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Commentary. Search me! –Понятия не имею!

Search me! – Понятия не имею!

a lame duck – неудачник, «несчастненький»

sub-deb counselors – советчики дебютантки (sub-deb – девушка, еще не выезжавшая в свет; разг. девушка-подросток)

stag line – линия, вдоль которой на танцах выстраиваются кавалеры (дамы) без пары

Exercise 1. Practise the pronunciation of the following words:

1. astute [Rs'tju:t] 8. alchemy ['WlkImI]

2. rustle ['rAsl] 9. grimace [grI'meIs]

3 bureau [bjuR'rou] 10. futile ['fju:taIl]

4. belligerence [bI'lIdGRrRns] 11. incredulity [LInkrI'dju:lItI]

5. eloquently ['elRkwRntlI] 12. forehead ['fOrId]

6. eavesdropping ['I:vzdrOpIN] 13. enchant [In'tSQ:nt]

7. balmy ['bQ:mI

Exercise 2. Read the following extract:

At a junior-class meeting held early the following week Stitch was elected president again, and Trudy, who couldn’t multiply numbers above six, became treasurer. At the same meeting the class adviser, popular and astute Miss Knauer, who came from upstate Pennsylvania, announced that the yearbook staff would be chosen on a tryout basis. “Applicants will be required to enter their names and submit samples of their work — unsigned – before November 15,” she said. “A jury consisting of the high school principal, junior and senior class advisers, and members of last year’s editorial board will make the selections.” She smiled winningly. “Any questions?”

“Suppose you don’t have any samples to submit,” said a voice from the back of the room.

“Then I’d suggest you write an analysis of the job you’re interested in — how you think it should be handled, what improvements might be made, et cetera.”

“Suppose you’re not out for any particular job?”

Miss Knauer considered, her dark eyes thoughtful. “You might write an essay on the yearbook as a whole — what improvements or changes you think might be made.”

“And if you’re interested in art work, I suppose you submit drawings,” someone else said.

“That’s right.”

There was a rustle of whispered comment among the students. This was a departure from custom that a certain amount of disapproval was inevitable, but Jane privately approved of the new system. She felt that it was bound to result in more competent management, and offered their class a chance to bring out a really superior book.

Trudy, of course, was displeased. It ended her dream of filling staff positions with a cozy little group of her best friends. But Ken, as former advertising manager, backed up Miss Knauer, who had instigated the change. “It’s a smart move,” he insisted. “Last year we had a bunch of kids who were so busy with other outside activities they couldn’t give the yearbook half enough time.”

In the few short hours between hockey practice and homework Jane tried to find something she might submit that would help her to qualify for literary editor. She looked over old composition assignments and skimmed through the pages of a notebook filled with attempts at verse. Nothing pleased her. Everything she had written sounded either childish or self-conscious. The verse was particularly dreadful. Had she ever been so sickening sentimental, so in love with life?

“At sunset the windows of my house are golden...” she had written. Home, the center of her universe – the house she had wanted never to leave. Now she almost wished they would move away, to another town, another state. She was beginning to loathe Franklin Street.

“A rose and my heart on the window sill...” Drivel! She slapped the notebook shut and hid it under a pile of discarded clothes in her bottom bureau drawer. Was it only last summer she had written such ridiculous guff?

Then she frowned and stared at herself in the glass, not liking the person she had become any better than the child she had been. Only by clinging firmly to the knowledge that this week end she had a date that Belinda envied, only by telling herself that she no longer cared a hoot about Ken, could she find courage to face a future which seemed very bleak.

Her mood matches the weather, which was gloomy throughout the week. One afternoon, as she was hurrying toward the athletic field with her hockey stick, she was surprised when Ken overtook her and fell into step by her side.

“You’re going out for the yearbook, aren’t you?” he asked, without preliminaries.

“I – I don’t know,” Jane stammered. She had been thinking about the hockey game at Bridgetown on Thursday, the Latin test announced for Friday, the senseless crowding of her days with things that didn’t count.

