The Little Friend

Allison was now sixteen. A mousy little girl who bruised and sunburned easily and cried at nearly everything, she had grown up, unexpectedly, to be the pretty one: long legs, fawn-red hair, liquid, fawn-brown eyes. All her grace was in her vagueness. Her voice was soft, her manner languid, her features blurred and dreamy; and to her grandmother Edie—who prized sparkle and high color—she was something of a disappointment. Allison’s bloom was delicate and artless, like the flowering grass in June, consisting wholly of a youthful freshness that (no one knew better than Edie) was the first thing to go. She daydreamed; she sighed a lot; her walk was awkward—shuffling, with toes turned in—and so was her speech. Still she was pretty, in her shy, milk-white way, and the boys in her class had started to call her on the telephone. Edie had observed her (eyes downcast, face burning red) with the receiver caught between her shoulder and ear, pushing the toe of her oxford back and forth and stammering with humiliation.

Such a pity, Edie fretted aloud, that such a lovely girl (lovely, the way Edie said it, carrying the plain freight of weak and anemic) should hold herself so poorly. Allison should keep her hair from falling in her eyes. Allison should throw her shoulders back, stand tall and confident instead of slumping. Allison should smile, speak up, develop some interests, ask people questions about themselves if she couldn’t think of anything interesting to say. Such advice, though well meaning, was often delivered in public and so impatiently that Allison stumbled from the room in tears.

“Well, I don’t care,” Edie would say, loudly, in the silence following these performances. “Somebody needs to teach her how to act. If I didn’t stay on top of her like I do, that child wouldn’t be in the tenth grade, I can tell you that.”

It was true. Though Allison had never failed a grade, she had come perilously near it several times, especially in elementary school. Wool-gathers, noted the Deportment section of Allison’s report cards. Untidy. Slow. Does not apply self. “Well, I guess we’ll just have to try a little harder,” Charlotte would say vaguely when Allison trailed home with yet more C’s and D’s.

But though neither Allison nor her mother seemed to care about the bad grades, Edie cared, a rather alarming lot. She marched down to the school to demand conferences with the teachers; tortured Allison with reading lists and flash cards and long-division problems; marked up Allison’s book reports and science projects with red pencil even now that she was in high school.

There was no reminding Edie that Robin himself had not always been a very good student. “High spirits,” she replied tartly. “He would have settled down to work soon enough.” And this was as close as she ever came to acknowledging the real problem, for—as all the Cleves were aware—if Allison had been as lively as her brother Edie would have forgiven her all the C’s and D’s in the world.

As Robin’s death, and the years following it, had served to turn Edie somewhat sour, Charlotte had wafted into an indifference which numbed and discolored every area of life; and if she tried to take up for Allison it was in an ineffectual and half-hearted way. In this she had come to resemble her husband, Dixon, who though a decent provider financially had never shown his daughters much encouragement or concern. His carelessness was nothing personal; he was a man of many opinions, and his low opinion of girl children he expressed unashamedly and with a casual, conversational good humor. (No daughter of his, he was fond of repeating, would inherit a dime.)