Jimmy had an appointment at Emory this Tuesday. I drove, while he listened to the last round of the Arnold Palmer golf tournament, postponed from the day before, due to rain. Traffic seemed surprisingly heavy for a Monday afternoon, until it dawned on me that it's spring break time.
I daydream a lot when I drive, especially if Jimmy's preoccupied and won't talk. I started thinking about spring break, and drifted back to when I was in school at Ashley Hall in Charleston. About this time of year, we'd start working on our summer tans. Any day that was sunny and the temperature topped 65 degrees, we'd go "lay out," as in "Where ya goin'?" "Lay out - don't have class til 2." We'd slather our bodies with baby oil and iodine and bake ourselves in any little patch of sun we could find. One popular spot could be accessed by climbing out a third story window onto a flat protected second floor roof.
I remember one girl from down the hall, Russell something or other: she was pretty enough, in an ordinary way, until she got in the sun. Then she turned into a goddess.
In the same amount of time it took us lesser mortals to cook to a bright pink, Russell would look like she'd been dipped in bronze. Her hair, into which she'd squeezed a lemon, magically transformed from mousy brown to shades of honey, dappled with pale blond. (WE'd sometimes resort to Marchand, with predictably unfortunate results.) Her light green eyes glittered against the even darkness of her skin and her teeth dazzled with an impossibe white (salt and baking soda, so they said.)
We marveled at her and gnashed our teeth in envious dismay, and despaired of the unfairness of it all.
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