CLINTON ST. QUARTERLY IN TRANSIT By Katherine Dunn Our small valley farm town was totally unprepared for the arrival of Jim Hubert and his daughter Amanda. Newcomers to the high school were rare, and those who began the first grade with Mrs. Blevins finished the twelfth grade altogether with Mr. Gerber. New faces were bound to intrigue us, and Amanda’s strange beauty hit us hard. She became the silent focus of every classroom that she entered and trailed a line of attention down the corridors as she passed. She was then, dark, and stamped with a lush delicacy. Seeing her move down the halls with my friends I could imagine that she was of some other species entirely. Perhaps we had come to resemble our dairy cows, while she was in no way domesticated. The first words she spoke in my hearing justified her appearance totally. None of us would ever leave the town permanently, but it was our custom to talk about it as a dull place. In the cafeteria on Amanda’s first day in school someone asked, “ How did you ever come to this forsaken burg?” Amanda raised a dark slow hand to her forehead and moved a wisp of black hair aside before answering. “ We liked the looks of the place,” she said. Amanda become the silentfocus j ^ p f every classroom that she enteredand traileda line o f attention down the corridors as shepassed. Her voice was deep and soft, her diction easy and clean. Her words struck me and I turned them over in my mind. It seemed irresponsible to choose a town because you liked its looks. We all knew there were only two reasons for living anywhere. First was the fact of having been born there. If, through some cataclysm, one was forced to leave home, the only consideration that applied to finding a new one was available employment. Amanda’s words split this truism and displayed alternatives that may never have occurred in our town before. There was a gypsy lushness, a sensuous implication to the “ liking of looks.” Of course, the looks that impressed the Huberts might well have included the commuting distance to Portland, the prosperity, and the fact that Minor Hanson had built a fine split-level house with redwood shakes and never lived in it. Hanson had finished the house just two months after his mother died so he had moved into her farm house to take care of the dairy. It was his house, the finest around, despite its newness, that the Huberts bought. The town assumed that the Huberts must be very well off. At school we were only concerned with Amanda. The great question in the minds of the females was, “ What would the boys do?” and the answer seemed to be, “ Not much.” They were obviously scared of her. Though she was as fragile and delicate as a web, though the planes on her face jutted at poignant angles, though her lashes swept half way down her cheek and her eyes were huge and black, though she moved with the restrained fluidity of a cat and her mouth possessed in its wide and swelling softness an aura of injury, of yearning for consolation, still the big light-haired, pale-eyed and freckled faces of our males displayed only puzzlement. She was altogether too much for them. An anxious general courtship began. We were bluff and jovial with each other but we tried to affect a courtly grace toward Amanda. Even the teachers seemed to feel a certain reverence for her. Their treatment of her was preferential and none of the students minded. We would have been embarrassed by any crass demands made upon her. Once in Speech class when Amanda was due to deliver her first speech of the year she apologized briefly to Mrs. Olsen and said that she had been unable to sleep recently. She accompanied her words by the characteristic gesture of her long hand moving the strand of hair from her face and I noticed that dark circles were wide beneath her eyes. Mrs. Olsen said, “ I hope you’re not ill, Amanda,” before calling on the next speaker. Later that day it occurred to me that I had never heard any of my peers profess trouble in sleeping. We could all sleep like puppies in any position as long as our bellies were full. Insomnia was a distinctly adult complaint and led me to suspect that Illustration by Barry Curtis . 35
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