An Old-Fashioned Story
Jane Mayhall
When Clorinda's letter came, Jackie was 14. The idea of having a memory had just begun to be exotic. You could remember, and it was a feeling of conceit, an aberration, a limitless unfixed disguise that made things seem what they were not. Would you know yourself as once you might have been? Jackie tapped the letter on her tooth and let the voluptuous sensation of Clorinda envelop vast roomy mirrors outside the commonplace.
That was dippy thinking and dead-end. In plain terms, they had not met since they were seven. Both were now 14. There was something embarrassing, mawkish, too realistic about the years that divided. But as Jackie still felt that every friend was the big experience, hot-shot, soul mate (precociously admitted, the arrows always pointing to your own self-interests), she could afford to give in a little to childish sentiment. There was much to be gained, and the thought that Clorinda still wanted to see her. After all these years, Jackie ploughing through her life in the same old place, not quite middle-South, and Clorinda off on unknown rounds in Terre Haute, Indiana.
Clorinda did not send a photograph, and she invited Jackie to come visit next week. Jackie's stomach slightly turned. To think that Clorinda would have grown taller, slimmer, blonder, curly-headedy-er. Jackie reconstructed Clorinda's elfin features. Secretly, she was the elf of the Second Grade, as Jackie was the black cat tiger. Clorinda, tiny and sprigs of golden curls, and Jackie was the suave black tiger. They were both little white girls in a white girl neighborhood, but that was the part that Jackie played. She didn't figure why. Clorinda was light and pixie with a husky pixie voice, and Jackie
