After Her Read Online Free PDF Page A

analyzing photographs of haircuts we liked, or John Travolta’s crotch in teen magazines.
    â€œYou’d think someone as famous as him would be embarrassed to have his picture taken in pants that tight,” Patty said. “He has enough money to buy a new pair if he’s outgrown his old ones.”
    Some things I explained to her. Some not. At times we’d just lie there together not speaking at all, just breathing in the faint breeze carrying the smell of wild fennel, or we spit seeds to see whose went the farthest. We took our shirts off and lay in the grass, sun on our skin, checking for breast development. Mine negligible. Hers nonexistent.
    Other times we hung out in an old rusted-out truck body abandoned on the hillside, with weeds growing up through the middle, whose presence in this spot formed the basis for endless speculation. We liked to believe we were the only ones who knew about the truck body, though once, when we settled into our spot there, we found a couple of old condom wrappers that suggested this was not so.
    The truck body sat about a mile up the hillside from our house, tucked away off the trail. A little way beyond lay an outdoor amphitheater where, every summer, a local semiprofessional theater company staged a lavish production of some popular musical ( The Sound of Music one year, Brigadoon the next), accessible only on foot. The cost of tickets for the Mountain Play exceeded anything our mother could have come up with, but during the period of weeks every summer when performances took place, we sometimes hiked up to the amphitheater. We had located a spot close enough to the actual performance site where we could spread out a blanket, listening to the music and observing the actors hanging around during rehearsals—changing costumes, smoking pot, necking, possibly—which was more interesting than the actual show.
    Guys and Dolls had been our favorite. Patty and I had never actually gotten to see the show, but over the course of the weeks they’d performed it a few summers back, we’d gotten so familiar with the songs that from our post a little ways off, we sang along with them: “I Got the Horse Right Here,” “Luck Be a Lady Tonight,” “Take Back Your Mink.”
    Even better were the times when no rehearsal was going on, and the two of us could occupy the performance space ourselves, putting on our own shows. Shy as she was out in the world, up on the mountain with nobody seeing her but me and the occasional red-tailed hawk or deer, my sister was fearless. One time when she was seven or eight, out there in the amphitheater—against a backdrop meant to be the main street for The Music Man —she performed a complete and glorious striptease.
    â€œWe’re like the kids in Charlie Brown,” Patty said. Had anybody, reading that strip, ever seen those children’s parents getting in the way of their adventures? From how it seemed in the comics, they carried on their lives without the least evidence of adult intervention.
    I had read a book once about a boy who got lost in the forest, and some wolves found him and took care of him. (It would be a boy, of course, who got to have an adventure like that.) Still, I loved that story. I saw us running free over the hillside, unencumbered by parental rules or concern for danger. We were a couple of wolf girls—but with fashionable jeans, though really what we wore were just Levi’s.
    W E RODE OUR BIKES A lot. No destination in mind. But you never knew what you might find. Once, riding around, we’d passed a Dumpster with a bunch of records stacked up next to it—someone’s entire record collection from the looks of it, and not things like Mitch Miller or Mantovani either, or Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, which was the kind of music our neighbor Helen favored, or Jennifer Pollack’s favorite, which we could hear out the Pollacks’ window all day long, the