MYRTLE: I can’t stay inside all day. I guess I live a strange life, I don’t know how to describe it. Each new city I got to, I find a girlfriend to bum around town with. When I wake up I call her or she calls me, and if we’re not working, or get off work at five, we make a date to meet somewhere and just, just—kill time together. No special plan, you know. We eat together and go to a movie and wind up in some bar we’re used to, and always meet a man or a couple of men there. What’s strange about my life is each day is like the day before or the next day. Just killing time, no change except time going. It begun to scare me, the way the days and nights all seemed like one day and night gone over and over and over. So, then I met Lot in a drugstore in downtown Memphis. He was looking through movie magazines on the magazine rack in that Walgreen’s. We struck up a conversation. He looked like a kid, my girlfriend Georgia said I was robbing the cradle. Well, I have this maternal chord in me and he touched it. It was my birthday. I don’t suppose it would have happened except on my birthday. My birthday reminded me how long I’d been just wand’ring around on the loose, each day like the other and no change in the future except time passing me by. I was scared. And Lot touched this maternal chord in me. So I took Lot home to my place and he spent the night with me, slept in my arms like a baby.—When he woke up he said to me, “Let’s get married.” At first I laughed, it seemed ridiculous to me. But then I thought, oh, well, as the fellow says, there’s a hell of a lot more to this business of sex than two people jumping up and down on each other’s eggs.

CHICKEN: So you said “Yes.”

MYRTLE: Yes, I did, I said yes. And we married yesterday and drove down here this morning. —The trouble with my life is I don’t plan it, it’s just an unplanned thing that happens to me. A thing like that can’t go on forever, you know.

LOT [from above]: Myrtle! Myrtle!

MYRTLE: Excuse me while I go up there and see what he wants.

[As she goes up the stairs, Chicken returns to the nude colored photo on the back wall of the kitchen and stares at it till Myrtle rushes back down, almost immediately after going up.]