There were bloody automobile accidents almost every weekend; that same group from Hollywood roaring down in their little convertibles, slamming themselves into eternity with the same dumb insistence with which they ordered their sickening sweets. So on the weekends the police often came around and stood inside the drive-in to “keep a lookout for troublemakers,” they said. They were two middle-aged local cops. When the crowd got too obstreperous, the cops would collar the young men and throw them back into their cars, telling them to be sure and kill themselves outside Laguna. Sometimes, they drove Annie home in an old police car that rattled like a half-empty toolbox. One night they took her down to San Diego, then to the Mexican border, right across from Tijuana. They had been kind to her; she felt their protectiveness toward her. But that night they’d talked as if she weren’t there; yet she knew the conversation was for her to hear. It was about the parties that went on up in the hills in the beautiful, opulent houses, and a kind of terror seized her as they all sat with the motor idling at the border crossing, the two stocky middle-aged men in their blue uniforms gagging with outraged laughter at the doings of the rich and exempt, and she thought, What if they knew about me? What if they knew I had been to Communist party meetings? What if they discovered I’m married? To a Communist? Ernie had told her not to wear her wedding ring to work. He’d grinned and said, “I suppose I don’t have to explain, do I?” She’d heard about Red Squads by then; she’d heard from Paul Lavan about cops in their strongholds, kicking the genitals of men who’d marched for Tom Mooney, or who’d tried to organize unions. She thought for a terrible moment she was simply going to cry with fear; then it would all come out. But nothing happened; they drove her home, quiet all the way, and when she got out of the car, one of them said, “Be a good girl, Annie-Fannie.”

On afternoons when she was off work, she went to the beach in her new green bathing suit she’d bought with her pay, and lay in the sun. She grew quickly bored and began to walk along the lovely shore with its fine sand and intricate rock formations, looking up sometimes at the house on the cliff that someone told her belonged to Bette Davis.