I didn’t see them before they left. I drank grape soda under the skylight and read trash. After a week or so I thought they’d be back so I went out there. I walked up from the highway. I could hear the music from half a mile away. There were cars in the drive all the way out to the dirt road. I must have rubbed bellies with twenty-five car bumpers getting up to the house. As I came closer to the house, the music had the same effect on my ears as a jet engine. The hens in the wire outside the living room crouched, petrified, their yellow eyes frantically staring. Angelina was running crazy between the dancers on the lawn, her barking grown hoarse as she was chased by a nipping, noisy, ragged ball of white fur half her size. I recognized most of the people from the school, but mingled with the leotards and beards were a few pairs of sheer stockings in low-heeled pumps, a few deliberate hairstyles.

I may have imagined a white shirt and tie.

It was late afternoon. There were bedrolls piled by the kitchen step. I recognized Liz Fink, a woman from school, presiding over the rice pot. Two girls in fluffy sweaters and matching skirts sat on the one kitchen chair clenching the knees of their blank legs. On their faces were identical expressions of shock. Liz carefully munched rice off a crusted fork.

“Hello, Sally. A little more thyme.”

She pinched green dust from a paper box and sprinkled it over the rice. She bent down to smell the mixture. She wore a black sweatshirt and a tent skirt. She turned from the pot, snorted, and scratched idly between her huge flattened tits with the fork.

“Sally, you can testify for these innocents. Is it or is it not true that I blow Charlie every night of the week?”

“Jesus Christ.”

“He’s ruptured, you know. I think of it as Heloise consoling Abelard.”

The two girls looked at me. It was not the act they doubted, it was the actress. Liz combed her black fetlock with the fork and smirked.

“They don’t even know such things exist.” She took a sudden lunge at the little window and pointed through it.

“See him? Right out there with that bitch poetess Lerner. The tall guy with the Nazi boots. That’s the one.”

The girls obediently gandered at old Charlie Bigelow hee-hawing out on the lawn. Liz struck a professional pose and waved the fork.

“It’s not at all unpleasant for the woman. Very exciting, actually. You start by murmuring into the hollow of his shoulder and kiss and nuzzle on your way down.”