“General Curtis LeMay? Why?”

Biff snickered. “Because LeMay wants to bomb North Vietnam back to the Stone Age.”

“Funny,” I said, and concentrated on my soufflé. Nineteen sixty-eight was going to be my first chance to vote for president, but with Bobby Kennedy dead the election seemed a lot less interesting, since RFK had, if nothing else, represented the hope of expanded possibilities.

Biff said, “If you’re not supporting Wallace, maybe you could help us with the Humphrey campaign.” Biff, as the head of NYMSRAL, had the organization drumming up support for the vice president. Glenna was stuffing envelopes and working the phones at the cramped office on 116th and Morningside, and so was Robin, even though she regarded mainstream politics as a bourgeois plot to bilk the masses and sporadically slipped up on the phone by quoting Marx.

“It’s not my thing,” I said, promising myself that if Biff made one more crack, I would slap him.

He didn’t get the chance. Robin fired up a joint, toked on it, gave it to Glenna, and blurted out, “The attending in charge of my ophthalmology team says he’s gonna kick me out of school.”

“Dr. Stroop?” Glenna asked, taking a hit off the J and passing it to me. “Why?”

“Because he’s a racist pig.”

“Robin,” Palmer said. “You’re not black.”

“I’m a woman and that’s about as bad,” Robin said, going over to the freezer and taking out a carton of mint chocolate chip. “Today, Stroop tells me if I don’t wear a bra on rounds, I’m gone. I told him Stroop was the name of the Nazi in charge of wiping out Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, and was that his daddy?”

Laughing, I coughed on the smoke and said, “Did Stroop appreciate your command of history?”

“Nah,” Robin said, sitting down and going to work on the Breyers. “But I flashed my SDS membership card and said I wasn’t doing anything I didn’t want to.”

Handing the joint to Glenna, I asked, “SDS has membership cards?”

Haughtily Palmer said, “Of course they do.”

I said, “Can you use it to get into movies free?”

Before Palmer could fire off a comeback, Robin said, “Meyers, call Stroop and say you’re a reporter investigating discrimination against women. Your editor will let you do it if he’s not some Establishment lackey. It’s a dynamite story. Stroop takes me into an exam room. He gets fatherly and says it’s not simply improper to go without a bra, it’s unhealthy. Then I say to him, ‘Check it out, my thirty-six D’s pass the pencil test.’”

“The pencil test?” I asked, and Glenna started giggling and put the joint in the pincers of a mosquito clamp, a miniature forceps that Robin had swiped from the hospital to use as a roach clip.

Robin said, “Stroop never heard of the pencil test either. And this is what I did.”

She unbuttoned her madras shirt, and there they were, a set of centerfold-quality 36 D’s. Robin stood up straight, placed a pencil under her breasts, and it fell to the floor.