Haywire by Brooke Hayward (android based ebook reader .txt) 📕

and Miss Brown alone. Once again she came to the house and tutored us every morning from nine to twelve. Three afternoons a week, now that we were older and presumably needed supplementary companionship, we were picked up by the Tocaloma Girls’ and Boys’ Club station wagons and taken off, with a group of our peers, to the Santa Monica Ice-Skating Rink or the Rocking Horse Stables, or, on Saturdays, to amusements farther afield like Knott’s Berry Farm.

It never occurred to us that this was an unusual arrangement, since any other to which we might have compared it was equally unusual. Even so, it would have been unthinkable to argue; we were brought up on the premise that to argue with one’s parents was fundamentally bad manners and bad manners were intolerable. (“I will forgive you anything you ever do if you do it with good manners,” Father would say, handing us Munro Leaf’s book Manners Can Be Fun. “Except tell a lie,” expostulated Mother.) And, manners notwithstanding, it would have been hopeless to argue with Mother, because whatever she said was dogma. We had learned that the fine art of wheedling, effectively practiced by our friends on their parents, was a waste of time with Mother. It was fruitless to try the time-honored plea, “But everyone else we know gets to …” because that, to Mother, was the most unpardonable excuse of all, showing a singular lack of individuality. “It couldn’t matter less to me what everyone else you know is allowed to do,” she would say, trying to be patient. “That is certainly no criterion of right or wrong, only of their parents’ taste, which is not necessarily something I have to or want to emulate. I have a responsibility to you and that is to teach you a set of values which is good and strong enough not to be influenced by—corrupted by—anyone else’s, no matter how attractive theirs may seem to be. You have to learn to think for yourselves.”

She meant it. There was no getting around her if she disapproved of something. Comic books were barred from the house under penalty of death, she said, because they were strictly for the mentally retarded, as were radio programs; if we felt the need for entertainment, we could read, instead of comics, books—any books we wanted, which meant that by the time we were nine or ten we had run out of our own and were rifling through Mother and Father’s library. There were no extenuating circumstances whatsoever for the presence in the house of Coca-Cola or candy, the pure embodiment of tooth decay; Mother was always able to point to this policy with justifiable pride, since as a result of it, none of us ever had a single cavity and, furthermore, never developed the trace of a sweet tooth.

We did not miss school at all, nor did we feel particularly deprived of playmates; we had each other, and as additional companions Danny and Diane Snodmuller, the children of the Dohenys’ caretaker, who lived across the road in a shack behind the heavy wire fencing that marked one corner of the property line. We were fascinated by everything to do with Danny and Diane: they were twins, they were poor, they were adventurous, they never had to take baths, they were a perfect age for us (halfway between Bridget and me), they taught us how to do cartwheels, they slept in a real tree house, and they had stacks of comics. Mother, of course, did not know about the last, or she would not have encouraged us to spend so much time over at their house. Danny and Diane were wonderful. They had to go to public school every morning, so we would walk with them down to where the dirt road ran into Coldwater Canyon, just to get in a game of tag before either the bus arrived for them or Miss Brown for us.

Afternoons if the weather was good, we’d put on our cowboy boots and set off in a tight band to roam the sagebrush-covered hills, sometimes aimlessly, sometimes on the trail of scorpions and lizards and flowering cactus. Danny and Bill practiced peeing at distant objects and became proficient at hitting anything within a radius of ten or twelve feet, while Bridget, Diane, and I watched enviously and tramped around looking for nice scorching rocks, which made especially satisfactory targets because they sizzled and steamed like dry ice when the urine hit them.

From the very beginning, Bridget kept herself slightly aloof from our unruly activities. She was not a tomboy and made no bones about it. She had neither the stamina for these excursions nor any interest in the typically rough games the rest of us liked to play at that age, where we chose sides and were pitted against each other for a rowdy chase sequence of cowboys-and-Indians or pirates. She would join us because we would coax or shame her into it, when she would really have been much more comfortable playing with her dolls or drawing a picture or reading. Bridget always seemed content to be alone, but this was partly because she felt so ill at ease with the alternative; whenever the three of us expanded into a larger group, it became an unfamiliar, disorderly, and threatening competition with which she couldn’t cope. Yet she didn’t want to be left out, either; there was a conspiratorial element that attracted her, and nowhere was this element as apparent as in our friendship with Jane and Peter Fonda.

The Fondas went back forever in time as we knew it, and were to go forward forever in time to come. Our families were united in the most abstract but intricately woven pattern. The Haywards and the Fondas: our mother had been married to their father and, after they had divorced, almost remarried him; our father was their father’s agent and eventually, with Mr. Roberts, his producer. It seemed we had been born into a