Someone Read Online Free PDF Page B

than silk, and we both lifted strands of it to our mouths. Laughing, Mrs. Hanson pushed us upright. “One of you in my lap is quite enough,” she said, catching her breath, the deep color rising to her face once again, “and Fatty Arbuckle here has already laid his claim.” She laughed, even as the deep flush rose from her chest to her neck and up into her cheeks. “Go,” she said, swallowing air.
    We traipsed out, down the stairs, arm in arm because we were the best of best friends and there was the happiness of continuing together the sudden, elaborate affection we had showered on Mrs. Hanson. Into the cool street and around the corner, and there already the black car and the crowd of girls, some with small brothers in tow. And then, as if she had been waiting for our breathless arrival, the stirring of white in the vestibule behind the glass, the door pulled open by Dora Ryan’s stout mother in hat and gloves and a new blue suit, with a trembling orchid onher shoulder. And then Dora herself in her wedding dress and her white shoes, her old father beside her—for Dora was not a young bride, perhaps thirty or so, a third-grade teacher at a distant public school, square shouldered and broad-faced, but lovely anyway, today, in her wedding dress, satin and lace and white stockings and white shoes, with only a small veil to catch what breeze there was. Her brother followed and a sister in a pink gown. The family paused at the top of the steps while a photographer crouched before them, then all swept down to the sidewalk and into the waiting car, each of us gazing silently until Gerty called out, “Good luck, Dora!” and all the other children echoed her call. Dora Ryan waved like a queen from behind our own reflections in the car window.
    It was then, as the car pulled away from the curb, that I saw Big Lucy on the other side of the street. She was mouth-breathing, holding her scooter between her red knees, the handlebar pressed harshly into her little-girl skirt. Her careening eyes fell briefly on me and I felt the bright day flatten out and grow still. Then Lucy mounted her scooter, bounced it over the curb, and took off after the wedding car, propelled by one broad white leg that seemed as solid and pale as the concrete sidewalk itself. The words she brayed were some variation of Gerty’s happy salutation, “Good luck, good luck,” but made to sound angry, even threatening, in Lucy’s harsh, beseeching voice. Some of the girls put their hands over their mouths, their eyes wide. Some laughed wickedly.
    And yet just as she was about to turn the corner—about to sail out of the neighborhood forever, out of the neighborhood and into an institution, because what could her poor family do with Lucy’s suddenly outsized female body, her crude and childish mind, her fits of violence—I saw Big Lucy lift her leg behind her and let it hover there with a ballerina’s grace.
    By the time we reached the church, the wedding had begun. We could hear the muffled organ notes behind the closed doors. Lucy was nowhere to be seen. We lined ourselves along the curb where the hired car sat, now cool and silent. The driver leaned against the hood, smoking cigarettes and reading the newspaper. When the church doors were opened again—the sound of the organ spilling out toward us like ocean water—we stood and brushed at the backs of our skirts. I had expected the bride and the groom to be the first to appear in the dark doorway, but instead the wedding guests came out, singly and in couples, coming down the church steps tentatively, squinting into the sun. A man in a suit approached us and, with a cigarette caught in the corner of his mouth, demonstrated how he wanted us to cup our hands: the left under the right and the right curled into a small funnel. Then he took a fat paper bag from his suit pocket and poured a small stream of rice into each curled fist. He was a smiling, joking, wine-colored young man, made the more charming