Diamond in the Rough by Shawn Colvin Read Free Book Online

with a freshman girl to mentor her for her first year. The older girls were called Big Sisters. Mine turned out to be Anna Baker, the real big sister of one of my best friends, Mandy. Anna was the stuff of prom queen and bohemia combined. She knew how to traverse both realms, was a total stunner, and for this we all looked up to her. Tall, tan, a body to die for, and a personality to match—irreverent, supremely confident, bigger than life, really. I was hers. The first thing she did, being a woman of solid priorities, was teach me how to smoke opium. I already knew how to smoke cigarettes, so this was not a leap. We sat on the shag rug in her parents’ living room with her connection, Leah, whose dad traveled to Indonesia a lot, and I got high. I never did figure out if Leah’s dad actually brought the opium over—it seemed logical and certainly exotic—or if it was the more likely scenario in which Leah herself procured it from someone in the rich 1970 drug land of our large university town. Either way it was fine stuff.
    The Baker girls were also revered for their talent for high drama. We all participated in Speech Team, where one could compete by reading prose or acting out a scene in a play either solo or with partners. I myself did prose as well as a duet acting stint from Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding, in which I played Frankie. Mandy tried her hand, with much success, in a scene as both Stella Kowalski and Blanche DuBois from A Streetcar Named Desire. Her final lines, and I can vividly remember her impassioned and desperate delivery at age fifteen: “I let the place go! I let the place go? Where were you ? In bed with your—Polack!” She won every time. Naturally this kind of thing leaked over into our everyday lives, and Mandy was quite proud when, after being picked up late by her gentleman caller, Scott, she coolly responded to his acknowledgment of his tardiness by snipping, “You are very observative.”
    Mandy wasn’t the only one who was challenged grammatically. Our friend Liz, upon going on one of her first dates ever, was sure to tell the waiter she didn’t want “scrotums” on her salad, when obviously she meant to say croutons. Liz was another one who could seamlessly ride the line between cheerleader and bad girl, even if being bad meant nothing more than sneaking cigarettes behind the back of her protective older brother, Steve. Only Liz could pull off smoking with elegance, though. She was the most feminine of all of us, petite and blond and buxom. It took her an hour to do her makeup and hair, which was naturally curly at a time when straight hair was the way to go. I was the total opposite of Liz, and this attracted us to each other. I didn’t wear makeup at all and wouldn’t have been a cheerleader if you’d paid me. Whereas Liz was prim and well mannered, I veered toward the crude and obscene. I farted and burped freely, talked about sex explicitly, and generally delighted in grossing her out. She disapproved but really couldn’t tear herself away.
    Jane was more on my level. We had a certain lack of sophistication. It was Jane and I who gave pet names to all our friends’ breasts. Liz was “Modest Mounds” for obvious reasons. Mandy was “Baby Nips,” Jane was “Smashed Bananas,” I was “Airplane Nose,” and our Vietnamese pal, Pat, was “The Good Earth.” Jane had delightful sayings like “Oh, balls!” and “You ain’t a-woofin’, honey!” and called everyone “doll.” She suffered no fools. Jane and I also had the corner on musical obsession. She didn’t play an instrument—that role was reserved for Joanne and me—but Janey and I swooned over our idols, something Joanne was far too cool to do. It was Jane and I who took on the arduous task of recording our own James Taylor interview. We got out a cassette player and would record a question: “James, we heard that you woke up in the night screaming....” Then we would cue up his response