“Sure you are,” Ken told her.

“What do you mean, sure I am?” Jane asked, with sudden belligerence. Who was he to tell her what to do?

Ken grinned, and Jane found herself surprised that he could completely ignore their estrangement. “You’re a natural, that’s all.” Before he could amplify this remark the town-hall clock struck the half hour. “Gosh,” muttered Ken as he pulled on his football helmet and broke into a run. “I’ll catch it from the coach if I’m late again!”

That same afternoon, as Jane was walking home alone in the early dusk, after leaving Polly at the drugstore, she ran into Ken again. Emerging from the interior of Hannum’s garage, he was frowning in complete self-absorption.

“Whoa,” Jane cautioned, as he almost bumped into her.

“Oh, hi. Excuse me.” Ken spoke dully.

“What’s the matter?” asked Jane impulsively. “Bad news?”

“I’ll say it’s bad. D’you know what they want, to put my Caddy back in running order? One hundred and eighty-six bucks!”

To Jane, as well as to Ken, it was a staggering amount. “Oh, it can’t be that much!”

“It is, though.”

“Why don’t you get another estimate?”

“I already have. It was ten dollars more.”

Jane steeled herself against feeling sorry for Ken. “What are you going to do?” she asked coldly.

“Search me. But one thing’s sure. I’d better start looking for a job.”

“I thought you were going to work for Teasdale’s.”

Ken shook his head. “They want a guy with a car.”

Jane shrugged eloquently. “Why don’t you get rid of the old heap and stop pouring money down a drain? You could sell it for something, couldn’t you?”

Righteous indignation made Ken’s eyes blaze. “Something? I could sell it for more than I paid for it, right now!”

“Then why don’t you?” Jane shot back, certain that he was bragging.

“Because it’s a darned good car, that’s why.”

There was something about such devotion to a mere automobile that made Jane’s resentment flare. “Even if you get it fixed up again you’re going to have to sell it, anyway,” she taunted.

“Who told you that?” Ken’s voice was like ice.

Jane couldn’t admit to eavesdropping. “Everybody on Franklin Street heard the row.” Then, knowing exactly how cruel she was being, she added, “Your father doesn’t bother to lower his voice.”

Humiliation glazed Ken’s eyes for a moment, and he drew back a step as though he had been struck. “The old man had a right to be sore,” he said defensively. “I made a mess of the welding He had a perfect right yell at me all he wanted to. Understand?” Turning on his heel, he walked rapidly away.

Alone once more, Jane had the grace to be ashamed. It was a pretty dirty trick, to attack Ken by criticizing his father. She felt hollow inside, as though she had done something evil. She wondered if this was the way people felt when they lied or cheated or stole.

Then she tossed her head and told herself that he deserved to be hurt, that no pain she could inflict would even their score. She hoped he felt awful – as sick at heart as she had felt the day he had invited Belinda to take the first ride in his stupid old car.

The next day Ken got himself a job in a restaurant on Main Street. Jane learned about it while she was eating a warmed-over dinner after her late return from the hockey game with Bridgetown, twenty-eight miles away. Leaning on one elbow, she sat at the kitchen table wearily conveying food from the plate to her mouth.

From the landing came Belinda’s voice, talking on the telephone. “A what?” Jane heard her ask. “You’re kidding.”

There was a pause, while Jane could almost see Linda begin to pout. “But I thought we were going to the movies Saturday night.”

That was when Jane realized Linda was talking to Ken. After another pause, Linda said, “Well, I don’t see why you had to begin right away. Couldn’t they wait until next week?”

Jane swallowed a mouthful of carrots that tasted like straw and let the fork clatter on her plate so that she wouldn’t seem to be listening. “Sure. Sure, Ken. I understand. You bet. Bye now.” Linda hung up.

A second later she opened the door at the top of the kitchen stairs. “Hi, there,” she said to Jane, whom she was encountering for the first time since breakfast. “You look beat.”

