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Commentary. plaid gingham –зд.клетчатое платье из дешевой бумажной или льняной ткани

plaid gingham – зд.клетчатое платье из дешевой бумажной или льняной ткани

bobby pins – (амер.) заколки для волос

a wolf whistle – (амер.) свист восхищения (одобрения) при появлении красивой девушки

lectern – кафедра, пюпитр, в церкви - аналой

to go Dutch (to the movies) – платить свою часть за угощение, устроить складчину

sophomore – второкурсник

metering rods, float gauge – части автомобиля

Exercise 1. Practise the pronunciation of the following words:

1. dirndle ['dR:ndl] 9. masculine ['mQ:skjulIn]

2. cherubic [tSR'ru:bIk] 10. thoroughgoing ['YArRLgRuIN]

3. cocoon [kR'ku:n] 11. conscienceless ['kOnSRnslIs]

4. aisle [aIl] 12. wearily ['wIRrIlI]

5. peremptorily [pR'rempt(R)rIlI] 13. preternaturally [LprItR'nWtSrRlI]

6. authoritatively [O:'YOrItRtIvlI] 14. forage ['fOrIdG]

7. wrecked [rRkt] 15. prowl ['praul]

8. juvenile ['dGu:vInaIl] 16. bravado [brR'vQ:dRu]

Exercise 2. Read the following extract:

The first day of school was rainy. Jane wore an old plaid gingham; but Belinda burst out of bobby pins into golden curls, a butterfly emerging from its cocoon. She insisted, against her mother’s better judgement, on wearing a new blue-striped dirndl which made her look cherubic and accented to advantage the color of her eyes.

A general assembly was called for the first morning, and Jane watched her younger sister enter extremely late and tiptoe up and down the center aisle looking for a seat. She was a picture of sweet innocence, young, fresh, utterly unspoiled. A dozen boys scrambled to their feet to help her, and from the senior section came an undignified wolf whistle which made Dr. Harmon rap on the lectern peremptorily. The student body stood to salute the flag, and the opening session had officially begun.

Trudy, who was extremely short-sighted, was sitting next to Jane. “Something new has been added!” she whispered. “Who’s that?”

“It happens to be my sister,” Jane whispered back. “I don’t know what she thinks she’s doing.”

“Making an impression, that’s for sure. But I never realized she was so cute.”

Cute, Jane was to realize before the day was over, happened to be an inadequate word for Belinda. The junior girls, discussing her effectiveness in the lunchroom, tried to find a better one.

“Devastating’s more like it,” said Sue Harvey. “Did you see the way Gordon and Jack kept walking past the door of her home room?”

“Let’s put it calmly,” suggested Polly. “The child has charm.”

“Where’s she been hiding herself?” asked a girl from the next table.

“In eighth grade,” answered Jane with a grin. Everyone thought it amusing that her younger sister had managed to conquer the masculine element of the high school in one easy lesson, but on the whole they discounted her durability. It wasn’t unusual for a freshman girl – a new face and a new figure – to skyrocket to popularity. But the older boys soon tired of cradle snatching and came ambling back gratefully to the girls who were nearer their own age.

Belinda, however, was happily unaware that any such future might be in store for her. She came home, late in the afternoon, with shining eyes. “Oh, Mummy, I’m going to just love high school!” she cried. “I knew I would.” That night, at the dinner table, she brought up the subject of dating, demanding that it be clarified once and for all. Turning melting eyes on her father, she launched a frontal attack. “You said, didn’t you, Daddy, that once I was in high school I could go out?”

Mr. Howard had been absorbed in discussing the Princeton football schedule with his wife. “Go out?” he countered. “But you go out already. You’re out all the time.”

“Daddy. Listen! You said I could have dates. Regular dates, not just going Dutch to the movies. With boys.”

“Humph.” Mr. Howard mumbled something unintelligible and looked questioningly at his wife. To Jane he sounded slightly like a frog with a cold in its throat. She looked down at her plate, unable to stifle a grin.

