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PARTISAN REVIEW
entertaining, and reliable. What mattered more than sex, athletics,
or studies to us at Brimmer was our popularity; each child had an
unwritten class-popularity polI inside his head. Everyone was ranked,
and alI day each of us mooned profoundly on his place, as it quivered
like our blood or a compass needle with a thousand revisions. At
nine character is, perhaps, too much
in ovo
for a child to be
strongly disliked, but sitting next to Elie Norton, I glanced at her
and gulped prestige from her popularity. We were not close at first;
then nearness made us closer friends, for Elie had a gracious gift,
the gift of gifts, I suppose, in a child: she forgot all about the popu–
larity-rank of the classmate she was talking to. No moron could
have seemed so uncritical as this airy, chatty, intelligent child,
the belIe of our grade. She noticed my habit of cocking my head
on one side, shutting my eyes, and driving like a bull through
opposition at soccer-wishing to amuse without wounding, she called
me Buffalo Bull. At general assembly she would giggle with con–
tented admiration at the upper-school girls in their penal black and
white. "What bruisers, what beef-eaters! Dear girls," she would sigh,
parroting her sophisticated mother, "we shall all become fodder for
the governess classes before graduating from Brimmer." I felt that
Elie Norton understood me better than anyone except my playful
little Grandmother Winslow.
One morning there was a disaster. The boy behind me, no
friend, had been tapping at my elbow for over a minute to catch
my attention before I consented to look up and see a great golden
puddle spreading toward me from under Elie's chair. I dared not
speak, smile, or flicker an eyelash in her direction. She ran bawling
from the classroom. Trying to catch every eye, yet avoid commit–
ment, I gave sidelong and involuntary smirks at space. I began to
feel manic with superiority to Elie Norton and struggled to swallow
down a feeling of goaded holIowness-was I deserting her? Our
teacher left us on our honor and ran down the hall. The class milled
about in a hesitant hush. The girls blushed. The boys smirked. Miss
Manice, the principal, appeared. She wore her whitish-brown dress
with darker brown spots. Shimmering in the sunlight and chilling
us, she stood mothlike in the middle of the classroom. We rushed
to our se,ats. Miss Manice talked about how there was "nothing
laughable about malaise." She broke off. Her face took on an ex-
