The Psychopath Inside by James Fallon

Author:James Fallon
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Penguin Group, USA
Published: 2013-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

Love and Other Abstractions

Diane and I met in late June 1960, the day after school ended for the summer. Although I lived in what was considered the medium-priced end of the upper-class town of Loudonville, Diane lived in an upscale neighborhood of the working-class village of Menands and went to a private all-girls school in Albany. Her father’s father, who had grown up poor but had earned himself a good living through real estate, had owned a large swath of Central Avenue in Albany until the crash of 1929, when he lost everything. Thus Diane’s father also started with nothing, and slowly created a modest real estate portfolio of his own. He had built the suburban neighborhood in which Diane’s family lived, and was a quietly prominent member of the community, having just been elected president of Wolferts Roost Country Club at the border of Albany, Menands, and Loudonville, to which my family also belonged. It was here, at the club’s swimming pool, where Diane and I met.

I would go to the pool every day with my younger brothers Pete and Tom, and we would swim and frolic from opening at ten a.m. to closing at six p.m. It was there that the three of us learned to swim, with Pete and Tom excelling through junior high and high school and Tom swimming for the New York State 100-meter championships in his senior year. Like in all sports, I did not excel in swimming but could swim freestyle sprints and breaststroke, just long enough at full-bore to compete for wins, until my asthma would kick in. We also loved to play cards together and with new friends we met at the club, as well as other games we learned from our parents and aunts and uncles, who were uniformly excellent parlor gamesmen.

By July I’d met many kids at the pool, and between games of water polo and “jump-dive” one afternoon, I overheard a girl’s voice. She was in the water a few yards from me, but I could hear her say, unnecessarily loudly, “He couldn’t be a Fallon. He’s too fat to be a Fallon.” I glanced over, and there she was, giggling with her friends. When I locked in on her, she turned her head and looked at me with a smile. I was annoyed but intrigued by her self-confident playfulness.

Over the following weeks we started chatting while with our friends, and soon we were sitting at the same poolside tables, often playing cards. We then started swimming a bit together, doing little mini-sprints while playing other water games. In conversation she was clearly ahead of me socially, and while not really being into the shank of puberty yet, and being pretty clueless about sex or romance, I knew I was attracted to her. It was partly her confidence but also her wit and intelligence. We were both just twelve years old, but she seemed to know things, to understand not only her own being, but even a bit of the great beyond, and it really put a hook in me, as I had never met anyone like her.

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