“You did say something of the sort, Mike,” Mrs. Howard murmured.

“But she’s just a baby. Dates? What does the child mean?”

“I mean,” said Belinda, with astonishing firmness, “that you made me a promise. You said when I was in high school – and now I’m in high school. So there!”

“Belinda!” said her mother rather sharply.

“I’m sorry, Daddy.” Linda’s eyes lost their momentary glint and her lashes fluttered. “But you can’t break a promise. You must remember. And I’ve waited and waited.” She looked as though she might burst into tears.

Mr. Howard capitulated in such a rush that he quite forgot to say that if and when Linda had these problematic dates they were to be limited strictly to week ends, but he did stipulate that she was to get home not one minute later than eleven o’clock.

“Even from parties – dances and things?”

“Dances!” Mr. Howard roared at his wife, over Linda’s head. “She won’t be going to dances, Fay, will she?”

“Not right now, I’d think. Perhaps later on. There will be class dances, I suppose, isn’t that right, Jane?” Mrs. Howard turned to her elder daughter for help.

“I shouldn’t be surprised,” murmured Jane. She deftly refused to catch Belinda’s eye.

Retreating to the only position he could surely hold, Mr. Howard repeated, “Eleven o’clock.” Then he pounded authoritatively on the table. “That’s the limit, understand?”

Linda nodded meekly. “Yes, Daddy.” She looked very thoughtful. “Eleven o’clock’s not bad, really,” she added, after a minute. “It’s always better to be the first girl to leave a party than the last.”

* * *

During the two weeks before school opened Ken had been so completely engrossed with his car that Jane had seen him only in passing. For days he had been off searching for a second carburetor, the hotrodder’s “necessity.” When he finally found one, on a wrecked Cadillac ambulance, his mother spread the word to the Howards, but how he got the money to pay for it Jane didn’t, at the moment, learn.

As a matter of fact, after the night of Trudy’s party, she rather avoided Ken. When she thought of how ridiculous she had been — how juvenile! — she grew hot and cold with shame.

Lying in bed at night, she watched the moon grow old, and wondered how she could make amends. She tried to picture herself telling Ken she was sorry, that she had acted like a baby, because he had surprised her, and that she really liked him a lot.

Sometimes this sounded possible, especially on the first few vivid nights. Then Jane would feel tremulous, as though she were standing on the brink of uncertainty. All her perceptions were sharpened, yet nothing seemed quite real. The apology became almost easy, and she could imagine Ken – but no, she couldn’t! She couldn’t imagine Ken at all.

Her resolution waned with the moon. Better ignore the whole episode. Better try to go on as though nothing had happened. What had possessed Ken, anyway – suddenly going all mushy? She’d been quite right to cut and run from such foolishness. She wasn’t old enough for that sort of stuff. But a small voice somewhere far back in her consciousness told her that this was merely dodging the issue. The other girls were old enough. Sue, Polly, even Trudy, had enjoyed – and discussed – first love affairs. Of them all, only Jane had remained unswayed by some likely lad. Perhaps, she excused herself, this was because Ken was always on hand and she accepted him almost like a brother. Almost, but not quite.

Now, for the first time in her life, she found herself spying on him from the shelter of her bedroom curtains. He looked so extremely masculine, in his old work clothes, as he cleaned and examined and probed the various parts of the car.

At another time – any time before Trudy’s party – Jane would have been down in the driveway with him, holding his tools, listening to his explanations even though she didn’t understand them, and lending the encouragement of her presence. But now everything was changed.

Now, to her own disgust, Jane barely spoke to Ken when she encountered him. Her mother, noticing her attitude, asked if they had quarreled.

Linda, who happened to be present, pricked up her ears, but Jane made her eyes blank and shook her head nonchalantly. “No. Whatever made you think such a thing?”

Mrs. Howard, a wise mother, didn’t press the point. And Jane thought that maybe after school started they’d get back on their former footing. It was an unfounded hope.

