One of the top girls — and a fixture of other people's talk

pivotal · STANDING

• When: STANDING (background identity through the YDAU corpus).
• What: Bernadette Longley is a top-squad girls' player: she holds the 18's A-1 Singles slot at the Port Washington engagement, and Aubrey deLint, explaining the Academy's temperaments to Steeply on the bleachers, files her with "the top girls here" — the ones with the "susceptible," forgetful kind of will the staff ("Schtitt and I") diagnose ("We see it in Longley, we see it in Millie Kent and Frannie Unwin"), her generalization arriving right after deLint has diagnosed the same susceptibility in Hal. Her doubles partner is the A-2 Diane Prins (identified via endnote — see Dating notes). Physically the book gives her a "long boxy head" and, in the bus scene, a "pretty neck"; her one described outfit is knee-length candy-cane trousers and a sweatshirt worn fleecy-side-out. And she has a small standing place in Hal's private accounting of his marijuana secrecy: after the colleagues who definitely know, "It's also not impossible that Bernadette Longley knows, actually" — a person close enough to the Pemulis-Struck-Boone orbit for the possibility to occur to him.