The only drive Rosie appeared to have was the ability to drive her goal-driven parents crazy.

“If a member of this family doesn’t want to go to college and then medical school to be a doctor or psychiatrist,” explained Rosie’s frustrated mother to her daughter, “then…then…” Rosie’s mother could never finish the sentence.

“What’s to become of her?” Rosie’s father asked the synagogue’s rabbi every weekend at services.

“God only knows,” was the rabbi’s astute reply.

Rosie Feinstein never attended Saturday morning services at the synagogue just across the street. She preferred to visit the zoo, or stroll in Central Park, or wander around the Met, or MOMA, or the Museum of Natural History. On weekdays you could often find Rosie sitting on a wall at Lincoln Center watching the agile, slender-as-swans female and male ballet dancers walk by. She admired their beauty and their bony bodies. Rosie Feinstein could never have been a ballet dancer. She was too short and stubby. She was barely five feet tall, with thick curly hair on top of a deliciously compact, robust figure. Any man who liked a deliciously compact, robust figure—a figure that sported breasts bulging out of their bra and an ass that a Cossack would love to grab onto—then Rosie Feinstein was his girl. Quite a few males considered Rosie Feinstein sexy as hell.

Billy Constable was one of those males.

Billy was at a loss as to why he felt the way he did about Rosie Feinstein. Probably because Rosie Feinstein the New Yorker was a whole new wonderful world to Billy Constable the Kentuckian. Rosie was a major reason Billy began loving Grossinger’s.

Rosie Feinstein loved Grossinger’s too. Always had. She went as often as she could scrounge up the money, summer or winter, it didn’t matter. What Rosie craved was the food, playing Simon Says, and the ease with which she could indulge her soupçon of nymphomania.

Rosie detested fixed.

She preferred mixed.

“It’s not that she’s a nymphomaniac,” said a girlfriend who didn’t sound a hundred percent sure. “It’s that Rosie believes variety is the spice of life.”

Rosie Feinstein had a predilection for the offbeat, and Grossinger’s had a plentiful supply of idiosyncratic males. A drummer here. A horny borscht belt comic there. A cloak and suiter with his greased-up hair and pinkie ring everywhere. And the gentile hillbilly from Bowling Green, Kentucky.

If there was one thing Rosie Feinstein loved it was shtupping the hillbilly. Billy Constable liked it too once he found out what shtupping meant. He reckoned he was semiretarded in the shtupping department, which he was, due to his lack of practice, but Rosie Feinstein was happy to give the well-endowed hillbilly an intensive crash course. She’d say, “Come on, Kentucky, let’s shtup,” or, “Remember, Kentucky, practice makes perfect,” just about every other hour of the day. At least that’s how it felt to Billy. Not that Billy minded. It’s just that his endurance didn’t match Rosie’s, nor did he have the time. He did have another job.