CHICKEN: Sure, I can read, I can make out most of the words and I can write something that passes for a letter. But dogged if reading ‘ll close them gates on the body. I tried it a while and give it up in disgust. Made up stuff like that don’t satisfy me. Does it you?

MYRTLE: No, it don’t me neither. I never was much of a reader. I pick up a woman’s magazine now and then.

CHICKEN: I bet you don’t even get ha’f through a story.

MYRTLE: I us’ally don’t.

CHICKEN: That’s how it was with me. I’d get ha’f through an’ give it up in disgust.—Fooling the public . . .

MYRTLE: Uh-huh . . .

LOT [offstage]: Myrtle!

MYRTLE: For Christ’s sake what is he bawling about, I wonder.

CHICKEN: Go see.

MYRTLE: Later—maybe. [She picks up one of the cards.]

CHICKEN: What’re you doin’ with that card?

MYRTLE: Cleaning my finger-nails with it.

CHICKEN: Use a match-stick.

MYRTLE: Never mind . . . I’ve got some orange sticks somewhere. [Pause.] You play cards?

CHICKEN: Not much. [Pause.] I like to go in town and look at a movie or go to a carnival show when one is in town, but only ever so offen, not ev’ry night, the way some people do it. Lookin’ at them screen stars don’t close the gates on the body and don’t ever think it does.

[Myrtle laughs.]

They’s nothing that gets a fellow quite so horny as setting there in the dark and looking up at one of them beautiful actrisses messin’ around in a wrapper. I never have seen one picture in which they didn’t and there’s young kids that play with themselves in the movies. Did you know that?

MYRTLE: —No . . . .

LOT: Myrtle!

MYRTLE [softly]: Oh, shut up up there, will you?

CHICKEN: After the show it’s worse than before you went in. You come back out and there ain’t one inch of you not overrun by those longings.

MYRTLE: I don’t go to moves except when some fellow takes me.

CHICKEN: Poker, I like to play that, but always seem to come out at the little end of the horn.

[Loud coughing and gasping is heard from offstage.]

MYRTLE [getting up]: I’m going to go up there now and see what he wants. [But she remains by the table.]

CHICKEN: You don’t seem to be in much of a hurry.

MYRTLE: I’m too soft hearted. I can’t stand to see people suffer.

LOT: Myrtle!

CHICKEN: Is that why you’re sitting down here?

MYRTLE: I’ve had a bad time all my life. You don’t understand how it is for a woman like me. I used to work at a dry-goods store in Biloxi. I was fifteen and I was thin and pretty.