Page 165 - WhyAsInY

sons (anD Mostly DauGHters) of tHe Blue anD WHite
• In junior year, having been influenced by one or more of SandyPatty’nDenise, I somehow learned to play bridge. I immedi- ately sought to teach the game to my mother, who seemed aimless since the canasta fad had ended, and my father, who loved games and did not want our two decks of cards to go to waste. The three of us spent a fair amount of time playing the game with my friend Joyce Lieberman, and my parents thereby acquired their unique style of partnership bidding. (See Chapter Three.)
• When I was the Mayor, I organized a roller-skating party at a facil- ity near Prospect Park. You might recall that, despite Harriet Levin’s best efforts, I had not learned to skate. But, as I told my parents, who didn’t want me to go, skates were far easier to use in 1960 than they had been when I was in third grade, and, besides, I had to go: I was the organizer. My mother said that she was con- vinced that if I went, I would break my wrist. I wasn’t grateful. I went. And I broke my wrist.
• When I was the Mayor, I had the power to write a “pass” that would get me out of a class. That worked fine, except that my gym teacher, Mr. Kushnick (yes, Jack’s father), for whom I had finally figured out how to climb a rope to the ceiling of the gym, didn’t think that that was good enough. When he took note of the fact that I had written myself out of a large number of gym classes, he told me that he would fail me if I didn’t find a way to attend multiple makeups. As you will have noted, I broke my wrist during my senior year, and, I would add, just in time.
• I’ll make this one mercifully brief: One of my French teachers, who was very attractive and had what I might now call lascivious lips, caught me writing about her, not in my notebook, which would have been bad enough, especially given what I had written, but in the worst transgression possible, dans mon livre. The consequence? My father had to come in and meet with ma professeure avec les lèvres
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