. . . But innocent, surely. And so different from her real life (her life as a teacher, her life, her ceaseless dinning life, in her head), surely it was healthy and rejuvenating and good for the soul, as Sheila claimed. (“I suppose we’re too narrow, too cautious,” Sheila brooded. “We could pick up a couple of men and bring them back to my place . . . or stop at a motel . . . what do you think? Do you think it would be worth it? Or would it just be trouble? and boring?” Without waiting for Monica’s reply she said, as if thinking aloud: “Hell, they’d just give us the clap, or knock out a few teeth. The fun of it now is what we do—and what we don’t do.”)

Sometimes when Monica was insufficiently Mary Beth—not sufficiently mollified by drink, that is—she had to admit that the excursions were exhausting, and beginning to be predictable. The tobacco smoke made her slightly ill, the noise from the jukebox made her head ring, there were indefinable odors she hated, and there was, inevitably, and frequently, the women’s lavatory. . . . The jostling in the barroom, the crowding, the loud good-natured bantering; the bantering that turned into bullying; the outright propositions, delivered in a tone of “fun” (Let’s go somewhere and fuck right now, men might say to Sheila, and Sheila would say, simply, Nope); the rivalrous women who might have been wives out for a good time, an illicit good time, or divorcées, or semiprofessional hookers—the women who eyed Sherrill Ann and Mary Beth with both shrewdness and resentment. And poor Sherrill Ann sometimes drank too much, trying to keep up with the boys, and got sick to her stomach in one or another filthy lavatory or parking lot . . . or at the roadside, on their way home. (Monica generally drove, on Sheila’s bad nights.) Once Sheila gripped her arm—squeezed it—said in an elated voice, “You’re a good sport, Mary Beth, hon—I wouldn’t have predicted.”

And Monica felt, despite herself, an immediate flood of childish gratification.

What of Sheila and men, Monica wondered. What did she really think, what did she really feel, about men . . . ?

It was hard to take them seriously, Sheila said. Then added, with a sly narrowing of her eyes: “It’s hard to take anyone seriously.”

If Monica tried to draw her out, to make inquiries, Sheila seemed rather aloof; or, perhaps, shy; everything was deflected into a jest, an airy bon mot, a shrug of her thin shoulders. When she was slightly drunk she boasted of herself as a woman who liked men and who sometimes craved men but, in fact, she could “take them or leave them: it’s all so banal in the end.”

Except for Morton, of course.

Except for Morton whom she had—well, hadn’t she?—loved.