She had forgotten that the first month of school could be so unbelievably hectic. New schedules, new teachers, class meetings, hockey practice – especially hockey practice – occupied Jane’s time. She was slim and fast and had played wing on the second team as a sophomore. Now she was being groomed for a first-team position, and the coach drilled her squad hard and long, three afternoons a week. September was a hot month, and Jane came home perspiring and weary, just before dinnertime.

Ken, who had equally intensive football practice, was finding less and less time to work at rebuilding his car, so every minute was valuable. If he saw Jane he called, “Hi!” or waved a tool abstractedly, but he didn’t give her any of his precious time.

It was from Mrs. Sanderson that the Howards got a thoroughgoing description of life with a Cadillac. She came over late one afternoon to borrow a baking tin and found Jane, still in her green-and-white hockey uniform, lounging on a kitchen chair while her mother sliced tomatoes for dinner.

“I think,” Mrs. Sanderson confided, “that Ken has decided to finish rebuilding his prize on our kitchen table. You know he works at night.”

“I’m not surprised.” Mrs. Howard smiled. She could afford to be amused, because she didn’t have to live in the midst of the clutter Ken produced.

“You should see my breakfast room,” Mrs. Sanderson told Jane. “If I want to set the table I have to remove a litter of metering rods, float gauges, bolts, springs, ‘idle’ screws — whatever they are — and heaven knows what. That’s why I gave Ken my big baking pan, I thought it might help keep the parts together.” She chuckled. “I’m afraid it was an ‘idle’ hope.”

“Why don’t you make him work in the garage?” Jane asked.

“He says the light’s not good enough.” Shaking her head in mock despair, though really quite entertained by the situation, Mrs. Sanderson continued. “There’s one thing I can’t understand. If this car needs two carburetors, why didn’t the engineers supply them in the first place? I must remember to ask Ben.”

“Why not Ken?” laughed Jane.

“Oh, I can’t even understand what Ken’s talking about these days,” confessed his mother. “Ben at least makes a little sense.”

She was just about to leave, baking tin in hand, when she turned back to speak to Jane. “By the way, dear, I wonder if you’d be able to stay with Georgie Friday night? We’re going in town to the theater, and I think Ken has a meeting or something; I forget what, but I gathered he wouldn’t be home.”

Stifling her first impulse to make some excuse, Jane thought, Why not? She could use the money, especially since Ken had made no indication that he intended to repay her loan in the near future. “I’d be glad to,” she said.

“That’s wonderful. Seven o’clock?” Nodding happily, Mrs. Sanderson bounced down the steps and across the well-worn path between the two yards.

* * *

“Bonjour, Monsieur Brown, je ne vous attendais pas pour le déjeuner,” translated Jane. She was sitting at the rather uncomfortable desk in her bedroom — the one her mother had bought in her first flush of enthusiasm for antiques.

“Ou est ma place, Madame?” Apparently Mr. Brown didn’t really care. Jane yawned, bored with the whole procedure, and wished she were as conscienceless as Belinda, who was singing to herself in the next room.

Tomorrow is Friday, she thought. Saturday morning and Sunday morning I can sleep. The first weeks of hockey did take it out, of a girl. Neither Jane nor any of the rest were used to the exercise yet.

Then she remembered that tomorrow night she had promised to baby-sit next door. Oh, well, the chances were that Ken would get in at a decent hour, even if his parents didn’t.

The fact that she might have a chance to see Ken alone for a while roused her. Maybe she could straighten out, in some way or other, what she now thought of as their misunderstanding. She shut her book with a slap and looked up to find Linda standing in the doorway.

“Give up?” she asked.

“Je suis fini,” Jane corrected her, and yawned again. “Boy, am I whipped!”

Belinda came in and sat cross-legged on Jane’s bed, rubbing cold cream into her face and neck with a rosy-nailed hand.

“I thought Mother said you couldn’t wear dark polish,” Jane murmured.

“Sh! Nobody’s noticed. Give me a break.”

“What color is it?” Jane asked.

“Fatal Apple.”

