Now, I heard a car chugging through the snow on Edsall Avenue and looked out the window. Robin’s Volvo skidded down the lane, plowed through a snowbank, and narrowly missed the GTO. I was sitting in the window seat when Glenna came racing up the stairs.

“Enjoy yourself?” I asked her, as she sat beside me, bringing the cold, clean smell of the outdoors with her.

“As much as you’d enjoy a hand job with brass knuckles. Everything tasted like overdone white-meat turkey.”

“It is Thanksgiving.”

“My mother served roast beef.”

“Very avant-garde,” I said.

“She claims turkey takes a day to cook, and she’s been swamped redecorating the kitchen at the Ethical Culture house.”

“She was doing that months ago.”

“Next subject,” Glenna said, the iciness in her voice a concoction of frustration and remembered rage that she reliably brought back from dinners in Riverdale like leftovers in a doggie bag.

Happily, the next subject involved Glenna’s gluing her mouth to mine, and then we did what we usually did after Glenna visited her folks, only now we did it with her maxi coat on.

Later, Glenna fished a pair of gold peace-symbol earrings from her bag, holding them out in her palm for me to inspect and saying, “I bought a present for us yesterday.”

“For us?” I said, appalled, being about as inclined to wear an earring as I was to wear high heels. “What’s a matter, I’m not sufficiently pussy-whipped I gotta pierce an earlobe and insert one of those?”

Glenna grinned. “No, silly. I’m going to wear them, but they’re for you. For luck. On Monday.”

“Monday?”

“The draft lottery. You get your number. Did you forget?”

“Not exactly.” Truthfully, I’d been more nervous about Robin’s telling Glenna about our campout than I was about getting drafted.

Dropping the earrings behind her on the floor, Glenna snuggled next to me, murmuring, “If you forgot, you’re not sufficiently pussy-whipped,” and I could feel her mouth, against my cheek, curve upward in a wicked grin.

ON MONDAY evening, December 1, we were on the couch, and Here’s Lucy was on the tube. Glenna was wearing her new earrings, and I’d been watching Lucille Ball in the midst of some screwball misadventure, when the CBS Special Report screen appeared, and the announcer said that Mayberry R.F.D. would be back next week at its regularly scheduled time, and then I was looking at newsman Roger Mudd, who was covering the lottery from a front-row seat in an auditorium at Selective Service headquarters in Washington.

General Lewis Hershey, the white-haired director of the draft, summoned a congressman, who plucked a capsule from a glass cylinder and passed it, like a priceless gem, to a graying colonel, who broke it open, withdrew a slip of paper, and announced, “September fourteenth,” which meant that males born on that date between 1944 and 1950 now had the honor of being drafted first.

A crew-cut, eighteen-year-old four-eyes from Selective Service’s Youth Advisory Committee plucked the next capsule, and the colonel said, “April twenty-fourth.”