The Spiked Heel

For the moment the pressure was off.

13

It was hot for May.

The heat attacked the city with a fierce July intensity. Girls in low-cut cotton frocks magically appeared on the streets; men’s bulky tweeds were exchanged for shantungs and linens and seersuckers; and the sun seekers crowded the sauerkraut pots of itinerant hot-dog carts. The city, under sudden siege, sucked in its fetid breath and people talked of a hot summer coming and began to drink Tom Collinses and Gin and Tonics.

Cara Knowles had never liked the heat. The heat and she were natural enemies. From the age of four, she had been whisked away to expensive camps in upper New York and Connecticut, safely away from the muggy, clinging oppressiveness of the sweltering city.

She had gone to camp every year until she was fifteen. When she was sixteen, she experienced her first pang of conscience. She tallied up one day the staggering amount of money her father had spent over the years to keep her cool. Her feeling of guilt was strong, but unconquerable beneath that was the memory of what a summer in the city was like. She struggled with the idea of staying home that summer, but on July 2, along with a passel of squealing brats and harried, hurried counselors, she once more boarded the northbound train in Grand Central Station. But this time there was a difference. This time she went as a junior counselor, an apprenticeship which cut her usual camping fees in half. Her father was pleased, and her mother was, also. Their little Cara was growing up; their little Cara was assuming the responsibilities of womanhood.

And, indeed, their little Cara was growing up. She had been a pale, thin, awkward fifteen-year-old the season before, her dark hair wild and unruly, her chest as flat as any boy’s, her legs spindly, her eyes wide staring brown saucers in her narrow face. As she approached sixteen, she suddenly ripened. For some inexplicable reason (she ate no more than usual!) she began to put on weight. Her arms rounded, and her legs matured, the thigh growing firmer to taper down to a well-rounded knee and a shapely calf and ankle. The flat monotony of her breast suddenly puckered, and then sloped gently, and then burst with womanhood so that even the good Dr. Knowles was slightly embarrassed when he inadvertently barged in one day on his newly buxom daughter struggling into a sheer nylon brassiere.

Her hair, uncontrollable until now, took on a new gloss, a shiny-dull blue black which she combed into the popular page-boy of the day. Her skin, pimply with adolescence, shed its scales, emerged clear and pristine, outdone only by the shining white line of her teeth, teeth which had received loving attention over the years under the hands of her father.

Secure in the padded comfort of her new body, content with her oval face and bright brown eyes, thrilled with the new gleam of her hair and the new thrust of her breasts, Cara Knowles arrived at Taka-Manna.

The sudden attention she received was a bit overwhelming. Last year the senior boys had studiously avoided her, dancing with her only when a counselor forced the task upon them. Their inattention had not disturbed her, mainly because she was thoroughly uninterested in boys and their peculiarly boisterous ways. For, coupled with the child’s body she had worn that season was a child’s mind, content to ogle butterflies in the Nature Shack, happy to engage in Ping-pong with an equally childish girl friend while her more enterprising bunkmates cast amateurishly inadequate glances at the senior boys.

This season, aware of her newly found charms, she had expected some measure of attention from the male j.c.’s. She had not expected attention from full-fledged counselors, most of whom were college boys, and some of whom had already seen service in the war! The attention she did receive was flattering and bewildering, but most of all ecstatically enjoyable.

When Cara’s brassiere was stolen from her trunk and was found fluttering from the flagpole the next morning, she laughed delightedly. When she won the camp’s beauty contest, exhibiting her charms against the bathing-suited glamour of older, wiser girls, she bore her queenship with royal grace and virginal humbleness. When men — well, yes, couldn’t these college boys be called men? — rushed to do her bidding at a barbecue or a dance, she was excitedly thrilled with a new strange sense of power, but she hid her ecstasy behind a pertly smiling, teasing face.

There was a barn adjoining the camp property.