Laura Furman - The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

Rita did not know that her body would wash up on the beach the next day, bloated and foul-smelling. She did not know that at the end of the summer I would be sent away to boarding school. And she would never know that I would not develop… not get a period or breasts or pubic hair… until I was eighteen years old because, the doctors said, of a hor- monal abnormality. Rita would never know that I only learned my retarded development was a serious problem through the whispers and hushed conversations of my aunts, and that my mother had to smuggle me in to see a women's doctor because my father had strictly forbidden it. Rita would never see me grow up lanky and quiet, stuck in my little girl's body without knowing why. And she would never know that in the years after her death we stayed at the beach house less and less, until we stopped going there altogether.

But I didn’t know most of these things either, that summer, when they took my friend away on a stretcher, her seaweed bracelet bobbing on her stiff arm, making her look as if she were waving good-bye.

from The New Yorker

IT WAS 1974: not a good year, clothes-wise, if you were an eighteen-year-old girl, tall and overweight, with thick, curling hair and glasses. Gina liked best to wear a duffel coat, underneath which she imagined she hid herself. But this was summer, and she was on holiday, and she’d had reluctantly to leave the duffel coat at home. The fashion was for smocks and long skirts with deep frills and cotton prints, so she mostly wore a Laura Ashley dress in a blue sprigged cotton that was meant to look as if it had been faded by long-ago haymaking in meadows of wildflowers; its buttons gaped open across her bust and it was tight around her hips and its effect on her, she was quite sure, was not rustic but hulking and vaguely penitentiary. Sometimes as she walked, bitter tears stung her eyes at the idea of the sheer affront of her ugliness forcing itself upon the successive layers of the air. At other times, she was more hopeful.

Today, at least, the sun was not shining. When it shone-and it had shone every day since she arrived-it made things worse; it seemed such an insult to nature and beauty not to want to peel off all one's clothes and run around on the beach, not to be happy. But now the sky was a consoling soft gray, which dissolved from time to time into warm rain, and everybody was more or less muffled under raincoats and umbrellas. Because it was raining, Mamie had driven inland with Gina from the house on the coast, to visit Wing Lodge.

Mamie was her mothers friend, and Gina was staying with her and her family for a fortnight; although to call her a friend did not quite explain the relationship, since Mamie was also a client, for whom Gina's mother made clothes. Mamie was small and very pretty, with sloping shoulders and ash-blond hair and a face that was always screwing up with laughter. Her tan was the kind you can get only in the South of France. (She had a house there, too.) Her clothes seemed effortless-today, for example, a Liberty print blouse under a cream linen pinafore-but Gina had seen some of these things in the making and knew how much effort actually went into them: the serious scrutiny of pinned-up hemlines in front of the mirror, Mamie bringing things back ruefully, apologetically, after a week or two, with a nagging suspicion that a sleeve had been set in too high, or an inspiration that the seams would look wonderful with two rows of overstitching.

She was being very kind-very encouraging-to Gina. She had not made any mention of the Laura Ashley dress or of the barrette that had seemed an appealing idea when Gina brushed her hair that morning but was now bobbing against her cheek in a way that suggested it had slid to an altogether wrong and ridiculous place.

They stopped off on their way to Wing Lodge at a tearoom by the side of the country road; they were the only customers in a small room crowded with unbalanced little chairs and glass-topped wicker tables, smelling of damp and cake.

It’ll probably be instant coffee, Mamie whispered with conspiratorial amusement. (Gina only ever had instant at home.) But I don’t care. Do you? Or we could always risk the tea. And you’ve got to have a Danish pastry or something, to keep you going.

Complicatedly, Mamie was making reference to the fact that Gina clearly oughtn’t to be eating pastries of any kind; but her diet, which was perpetual during this period of her life, alternating drearily between punishing obedience and frantic transgression, had been thrown into such chaos since she’d been staying at Mamie’s-on the one hand, she was too shy to refuse the food that was pressed upon her; on the other, she didn’t dare to raid the fridge or the cupboards in between meals-that she didn’t even know whether she was being good or not. She took advantage of the lack of clarity to agree to the pastry.

Gina had just had her A-level results-three As-and she was prepar- ing for her Cambridge entrance examinations in November. Mamie professed an exaggerated awe of her cleverness.

You really make me so ashamed, she said, when she had finished charming the gray-haired waitress and giving very exact instructions as to how she liked her tea (“pathetically weak, no milk, just pour it the very instant the waters on the leaves, I’m so sorry to be such a frightful nuisance”). We’re such duffers in my family. We’ve hardly got an O level between us- and that's after spending an absolute fortune on the children's education. Josh simply refused to go back to Bedales to do retakes. Becky left the day she was sixteen. She never even sat any exams. How I’d love for one of them to have your brains.

I’m not that special, Gina lied, her voice muffled through damp pastry flakes.

Somewhere in the deepest recesses of herself, Gina pitied Mamie and her children, precisely along the lines that Mamie suggested. The children- three older boys and a girl Gina's age-certainly weren’t clever in the way she was. She’d never seen them reading a book; they hadn’t known the other day at breakfast who Walter Gropius was; and she was sure that they were sublimely ignorant about all the things that seemed to her ultimately to matter in the world: literature and painting and the history of ideas. But that arrogant intellectual reflex felt so remotely subterranean as to be almost inconsequential, compared with her willingness to acknowledge every advantage that Becky and Josh and Tom and Gabriel had on the surface in the here and now, in honor and envy of which she was horribly ready to abase herself. And Mamie was surely disingenuous in her praise of Gina's brains. She was just being kind. She wouldn’t have exchanged brains, really, for the easy personable charm that all her children had, not if it meant that they’d have awkward bodies and thick glasses.

And, even if they weren’t clever, Mamie's children didn’t actually say stupid things, as Gina did, tongue-tied with bookish awkwardness. On the contrary, they were funny and chatty and informed about practical matters. They confessed to being indifferent to politics but were sincerely charming and generous with the woman who came to clean and cook and iron for them every day, whereas Gina didn’t know how to talk to her. And then they were masters of arts that Gina knew she would never be competent in, no matter how hard she tried: tennis, for example, and motorcycling, and snorkeling. She couldn’t even ride a push-bike.

Gabriel, the oldest, had a darkroom and developed his own photographs; Becky posed for him, unembarrassedly arranging her face to look its best whenever called upon. If Gabriel turned the camera on Gina, she swiveled away, protesting and sulking, so he soon stopped trying. The house was filled with vivid black-and-white pictures, in which the lives of this family seemed poignant and enchanting, even beyond what you could grasp in ordinary everyday contact with them. Gina studied the photographs with the same yearning she felt over the fashion pictures in magazines: trying to understand how one might possess oneself with such certainty, and know so confidently how to live.