When my mother came to pick me up, I started to cry and told her I hated the November Club and everything it represented.
    â€œWhat does it represent?” she asked. “The foxtrot? What’s so awful about that? We paid good money for you to learn how to dance, and now you’re hysterical? Really, Patricia.”
    When I got home, I exiled my patent-leather flats to the inner reaches of my closet. They were no longer shoes but clumps of hay that could easily be made into a scarecrow whose purpose was to frighten away cute boys with impeccable manners. To this day, I still can’t foxtrot, or make small talk, but I do like patent leather.

    Richard Cardinal Cushing, who had offered the invocation at President Kennedy’s inaugural, was set to preside at our confirmation, and we had spent hours practicing. He was required to give each confirmand a symbolic slap on the cheek as a reminder that we had to be strong in defense of our faith. The Cuban Missile Crisis had happened six months earlier and the nuns were obsessed with Castro. In case he showed up in Andover wearing battle fatigues and chomping on a cigar, we had our instructions. Even if he threatened to pull out our fingernails or tongues, we had to resist committing a sacrilegious act, such as spitting on the crucifix or stomping on Communion wafers. It was a test of our will, and like Maria Goretti, we could respond only one way: “Death—but not sin.”
    The nuns were even more fearful of Nikita Khrushchev, who had such deplorable manners that in 1960, at the UN General Assembly, he banged his shoe on the table. (His granddaughter, Nina, later explained that he’d taken it off, complaining that it was too tight.) The nuns considered his actions the height of barbarity, and if the Communists took over the country, Khrushchev would outlaw our faith and take away our shoes.
    I’d watched President Kennedy’s Missile Crisis speech with my mother and the Avon lady. She’d dropped by to deliver my mother’s Topaz perfumed cream, which came in a yellow milk-glass jar. Since we were on the brink of nuclear war, my mother was having second thoughts about the body cream and wondered if she could return it. My mother didn’t like the Avon lady. She was beautiful and single and wore her platinum hair in a stylish chignon and owned a variety of high heels. She roomed with an elderly couple at the end of our block, and in addition to selling Avon products, she worked at a hospital not far from my father’s bank. After she asked him if he could give her a ride in the mornings, my mother thought her pushy and