He asks her, “What for you?”

“Oh, anything. The same thing. I drink everything.”

While he is cracking an ice tray in the tiny kitchenette, the two boys have snuck out of Billy’s bedroom. Rabbit wonders if they have been looking at dirty photographs. The kind of pictures kids used to have to pay an old cripple on Plum Street a dollar apiece for you can buy a whole magazine full of now for seventy-five cents, right downtown. The Supreme Court, old men letting the roof cave in. Billy is a head taller than Nelson, sunburned where Nelson takes a tan after his mother, both of them with hair down over their ears, the Fosnacht boy’s blonder and curlier. “Mom, we want to go downstairs and run the mini-bike on the parking lot.”

“Come back up in an hour,” Peggy tells them, “I’ll give you supper.”

“Nelson had a peanut-butter sandwich before we left,” Rabbit explains.

“Typical male cooking,” Peggy says. “Where’re you going this evening anyway, all dressed up in a suit?”

“Nowhere much. I told a guy I might meet him.” He doesn’t say it is a Negro. He should be asking her out, is his sudden frightened feeling. She is dressed to go out; but not so dolled-up it can’t appear she plans to stay home tonight. He hands her her g.-and-t. The best defense is to be offensive. “You don’t have any mint or limes or anything.”

Her plucked eyebrows lift. “No, there are lemons in the fridge, is all. I could run down to the grocery for you.” Not entirely ironical: using his complaint to weave coziness.

Rabbit laughs to retract. “Forget it, I’m just used to bars, where they have everything. At home all I ever do is drink beer.”

She laughs in answer. She is tense as a schoolteacher facing her first class. To relax them both he sits down in a loose leather armchair that says pfsshhu. “Hey, this is nice,” he announces, meaning the vista, but he spoke too early, for from this low chair the view is flung out of sight and becomes all sky: a thin bright wash, stripes like fat in bacon.

“You should hear Ollie complain about the rent.” Peggy sits down not in another chair but on the flat grille where the radiator breathes beneath the window, opposite and above him, so he sees a lot of her legs—shiny skin stuffed to the point of shapelessness. Still, she is showing him what she has, right up to the triangle of underpants, which is one more benefit of being alive in 1969. Miniskirts and those magazines: well, hell, we’ve always known women had crotches, why not make it legal? A guy at the shop brought in a magazine that, honestly, was all cunts, in blurred bad four-color but cunts, upside down, backwards, the girls attached to them rolling their tongues in their mouths and fanning their hands on their bellies and otherwise trying to hide how silly they felt. Homely things, really, cunts. Without the Supreme Court that might never have been made clear.