And not her sisters, though it was true, last summer.
Franny had once watched through the staircase spindles
as curvaceous Martie and the ROTC member
entered into a clothes-wrinkling struggle on the living room
couch.
All that slow and serious movement
had seemed so utterly foreign to Franny like the first time
she had seen a newborn puppy nurse or a cecropia moth
make its way from its cocoon, that she did not
judge it by any parental injunction she
might have overheard.
Martie loved the ROTC boy, and he loved her,
and Franny watched their activity on the couch
not from mere curiosity but from envy and sympathy and worry,
too.
Heart aching, she sensed that the sum of all that writhing
could not equal Peg and Brick's taking center stage at a party
to touch-dance to Tommy Dorsey's "So Rare."
And suppose that Martie and the ROTC boy's species of living
room struggle were all that were left for the rest of them.
This impoverished, privately formed notion
contradicted all that Franny had been
raised to believe lay in wait for her grown-up self.
But there was a measure of comfort in the fact
that Martie appeared to know, at that acute moment, exactly
where she lay, and that someone cared
at least for a while for her movements
and her breath and her lips.
The taste of the kiss that Bob Prohaski
had given Franny in the Strawberry's dark garage--
elemental, almost a little bloody, reminiscent of the way
that the old-fashioned porch screens at her own house
tasted when she pressed her tongue to their rusty weave.
I'm going to stop there.
That's actually the end of chapter 1,
but it looks like we're running fairly long.
So that's chapter 1.
[APPLAUSE]