“Sounds poisonous,” quipped Jane, and Belinda giggled. “Have you finished your homework, pet? Don’t tell me. Let me guess.”

“All I can do.” Belinda shrugged. “Math and I just don’t get along.”

“Or is it that Mark and you get along too well?” Jane mentioned one of the boys who had been most persistent in carrying Belinda’s books home from school.

“Mark? Poof!” Belinda blew him away with a gesture. “He’s only a freshman.”

“What are you?”

“Now, Janey, don’t be dim-witted. You know girls never like boys their own age.”

“Tell me about the older men in your life,” Jane suggested.

But suddenly Belinda turned serious. “Do you think there’s anything wrong with going out with older boys?”

“Who did you have in mind?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Belinda parried. “Some of the boys in your crowd have been sort of nice to me.”

“Have fun while it lasts,” Jane suggested, pulling off her hockey shirt. Then, realizing that Belinda had expected something less flippant, she said wearily, “Oh, I don’t know, Lin. You’re the best judge of what you want to do. When I was a freshman, the problem just never came up. I guess I wasn’t very much interested in boys.”

Later, toweling herself dry after a shower, Jane wondered if she had let Belinda down. It was rather endearing of her younger sister to come to her, as she had several times since school started, for advice. But Jane could already see that her own experience was insufficient. She felt as though her path and Linda’s ran at angles to each other, yet there didn’t seem to be any point at which they might logically cross.

* * *

“How you could forget the first football rally of the season is beyond me!” Belinda said.

She and Jane were clearing the table Friday night after dinner, and for once they were both hurrying, because it was almost seven o’clock.

“It was sort of dumb, but it’s too late now,” Jane replied. “I just can’t disappoint Mrs. Sanderson.”

“Maybe Mother would take your place,” Linda suggested.

Jane shook her head. “She and Daddy are going out.”

There was nothing to do but make the best of it, and Jane was inclined to be philosophical. As she curled up against the cushions in the corner of the Sandersons’ big sofa she told herself there would be other rallies, other times when she could watch Ken shine.

For Ken was a big wheel this year, in football. He and Jack Preston and Eric Forte were the three most important men of the team, according to Polly, who always seemed to be in the know, Polly, who was playing center forward in hockey, was pretty certain to be elected captain of the first team. She and Jane usually walked home together after practice, and it was then that Jane always managed to catch up on the high-school news.

It seemed strange to think of Ken as a shining light in the senior class, when for so many years he had just been the boy next door. It was even stranger to realize that next year he would not be here at all!

Jane put this inevitable fact sternly out of her mind. She decided it was time she started living, like Linda, in the here and now. And the question of the moment was: how was she going to treat Ken when he came home from the rally? How was she going to put this silly situation straight?

It occurred to her, of course, that Ken might not recognize that there was any situation. By now he might have forgotten the whole thing.

The idea expanded in Jane’s mind with the mushroom growth of most night-time thoughts. It became a certainty by eight o’clock, and by nine Jane had decided the thing to do was to ignore bygones and be perfectly normal – casual and pleasant and interested, just as she’d always been.

This settled, she turned the pages of a magazine and waited. Unless he was going somewhere with the boys, she could expect Ken home not long after ten o’clock.

As the hour approached she became increasingly nervous. The house seemed preternaturally quiet and the night outside very dark. There wasn’t even the usual blaze of light from her own home to reassure her. In an economical moment her father must have turned out everything but the hall lamp.

George awakened just as the clock struck ten. He wanted a glass of water. When she held it for him to drink he said, “Hello, Jane. You here?”

Covering him up, she wandered downstairs again decided to turn on the radio in an effort to dispel the feeling of gloom. But just as she crossed the living room she heard voices in the street – first Linda’s, then Ken’s.

Good, she thought. They’ve come home at the same time. Now I have an excuse if I don’t want to stay. I can say Belinda shouldn’t be left alone.

Going back to the couch, she curled up again in one corner and picked up the same magazine she had put down. The voices grew louder; there came Linda’s light, tinkling laughter, and then a screen door hanged.

