I was the representative from the fifth grade to the student council. We had our meetings on the stage of the auditorium behind the curtain, and the guy who was the vice-president of the school (he was a year ahead of me) I found to be so swoony --- snacky, as they say. I would goggle at him across a seated circle of kids at our meetings. Years later, I ran into him again at an exchange at Thacher, which is California's Andover. It's a place where every boy (at that point it only boys) had a horse and only the offspring of the powers that be were sent there. |
| We started a tragic romance. It didn't make sense to anyone, not least of which was either of us. He was a jock; I was not. He would never introduce me to his parents because I was Jewish and they were high-WASP. My mother remarked on his beautiful manners, even as they solely manifested themselves to her in his deportment when he picked me up at the front door. He was too much the gentleman to remark on the dual reeks of rage and pathology that even he could get a whiff of as he drove us away from that house of usher. |