The Private Lives of Pippa Lee by Rebecca Miller Page B

still beside each other, catching our breath. I propped myself up on one elbow. Amy had a chipped front tooth that glimmered inside her parted lips.
    â€˜If I’m a boy-girl, then I can be your boy-girlfriend,’ I said.
    â€˜No you can’t,’ she said dismissively.
    â€˜That way, when you have a real boyfriend, it’ll be easy.’
    She mulled this over for a moment. ‘But we wouldn’t tell anybody.’ She looked at me, her eyes narrowing.
    â€˜You think I’m dumb, or crazy?’ I asked. Then I let myself tip forward, very slowly approaching her face, and kissed her. Her lips felt cool and rough. She pushed me away, laughing, but later that day she let me do it again.
    We kissed a few more times that summer. I persuaded her to let me lie on top of her twice, as well. I loved feeling myself crush down on her. She struggled out from under me, though. Once, I was surprised to see alarm in her face as I pinned her down; she was clearly relieved when we heard my mother’s steps on the stairs.
    Years passed. Amy turned out to be a very intelligent girl. She got A’s in everything but history, a subject she detested for some reason of her own. I was an indifferent student. The words in my schoolbooks held no reality for me. I consumed them reluctantly, as if they were stale bread. I spent less time with Amy now; she was always in the library with her brainy friends. She studied ata round table with those geeks, sitting up straight like a princess, her long, dark hair glistening down her back, and worked away for hours under the admiring gaze of Mrs Underwood, the wheezing librarian. Ravaged by cigarettes, she rolled an oxygen tank with her while she was stacking books.
    The kisses Amy and I had shared melted away into a childhood we both remembered like a dream. I could no more have kissed her now than fly a 747. I wouldn’t have known how. I was thirteen, and I must tell you I was really something. Two compact and perfectly formed breasts had sprung up on my chest like mushrooms, overnight it seemed, disconcerting my brothers and sending my mother on an emergency shopping trip for my first bra. It took my father months to notice them. I’ll never forget the look of muted surprise on his face as I bent to clear his plate and he realized what had happened to me. I was small and lithe, with copper-colored hair, padded little hands, and a face like a cat. That’s what everyone said, that I looked like a kitten, with my broad, flat face and wide, slanting gray eyes, my small, cupid’s bow mouth – and my lassitude. I could lie on the couch in a torpor all morning long, then spring up and bolt out the door in a pair of tiny shorts, my mother shouting after me, pleading with me to come back in and change.
    As I have mentioned, I was a sexual creature pretty much from the get-go. At eleven, I found a way to achieve orgasms while doing the breaststroke, which subsequently led me to join the swim team of my junior high school and accounted for my iron thighs. In my early teens, though virginal in the extreme – I had never even kissed a boy – I developed a peculiar fantasy in which I met a faceless, unimpeachable gentleman whose pristine heart was overwhelmed with forbidden love for me. The boys in my school held no interest for me. They were all dying for it. I needed to find someone who absolutely didn’t want to be seduced. But I’m getting ahead of myself. At the moment, I’m thirteen, Grandma Sally has thrombosis, and Suky is going to Delaware.

Aha!
    Grandma Sally was fat. We saw her as rarely as possible. Suky could hardly look her. But, thinking back on it now, I don’t think it was disgust and embarrassment about Sally’s weight that kept her sparrowlike daughter away from her. I think the reason was that Grandma Sally had the full measure of my mother. I remember, on one of her rare visits, Sally followed Suky with her hooded eyes as