“No. I like you much better fat. You were always too vain before. Women like a man who isn’t aware of his looks. I’ll bet you do a lot better with women now.”

“If you’d been more vain you’d have had a better time. Always clumping around in baggy shirts with smelly pits and scraggy hair. For years I considered you a failed lesbian.”

“I know. I was always afraid people would think that. But I looked like a muffin in anything that fit. Oh, well. Too late.”

“Too late,” he agrees, and we pour another cup of tea and each eat another peach.

He doesn’t ask what the thing is about. He pokes up the fire and I do the dishes. My hands hang in the gray water for minutes while I think about what I am doing. Why do I think he has to read it? So he can praise me? Exonerate me? Can he say, “Yes, you took them food. You said what you knew to say. You did what you knew to do,” and will that make it right?

He is sitting in there now. The house is full of him. I can hear the hiss of the coal and the rasp of his throat clearings. The pages turning. He’ll read it. He won’t skip or scan. He’ll read it dutifully.

But I can’t sleep with his noises and the fact that he is reading my story of Sam and Carlotta. Maybe after all he’ll tiptoe in and make a pass at me. The dugong and the manatee, coupling in the briny sea, ta ra, ta ra, ta ra, ta reee …

This place is hard to find

It was an awkward time. Painful. New freshmen started arriving at the school, clean from home in clothes their mothers had helped them shop for. They were all busy shrugging into their new attitudes of being brighter, more poetic, or crazier than thou. I could feel the school sucking them in and encouraging their disguises.

The returning hordes bustled about, setting up houses together. They stalked around, trying out new images for the year or reestablishing old used ones. I bought gold hoop earrings and a short, thick cigarette holder. Sat with my high boots crossed in the snack bar and blew smoke down my nose at them all. It didn’t seem to help.

The day before classes started I almost went to visit Clancy. I found the slip of paper on which she’d written her address, walked a dozen blocks in an unfamiliar direction, asked an old lady and a dirty boy about the number. I was only saved from knocking when I saw Rennel’s car parked out front. There was no mistaking the Rambler with its dents and the psychology texts on the back seat.