Vera couldn’t wait to get out of the house. The school year was almost over. She was impatient to rid herself of her books and the kitchen chores she committed like prayer next to her mother. She was anxious to shed the smells of cabbage and the fog of her father’s pipe, the one bourgeois extravagance he allowed himself. She changed into pants and a sweater and brushed out her hair and when the front door banged shut behind her, the spring afternoon actually seemed lighter.

Her parents were loath to let her go. They looked perplexed at her requests to be let out with her girlfriends for a soda. Why? That’s what Sundays are for. Her father turned back to the newspaper. Her mother finished whatever she was doing, washing or canning, and turned to look at Vera head-on. Vera couldn’t hold her gaze and tried to sneak around the corners of it like a mouse trapped along a bare wall. Her mother looked at her. She was not stupid; she suspected that Vera’s insistence was about a boy, but let her go anyway. It is different now, different times, a different place, but the same urges, so she let her go. Vera’s father probably suspected the same, and together, their parental imaginations conjured up a strapping Scandinavian kid, the family recently moved in from the farm. And that was okay. We are in America, we do what they do here, he always said.

Vera skipped down the steps but slowed and was careful not to swing her arms. She didn’t want to sweat, to feel her skin turn hot under her scratchy sweater. She slowed and turned onto Broadway and the low-slung dusk lightened a bit. The city glinted and sparkled. Everything on Broadway looked chromed in the setting sun. Bel Airs and Cadillacs coasted down the boulevard, regal and serene, sanely carrying their occupants home from work. Wives in long coats as stiff as armor lugged mesh bags from delis and corner stores, and a few carried paper sacks from the new supermarket on Sixth Avenue. There were kids dodging cars and bootblacks stepped from their stations to smoke and get fresh air on the sidewalk.