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happily gave up fourteen years later. To earn money for cigarettes, movies, and other indulgences, my friends and I either did odd jobs for our parents, worked part-time in offices or stores, or babysat. When we weren’t working, sometimes we took a bus to Brighton Beach, rubbed each other with suntan lotion, and displayed our budding bodies in the noonday sun. This was before we learned about the perils of exposure to the sun without an SPF number.
    Hormones and pheromones mingled in the heat as we walked up and down such thoroughfares as the Coney Island Boardwalk, Sheepshead Bay Road, or Kings Highway. We did what teenagers typically do: the boys swaggered while the girls whispered and giggled. We also visualized ourselves wearing the fall clothes already on display in the store windows, but with barely enough money to share a banana split between us and still have bus fare home, we couldn’t afford to buy any of the cute outfits. Instead I settled for a box of handkerchiefs with the initial “C” embroidered on each handkerchief alternately in pink, blue, or yellow.
    The summer of ’55 was a succession of salad days—a sweet, simple, peaceful time of golden youth and green innocence. There was nothing but the vine-ripe fruit of each delicious day and honeysuckle night. I thought, If every child on earth could experience just one such summer, it would be a much better world.
    But as every school-age child learns, summers end.

Chapter Eleven
Aspiring to Be Popular
    M y primary objective at Madison was to be attractive, well liked, and respected by the other kids, but the more I sought popularity, the more it eluded me. Heredity had made me small in stature and a year late in commencing puberty, and I was still two years younger than most of my classmates. The math was inescapable. In those socially crucial high school years, I was almost three years behind my peers in physical development.
    I cried the day I overheard a boy refer to me as “cute.” In those days it did not mean hot or attractive. “Cute” described a girl a boy thought of as a friend, not someone to date. As much as I didn’t want to be the girl boys called for advice about how they could get the girl they really wanted, that was the purpose of virtually every call from a boy. With few friends and no siblings at home, I spent a lot of time alone. But my solitude had an unexpected benefit; it made me a good observer. When a girl is gossiping and discussing shades of nail polish with her friends, she’s less available to pay attention to the world. Being alone gave me a chance to process what my senses took in without having to factor in other people’s opinions.
    There was no danger of my falling in with a bad crowd. Therewasn’t much of a bad crowd at my school. Sometimes the girls with more developed breasts and womanly shapes came to school with their hair curled in bobby pins under silk scarves. In addition to creating curls, this practice had a secondary purpose. It implied that the girl had a date after school with an older guy and didn’t care if the boys at school saw her in a scarf. They dressed like Natalie Wood in Rebel Without a Cause and smoked in the schoolyard. It’s possible that they were dating juvenile delinquents, but at least the girls showed up for classes.
    Most of my classmates and I came from working-class families in which one or both parents kept a close watch on our activities. We were expected to achieve academic excellence, and I met those expectations. Unfortunately, that was a recipe for failure for a girl hoping to be asked out on a date. No matter how much I tried to downplay my intellectual curiosity, boys never took me seriously, which meant that the most popular girls didn’t take me seriously either. Or so I thought at the time.
    Three decades later, a group of middle-aged men and women came backstage after one of my concerts to visit the middle-aged woman I had become. After they identified themselves