“I am.”

“Who won?”

“They did.”

“Oh,” said Belinda. “Tough luck.”

It wasn’t luck, Jane could have told her. Brookfield was outclassed, in spite of Polly’s prediction that if they could beat Carlinville they could beat anybody. Part of the trouble was Jane herself. Although she did her best, her playing had never again reached the peak attained in that first game of the season. No longer did she spark the forward line. Sometimes she found it hard to keep up.

Fidgeting on the landing, Belinda asked, “Where’s Mother?”

Jane shrugged and munched hamburger steak apathetically. She was wondering what kind of work Ken had managed to find, but she was too proud to ask.

The next moment Linda blurted it out. “Ken’ taken a dish-washing job, nights. Of all silly things!”

“Why silly?” asked Jane.

“He has to work till nine-thirty. By the time he gets home it’ll be too late to do anything!”

“Yes, I guess it will,” Jane agreed, dropping her lashes to hide the malice her eyes might reveal.

* * *

Up on the hill behind the golf course the November sun was unexpectedly warm, as though Indian summer had returned for a Sunday call. Scuffing through the crisp brown leaves which filled every hollow, Jane remembered that last year Thanksgiving day had been like this –positively balmy, so that she and Trudy had gone for a walk without any coats.

Miss Plunkett bad been horrified. “You’ll catch your death of cold,” she’d warned. Miss Plunkett had come for dinner, though she had never been invited to a meal in the Howard house before. She was, as Jane’s father put it, “one of Fay’s lame ducks.” By this, he meant that she was one of an odd assortment of guests whom Mrs. Howard invited for holiday dinners because she felt sorry for them. They were invariably the misfits of the community, the solitary souls whom life had either mistreated or passed by.

Miss Plunkett was the passed-by type, Jane remembered. She was a spinster music teacher with only two possessions of any importance: her piano and her cat. A shudder of apprehension made Jane’s body tingle. From today’s perspective Miss Plunkett appeared more tragic than peculiar. Was that what happened to girls who didn’t know how to get along?

At the top of the slope Jane put her bag of sandwiches and fruit -the lunch she had packed on the pretext of going picnicking with Sue — in the crotched branch of an oak tree. Then she walked over to a little knoll sank down on the dry grass, leaning her chin on her knees.

She had come up here for two reasons: to be alone, and to think. She couldn’t go on pretending any longer. She couldn’t force her face into one more smile or make one more falsely gay remark. Last night was the end -the absolute end. After Bob had brought her home from the dance and deposited her with ill-concealed relief on the doorstep, Jane had faced the fact that copying Belinda’s technique was not the answer. Never, if she lived to be a million years old, could she learn to be a glamour girl.

Not that she hadn’t tried. She’d studied all the appealing little ways that seemed so foolproof when Linda displayed them. She had fluttered her eyelashes and laughed a lot and feigned a consuming interest in Bob’s university life. She had followed the advice of the sub-deb counselors: “Get a boy to talk about himself.”

Not that Bob hadn’t talked! He’d talked about himself until he was hoarse, but it hadn’t seemed to make Jane any more attractive in his eyes. At the dance his glance kept wandering toward the stag line, but obviously without any hope that he was dating the kind of girl on whom other fellows would cut in.

Why had she been equally certain of this herself, Jane wondered. By what alchemy did popular girls obtain their special glow? As the hours dragged on, she only felt increasingly brittle. She was aware that her laugh had become a whoop, that her smile must be a grimace Even her dancing faltered; she was constantly out of step.

She was trying too hard, she told herself, and did her utmost to relax, but by then it was too late. Two girls were bewitching the stag line -one a tall, willowy brunette in a red wool dress cut on every sophisticated lines, and the other a fluffy blonde who reminded Jane of Belinda, except that she danced with her eyes closed and never seemed to say a word.

