"Cress Delahanty"

[fiefoe]

The other Jessamyn West. Set in the original O.C.. Cress was introduced to us in a rather alarming fashion, and then one started remembering what being 12/13/14 was like and felt grateful.

• "The day dies," murmured the girl, "its burnished wrack burns in yon western sky." <> Then sh was quiet so that no single word should fall to ripple the clear surface of her joy.
• She was as happy as a snail that expels the last grain of sand which has separated its sensitive, fluid body from its shell. Now she flowed back against the walls of her house in pure contentment.
• This week's poem was called, "You Do Not Have to Wipe the Noses of Your Dreams," and Cress thought it as stark and brutal as anything she had ever done.
• She regarded her face more closely in the spattered mirror. "There is something wanton and evil there," she thought, "something not good. Perhaps I shall be faithless," and she trembled with pity for that dark one who loved her so dearly.
• "I mean that hat was never intended for a thirteen-year-old girl. It's for an older -- woman," concluded Mrs. Delahanty, wasting irony.
• The hat was summer time. It was deep and broad like summer. It caused soft scallops of shadow, like summer shadows under the densest trees, to fall across her face.
• Her hat, still gradually, gracefully floundering, was bleeding flamingo red into the aquarium, so that the amazed fish now swam in sunset waters.
• "The most I'd dared hope for was to be gentle. Then," said Cress with great satisfaction, "stricken."
• "It's all right to be honest," Cress reassured her, "but there's nothing very outstanding about it."
• "A trademark!" <> Mr. Delahanty grimaced. "Spitting. At thirteen I was a professional spitter."
• "Gertrude," Mr. Delahanty said, "you never had to bother trying on attitudes. You were born wearing one that fit beautifully."
• adult resignation in her daughter's voice, adult acceptance of the fact that the source of one's joy is also often the source of one's sorrow
• She was now fourteen years old and oppressed by the brevity of life, the fugaciousness of blossoms, and the evanescence of raindrops.
• She had more feelings than she knew what to do with, more emotions than her tranquil life permitted her to discharge.
• She would stand in Calvin Dean's presence, every thud of her heart lifting the words, "I love Calvin Dean," written one hundred times over, a fraction of an inch nearer him. Surely he would feel it, surely it would influence him.
• They sank their spoons in it and ate it down, their appetites equal to the whole of it, color, size, sweetness and multiplicity of ingredients.
• And with her new-found ability for light talk?

__ List-making, she felt sure, was just a way some people had of being orderly about their unreason.
__ There are clearly two classes of people in the world: those for whom the world was magnified and enriched in words and those who could never find the beautiful world of their living and knowing on any sheet of paper.
__ Butcher birds, rich in insects, impaled their surplus stock on suitable thorns.
__ It was dark there, not only because the earth was oil-soaked and pocked with sump holes that shone like greasy bruises in the gray dust...
__ "So Bunny Evans' name was Abundance."