Now! Jane readied herself to look up with a smile as Ken came into the room. But no footsteps sounded on the porch. She waited and listened for fully a minute, but even the sound of voices had disappeared.

Could they possibly be so childish as to try to sneak up on her and scare her? If that was the game, she wasn’t going to be a sitting duck. Mrs. Sanderson had mentioned that there was coke in the refrigerator. Deciding that this would offer a logical escape, Jane started out to the kitchen. Silly kids!

But in the darkened dining room she stopped short. The lights at home had been turned on, and through the kitchen window opposite she could see Ken and Linda foraging for something to eat. They were talking and laughing, just as they had been on the street, but now they seemed to be standing in a stage set, and their gestures and expressions had an animation which said, as explicitly as words, that they were having a lot of fun.

Jane froze where she stood, and watched them. Ken seemed in no hurry to get home. He sat on the kitchen table, swinging his long legs, and ate the peanut-butter sandwiches Linda handed him; then he walked over to the refrigerator and helped himself to a glass of milk.

Apparently whatever he was talking about when he wasn’t chewing or swallowing was very amusing, because Belinda laughed a lot and kept batting her eyelashes at him, in a way she had just acquired. She wasn’t eating much herself, Jane noticed. Her entire attention was centered on Ken.

Why, she’s playing up to him, Jane realized. For a second she was completely stunned. Then she decided she really should be entertained. As though Ken would fall for that sweet-young-thing routine!

But in her mind’s eye she could see Gordon and Eric prowling back and forth outside Linda’s home room. She could hear the wolf whistle from the senior section, which had opened the first assembly. She remembered the reports of Linda’s progress, which were repeated in study hall and lunchroom — gossip to which she had listened with an elder sister’s indulgent smile.

Was Ken so very different from the rest of the boys?

Don’t be absurd, she told herself. The whole thing’s ludicrous. Ken happens to meet Linda on the way home from the rally and stops by for a snack, and I start making a mountain out of a molehill. But had he met her by chance or had the meeting been prearranged? This she couldn’t know.

Suddenly aware that she was standing in the dark spying, Jane turned on her heel and walked back to the living room. The front door was closed, but she opened it, feeling that the house was close, that she needed fresh air. Then she went upstairs to Mrs. Sanderson’s dressing table, found a lipstick and powder, and very carefully made up.

She was just coming down again when Ken sauntered into the house and flung himself into a chair. “Boy, is that kid sister of yours a lulu!” he chuckled. “Where did she get that line?”

“What line?” Jane tried to be offhand and managed to sound grim.

Ken shook his head, then burst out laughing. “Don’t ask me. All I know is she sure does give with the build-up.”

Jane picked up the schoolbooks she had brought over but left unopened, and moved toward the door. “Maybe I ought to take lessons.” Annoyance pricked through the determined lightness of the remark.

“Hey,” said Ken, his eyes twinkling impishly, “maybe you should.”

Jane gritted her teeth, knowing that this was a time to hold her tongue; but she couldn’t help retorting, “Are you by any chance trying to be funny? You could stand a few lessons yourself.”

Ken looked startled, almost apprehensive. “In what?” he asked, with an attempt at bravado.

Jane, searching for a scathing reply, looked at him sprawled in the chair. “In manners, for one thing,” she snapped: And as she stamped out of the house it never occurred to her that he might think she was still indignant about the other night.

Exercise 3. Find the following words and word combinations in the text you have read. Write out and learn the pronunciation. Give the Russian equivalents:

1. to be in store for smb

2. to bring up the subject

3. to be absorbed in doing smth

4. to turn to smb for smth

5. to see smb in passing

6. to make amends to smb for smth

7. to picture oneself doing smth

8. to be on hand

9. to encounter smb / smth

10. to prick up one’ s ears

11. to be persistent in doing smth

12. to be in the know

13. to be inevitable

14. to sneak up upon smb

15. to hold one’s tongue

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