Maybe that was the fashion – dancing with your eyes closed. Jane tried it, and Bob said, “What’s the matter – sleepy? I was thinking myself we might pull out of here and get along home.”

So before it was even midnight she was back on Franklin Street, a proven failure. She knew, as surely as though it were written on her home-room black-board, that Bob Wright would never ask her for another date.

The title of a novel her mother was reading leapt into her mind: Point of No Return. Where had she been when the rest of the girls were learning the unfathomable things that made them desirable? Lost in a childish contentment, unaware that everyone else was growing up. And now there was no way of going back and starting over. Now, no matter how wisely Trudy tried to advise her, no matter how hard she might study, she could never make up for lost time. She stared down at the town spread out in a semicircle below her, at the cars twinkling along the highways, at the bridge which spanned Thompson’s Creek. She could see the school, the town hall, the post office, the very block on Franklin Street where she lived. It all looked as welcoming and friendly as ever, but Jane felt like an outcast. Once it had been her town, all hers. She had loved it, embraced it, championed it, but now it was hers no longer. It belonged to the others – to Linda and Ken, to Trudy, to all the lucky people who had acquired the thing she lacked.

“Stop being sorry for yourself!” Jane said it aloud and picked up a stone and threw it, so that it bounded down the hill. There was only one thing to do and she knew it. Pick up the pieces and go on from where she stood – or sat.

That meant several things: Somehow she’d have to conquer the ugly, futile jealousy that was making her miserable. Somehow she’d have to find an interest big enough to sustain her. Somehow...

She edged off her knoll and lay down in the grass, looking up at the sky — the great, blue, cloudless sky that made any problem she might have seem suddenly insignificant — and gradually she felt a sense of perspective returning. The outdoors was still unchanged. Nobody had taken away the stark beauty of the almost bare trees. She could still enjoy the crackle of leaves under her feet, thrill to the lonely, going-places whistle of a distant train, watch with a sense of adventure the flying wedge of geese honking their way south.

“Oh, I say — I beg your pardon. I very nearly stepped on you. I was looking at the geese.”

The voice, with its very British accent, was unexpected enough to seem unreal. Jane looked up into the strange face of a stocky, tweed-jacketed lad with a lock of straw-colored hair falling over his left eye.

She sat up in complete astonishment. “I was looking at the geese too. I didn’t hear you coming.”

The boy once more investigated the sky. “Super, isn’t it, the way they keep formation? How d’you s’pose they manage? Built-in radar?” He stood with his hands in his jacket pockets, looking not in the least surprised that he had tripped over a girl lying flat in the grass on a lonely hillside. After a moment he pulled out a pack of cigarettes and extended them. “Smoke?”

“Oh, no thanks!” said Jane quickly.

The boy laughed. “You needn’t act so shocked. A good many girls do.” He lit a cigarette and sat down on the grass beside her. “Jolly fine day,” he remarked.

Jane could scarcely stifle a smile. The slang belonged to an English novel, not to the hills above Brookfield, but a glance at his calm face told her the boy hadn’t intended to be funny. She nodded. “Yes, isn’t it?”

“D’you like to walk?”

Jane nodded again.

“That’s interesting. Most American girls don’t, I find. Maybe I’d better introduce myself. My name’s Peter Shakespeare.” He acted, again, as though he had said nothing odd.

But this time Jane laughed in his face. “You’re kidding. It couldn’t be Shakespeare.”

“It is, though,” Peter protested seriously. “There are lots of Shakespears about actually. I’ve met a couple who aren’t even relatives of ours.”

“You don’t live in Brookfield, do you?”

“No. Just across the line, really. In Carlinville.”

“Oh.” Jane felt vaguely disappointed. Carlinville was such an inferior town.

“I’ve only been in the States a short time,” the boy went on, stroking the hair back from his forehead. Jane noticed that he needed a haircut badly and that the elbows of his jacket were patched with leather. She also noticed that his fingernails were clipped and clean and that he had the most candid gray eyes she had ever seen. “You see, my father died and my mother had to go back to work, so it seemed simpler to send me over to my uncle for a year.”

