go—everyone can’t be like Jane Rady. It seemed as if my whole face was stiff with scowling and my eyebrows must be growing straight across my nose, dark and heavy.
The full disappointment of the evening struck me all in a lump. It was the rollicking sadness of the music that made my heart feel sore. It was that and the thought of last night and all the silly, wonderful things I had been feeling all day and the way my heart had jumped when the phone rang and it was Jack. And it was because he was there now dancing with Jane Rady when he hadn’t even danced with me once and I was his date. And the other fellows didn’t like me either and I was awkward and didn’t know anything to talk about. It was all that and thesudden, sickening realization that I couldn’t fool myself. I did care! It wasn’t because it was the first boy I had ever really been out with—this was something different. I had never felt this way before—and he didn’t even care! Someone had put another nickel in the music box and they kept on dancing.
So I just waited, toying with my empty glass, and the corners of my mouth seemed suddenly tired and a peculiar lonesome ache went through me right down into my hands. I just sat, not thinking of anything in particular, feeling as useless, as emptied, and as hollowed as a sucked orange.
Lying in bed that night thinking it over, slowly and dearly, I decided it was me that was all wrong. Other girls knew what to do. Other girls could talk with fellows and laugh with them and say funny things. Jane Rady could do it. Jane knew how to dance with her head back so her hair fell long and smooth as silk thread. Mine was curly all over and no matter how much I brushed it there were always little wispy curls around my face, as if I had just come out of a steamy shower. I wasn’t the kind of a girl who could ever go into McKnight’s drugstore and have a crowd of boys come over to sit with me, wanting to buy me a Coke. And I know I’d look silly if I shook my finger as if I were trucking and clicked time with my tongue, swaying from side to side the way some girls can do, when good dance music came on the radio. None of the fellows at Pete’s had even offered me a cigarette because they could tell just by looking at me that I was the kind of girl who wouldn’t know how to smoke!
And of course I had acted all wrong too. It made me squirm inside to think of it. When Jack and Jane had finished dancing I should have smiled as if I hadn’t cared at all and said something smart like “smooth stuff there,” or “just like Veloz and Yolanda,” as any other girl would have done. But I didn’t. My face had been stiff with misery, and seeing everyone else laughing and having so much fun I couldn’t help thinking how much better it would have been if I had just gone to the movies with my mother and sisters. You know, if you don’t see all the fellows and girls out on dates you don’t think about it and then you don’t feel so unhappy. If I hadn’t gone out to Pete’s at all things could have gone on as they had before—“Angie Morrow doesn’t go out on dates because her mother doesn’t let her”—and no one would have known I was such a drip. But now even Jack knew.
Only once during the whole evening had there been a trace of that strange, warm feeling of last night when, just before we went home, we had gone outside and down to the water’s edge behind Pete’s. The lake was rough and the waves tossed up, white with spray, sucking at the shore, and the wind went soughing through the line of old willows, swaying them with a sonorous, restless rhythm. We stood quiet, listening to the night sounds and watching the pale moon, half hidden by the gray cotton cloud stretched across it. Inside, Pete’s had been so full of music and laughing but out here the whole stretch of dark water and the thick weeds and the swaying trees on theshore seemed tormented by a strange, aching lonesomeness, and the wind blew
Daisy Hernández, Bushra Rehman