“I’m not tired. I have a lot of things to read. I’ve got a lot of work to do.” I left her and went back to my room and lay down on my bed. I had only been there one day and already I was thinking it was a mistake to move into the house. Already I was feeling claustrophobic. I got up from the bed and began to pile things in my closet. In thirty minutes I had my room looking the way I had always liked my rooms. Everything put away and a plain bedspread on the bed. I took all the powder boxes and junk off the dresser and set my typewriter up on it and moved the lamp beside it. I opened the drapes and pushed open the window. I turned off the light and lay back down on the bed. Some old law student in a dark suit was coming to take me out to dinner. He was dark and tall and cold. He never smiled. He wanted me to act like a lady. He wanted me to be beautiful and thin. Sophisticated and aloof, quiet and soft and perfect. He was my father. He had come to get my mother. Together they walked down the path from the Chi Omega house to the car. They were going out to dinner. They were irritated and very sad.

After a while I got up and took off all my clothes and put my pajamas on. I lit a small oil-filled lamp I had bought at the dime store. The smell of perfumed oil filled the room, a strange foreign smell. I turned on the radio. “Moonglow with Martin” from the ballroom of the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans. Every night my long-lost love, Bob Rosen, listened to that program. No matter where I was or how far away from him, if I was listening to it, so was he. Radio waves. “It must have been moonglow, way up in the blue. It must have been moonglow, that brought me near to you.”

On Monday afternoon Stanley Mabry called me on the phone. I was upstairs in my room reading Henry IV, Part II out loud. I was walking around my room reading the king’s death scene.

“My day is dim.

Thou hast stolen that which after some few hours

Were thine without offense, and at my death

Thou hast seal’d up my expectation. . . .

Thou hidest a thousand daggers in thy thoughts,

Which thou has whetted on thy stony heart,

To stab at half an hour of my life. …”

“Rhoda.” It was Donie at my door. “Come on. Stanley’s on the phone. He wants to talk to you.”

“Okay. Hang on. I’m coming.” I stuck a bookmark in my book and laid it on the bed. Then I went out into the hall where the phone sat upon a shelf in an old phone booth painted blue.