Someone driving from Lancaster to Alton would pass through Olinger as a segment of a continuous strip of commercial enterprise. In David’s boyhood, the town had trailed off into cornfields, an old grist mill, a creek full of watercress, a great stone quarry both dangerous and enticing in its emptiness. Now all such mysterious, underpopulated terrain was filled with shopping centers, car lots, aluminum diners, and fast-food franchises. Still, Olinger retained, at least in the minds of his generation, a distinct sense of itself as a sane and blissful medium between the laughable rural innocence of a one-street, two-factory town like Schenktown, tucked into bleak stretches of corn stubble and abandoned apple orchards, and the urban horrors of Alton, a big depressed industrial town now increasingly dominated by its citizens of color. The people of Olinger were proud of being where they were, and David still felt his initial departure, set in motion by his mother, as a loss. She had talked his father into moving out of Olinger into an old farmhouse some miles to the south when David was fourteen.

Though tending to hang back shyly at these reunions, he stood up and looked for Julia. The reunion was being held in a function room of an Alton restaurant, festooned with the class colors, maroon and gold. Blown-up photos from the happy days—duck tails, bobby socks, the smoke-filled luncheonette—had been hung about. A long buffet table was being set up. The bar was busy and noisy. He found Julia standing not far away, in the center of the room, with a few old admirers and the inseparable Doris Gerhardt. Good-natured, ginger-haired Doris had been perhaps the shortest member of their class, and one of the first to get married. Both women kissed him, which David had not expected. While Doris’s kiss, delivered strenuously upward, was warmer and more pressing, Julia’s had certainly occurred, a moist female moment in the center of his lips. The Connecticut courtesy kiss, an antiseptic brushing of the cheeks, didn’t exist here. Julia had put on at least ten pounds since high school, but her tallness and elegantly erect posture made light of it. Her hair was white yet still abundant and somehow high, springing from her forehead in a soft combed crest, and then falling away toward her wide shoulders. She had a hook nose and gray-green eyes with a dark quiet to them: a German beauty, sallow-skinned, carrying herself as if simply being herself was quite enough. She had gone out for no extracurricular activities that he could remember. In the yearbook she had listed as her main ambition “to get out of school.” In class she was stately and impervious, except when called upon to recite; when she stood, her face flooded with a blush that sent an erotic shiver across the rows. Her smile had an engaging helpless air to it, as if to say, “Well, what can one do?” Was kann mer duh?