Quite clearly something was wrong in Sheila’s life—the pressure of the upcoming exhibit, perhaps—telephone calls, unexplained, that left her embittered and shaken—but, in the right mood, she was as irresistibly funny as ever. She told droll tales on herself, wildly comic episodes out of the past, or something that had occurred just the other day in New York City (“There was this man, actually he didn’t look like a bum, on Houston Street, urinating a few yards from the sidewalk, absolutely no shyness, certainly no embarrassment”); she was drawn into laughing herself once it seemed that Monica, her uneasy audience of one, would laugh. Monica strained to see the logic of her friend’s humor and fell after a few minutes into her mood—slapdash, wide-eyed, deadpan, funny.

Morton, Sheila said, had a very peculiar sense of humor: sometimes he laughed exuberantly, wonderfully; sometimes he merely stared in contempt. “I could never depend upon him,” she said casually.

It was at about this time that Sheila, teasing and cajoling, finally persuaded Monica to join her on one of her pub crawls, as she called them, along the highway, over in Edgarsville and Swedesboro. There were, she claimed, “marvelous” places, never frequented by the genteel residents of Glenkill, bowling alleys, country taverns, dance halls, truckers’ hangouts, that sort of thing, it was precisely what Monica needed, and what Sheila herself needed, as a change of pace. “You’re actually becoming a stiff-backed little prig,” Sheila said, “— ‘Miss Jensen’ of the Glenkill Academy.”

Monica winced, and laughed, as if the remark were just a joke; as of course it was.

Smiley’s Place, County Line Tavern, Jake’s Lanes & Barbecue, Hedy’s Café, Swedesboro Inn, Mitch’s Bar & Grill, Buddy’s Circle Café, Black Billy’s . . . Places where you never ran into anyone you knew, Sheila said, and never anyone who knew you.

So: in remarkably tight shiny-black trousers and a green satin shirt, Sheila was “Sherrill Ann,” a lively divorcée from the Edgarsville area who worked for the telephone company, or was someone’s secretary, or who owned a beauty parlor on a small scale; and Monica was a pretty blond named “Mary Beth,” also a divorcée from Edgarsville, who wore a red turtleneck sweater, and blue jeans, and a locket on a thin gold chain, and who worked in the same office with Sherrill Ann, or was it in Sherrill Ann’s beauty parlor . . . ? They appeared to be friendly, forthright, uncomplicated girls, good-natured girls who enjoyed draft beer and bowling and casual conversations, standing at the bar side by side with men, but always insisting, always insisting, upon paying for their drinks themselves; and leaving together, as they’d come.