My reflection is still staring back at me. Why, oh why, I ask myself, did I have to be born with my father’s nose? This is something that began to be noticeable during this past year. Especially since I was visited for the first time by the remarkable events outlined in that informative little booklet entitled “Marjorie May’s Twelfth Birthday”—otherwise known as “getting your period.”
Is it possible that “becoming a woman” means that you can begin to grow a nose like a man? Why didn’t Arnold, my seventeen-year-old brother, inherit my father’s nose? But no, blond, blue-eyed, and baby-faced Arnold (who is back home in the city working at a summer job) is the very picture of a romantic pretty-boy. While I...oh, what’s the use?
All I’ve been asking for these past few months is a bobbing—just the tip of my nose pushed up and back, something I can do with my index finger, hardly what you would call a nose job.
But my parents have refused to listen to me, even forbidden me to bring up the subject. “There’s a war on,” says my father.
“What’s that got to do with it?” I ask, falling right into the pit.
“Good heavens, Isabel,” he thunders, “don’t you think doctors have more to do than making your nose one-thirty-second of an inch shorter? Aren’t you hearing on the radio what’s been going on in the steaming jungles of the Philippines, Bataan, New Guinea? How can you be so thoughtless and selfish?”
Steaming jungles, hmm. It’s plenty hot in this little wooden box of a room that’s supposed to save me from the baking sidewalks of Le Grand Concours. That’s French, in case you didn’t know it, for this big busy street in the Bronx, lined with apartment buildings, that’s known as The Grand Concourse. As Miss Le Vigne, my French teacher, would say, “Mon dieu, ouvrons les fenêtres. Comme il fait chaud!”
But there are no windows to open. The only window is at the back of my little room, and it’s already open and looks out onto a barricade of dark pine forest heavy with trapped air. So I wriggle into my bathing suit, grab a coarse, pebbly towel, and wander down the path that leads across a dirt country road to the lake, better known as Moskin’s Mud Hole.
Sure enough, there are a bunch of eight- and ten-year-olds, all boys, cavorting around the dinky wooden platform that is used as both a boat dock and a diving platform.
If there’s anything I hate more than ten-year-old boys, it’s twelve-year-old boys. Short, fat, and boisterous; skinny, freckled, and buck-toothed; tall, gangly, and pimpled—all twelve-year-old boys make me feel like I want to vomit.
The kids at the lake give me a passing but interested look as I glide by them. My breasts, along with my nose, have popped noticeably in these past couple of months, and I’m wearing a jersey two-piece bathing suit. Just one fresh remark, I think to myself, and I’ll punch the little smartass right in the nose.
But Moskin’s young guests soon return to scrambling up onto the dock, holding their noses, and plunging back into the water like a pack of trained seals, while I take off and slip into the lake at a more distant point, swimming slowly to the far shore. There are footpaths there that trail off into the woods and lead to clusters of rented summer bungalows. Moskin’s, after all, doesn’t own the entire lake, and you can tell this from the fact that here, where I’m now sitting on my towel and drying off, there’s an old rubber swimming tube and a rowboat that’s been pulled up onto the muddy shore.
It’s probably not a good idea to go exploring along one of the footpaths today because I’m barefoot and already my feet have been cut by sharp stones from when I crossed the dirt auto road at Moskin’s to get to the lake. Still, I’m sort of entranced by the path just to my left through the deep piney woods. It has to lead somewhere.
So maybe I’ll wander just a little way in through the dimness, stepping softly on the pine needles that cover the dusty soil. It is dark in here, though. Not spooky, but not exactly friendly either.
What if there are snakes? That curved branch over there, for example. It could be a snake. Simply because it’s lying so still doesn’t mean it isn’t a living slithery thing, just waiting to strike. I draw closer and peer down at it. How close do I dare get, and why am I being so dangerously nosy anyway?
Suddenly there’s this strange rustling noise coming from somewhere nearby. It could have been a bird flying out of a tree. But when I look down I could swear that the “branch” on the ground has moved. Now, I really do have to satisfy my curiosity. Was that the warning rattler on a rattlesnake’s tail that I heard rustling? Could there actually be rattlesnakes in the nearby woods threatening Moskin’s juicy summer guests?
Softly, softly, I approach the snake/tree-branch. Not a sound, nothing stirs. And, then, in a flash, something springs up at me. It has no mouth, no flicking tongue, no venom-filled fangs, but surely it’s alive.
I jump back as far as I can, stumble on some tree roots, and go sprawling on my backside. My head bangs hard as I hit the ground, and for an instant, everything goes black.
Then, slowly, the pain of a bruised elbow, a badly bumped shoulder, and a bonked head bring me to. I open my eyes to a startling whiteness and think instantly of the uniformed nurse who was standing over me when I had my tonsils out. But, no, I’m still in the woods. Only now I’m no longer alone.
“Gosh,” says a soft male voice, “what happened to you, girl? Looks kinda like you dropped right outta the trees. Help you up?”
I am so embarrassed. I’m not really a klutz—one of those kids who’s clumsy at everything and always falling down. And this, this person who’s peering at me from above is the cutest sailor in the U.S. Navy that you ever saw. He’s wearing his summer whites, middy and bellbottom trousers, no cap, and has earnest brown eyes and dark hair. He reminds me a little bit of Bob, last summer’s saxophone player in Moskin’s band. And, of course, he’s eighteen or so, and—just like Bob—probably too old for me.
He pulls me up with one hand and I brush myself off and say, “Merci beaucoup,” trying to sound casual and not the least bit put out by my recent tumble.
“Are you French?” he asks, raising one eyebrow.
“Not really,” I confess. “My name’s Isabel.”
We chat awhile as we walk back toward the lake. His name is Roy and he’s a recent enlistee in the Navy. Right now he’s visiting his family at one of the bungalow colonies and he’s awfully bored—and wondering what there is to do around here...
A few minutes later I’m hurrying back to Moskin’s. I can’t wait to tell Ruthie that I met a sailor in the woods and that he’s coming to Moskin’s casino tonight to dance to the jukebox. (Oh, about that “snake”—it was just a weirdly curved greenish-black tree branch, after all.)
Still in my slightly damp bathing suit, I’m looking all over Moskin’s for Ruthie. This sailor boy, Roy, really looks groovy to me. I’ll bet he can do the Lindy. And he doesn’t seem to have that supercilious attitude toward twelve-year-old girls that my brother Arnold has. So maybe, war or no war, the summer at Shady Pines won’t get off to such a dreary start after all.
The best place to find Ruthie when she isn’t taking care of the guests’ kids is in the hotel kitchen. When I was younger, I have to admit, it was my favorite hangout, mainly because of the crock, always filled with big thick cookies topped with cinnamon and sugar or with chocolate sprinkles that were there for the taking.
Sure enough, Mrs. Moskin, Ruthie’s mother, who’s in charge of the kitchen and does most of the hotel cooking, spots me with a nod of her chin toward the cookie jar. As usual, she’s wrapped in a white apron that looks like flour sacking and wears a head cloth that