There seemed to be no appropriate comment to make, so Jane asked another question. “Do you go to Carlinville High?”

“No. I’d passed my examinations, you see, before I left England. I’m working with my uncle in the plant.”

What plant? Jane wanted to ask, but was afraid it might sound rude. There were several factories in Carlinville, and it could be any one of them. Before she could make up her mind to put the question, Peter changed the subject. “Nice country, isn’t it?” he asked with a sweeping gesture. “Reminds me a little of the Cotswolds. D’you know England at all?”

“If you mean in books...” Jane said hesitantly.

The boy grinned. “I mean have you been there?” He pronounced been like bean, which sounded very stilted to Jane’s ears.

Jane shook her head, plucked a long blade of grass, and bit it. How could he possibly imagine that she might have been in England? Was he teasing her? She looked out over the valley and waited, thinking that this was a strange conversation as well as a strange boy.

“You’d like it, I think,” he said lazily, leaning back on one elbow. “There’s a little town called Broadway, not far from where I live, that seems to enchant the Americans.” Shakespeare... Broadway... He was kidding! Jane glanced at him suspiciously and edged a little farther away.

As though he could read her mind, Peter smiled. “I’m not ribbing you, ‘pon my word. Look it up on the map.”

“Where do you live when you’re home?” Jane asked skeptically.

“Chipping-Norton.” A shadow seemed to cross the boy’s face. “At least I did live there. Now Mother’s moved to Oxford, of course.”

What do you mean “of course”? Jane was tempted to ask. She was growing more confused by the minute. But with another abrupt change of subject Peter said, “You’ve read a bit about England, though. What books?”

For a moment Jane couldn’t think of a single English title. Then she said, “I’ve just finished Jane Eyre.”

“Oh, have you? Improbable sort of yarn, but marvelous mood, don’t you think?”

Never had she encountered a boy who talked so oddly. Jane was torn between amusement, incredulity, and a sort of unwilling interest. She nodded and said, “You feel as though you are Jane Eyre.”

A glint of approval appeared in Peter’s eyes. “Have you read any Arnold Bennett?”

Jane shook her head.

“Hardy?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“You’re a little young yet, I suppose. How old are you — fifteen?”

“I’m sixteen,” Jane said rather sharply.

Peter grinned again. “You haven’t told me your name.”

“Jane – Jane Howard. You are an inquisitive boy.”

“Yes, rather!” Peter admitted. “It’s the only way to get to know people, you see.”

Jane glanced at her watch and stood up. “I’ve got to be going.”

“I’ll walk you to the bottom of the hill, if I may.”

She said neither yes nor no, but he came along anyway, and when they parted at the road which connected Brookfield with Carlinville he asked, “D’you often walk this way on Sunday?”

“Not very often,” Jane admitted.

“Oh.” Peter’s face fell. “Too bad.” Jane waited, puzzled. “I was thinking, since you said you liked to walk...” He hesitated, for the first time seeming abashed, and kicked at a clod of earth with the toe of his shoe. “Tell you what!” he said, looking up as though he had a great idea. “If it’s fine next Sunday I’ll come to the hill about the same time. If you’re there – why, smashing! If you’re not...” He shrugged.

Jane frowned, rather taken aback. “I don’t think you’d better count on me,” she said slowly and firmly. “I really don’t.”

It wasn’t until she was halfway back to Franklin Street that she began to feel hungry and remembered the bag of sandwiches, still untouched, in the notch of the tree.

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 back up

2. to overtake

3. to fall into step

4. to even one’s score

5. to be out of step

6. to do one’s utmost to do smth

7. to be a failure

8. to feel like an outcast

9. to trip over (smth., smb.)

10. to laugh in one’s face

11. to stroke (one’s hair) (stroked, stroked)

12. to be tempted to do smth.

13. to grow confused

14. “Tell you what.”

15. to be taken aback

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