“No,” she said, “it wouldn’t help.” She picked up her glass of water. “Not really,” she said. “You see, I’m taking my own looks at me right now. I’m wiser to me than you are. I see things that you just can’t.”

Chapter Five

CHAPTER FIVE

After high school she went to work. She thought of college, but not seriously. She liked the money she was making more. At a dance on the Port Smith campus she met a liberal arts sophomore named Jimmy, aged nineteen. They ended the evening in a hotel downtown.

He had never slept with a girl but he knew female anatomy; he asked and she told him that there had been only one before him, a sailor. Jimmy believed it. It hurt him but he took it bravely, and eventually he felt proud of his maturity and understanding. Things went smoothly. She moved away from home and registered in a night class in Freshman English in Port Smith. The affair went on into the next year, more intense and more complicated, more satisfactory to her, and she felt sure that she and Jimmy would be married. She made a B in English and started two more courses in the spring. When it became obvious that she was going to make A’s, Jimmy began to act badly. He was jealous, he admitted it. He said that he wanted her to quit school, even mentioning marriage, but when she tried to make certain that he would marry her if she quit, he would not give her a direct answer. By the summer he was saying that he could never marry her, that he did not love her enough. She wept, got sick, but could not bring herself to break off. By September he had done it. She resolved to keep her life in good order.

“I did, for a month,” she told Leland. “Later in therapy I told Wendell that I hadn’t been able to stand not having sex, and he asked me why I hadn’t masturbated. I’ve never done that, but that wasn’t what I hadn’t been able to stand not having. It was that and all the rest of sex, do you understand?”

“I think so. Did you realize that Jimmy was only looking for a way to get rid of you when he asked you to quit school?”

“You saw that? That it was too important to me?”

“Of course. I haven’t been around psychiatrists, but I’ve been around.”