There was a country simplicity to her, a well-fed glossiness. The first time they kissed, in the intermission of a dance that Owen had attended because his mother urged him to be less scornful of the region’s high school even though it wasn’t Willow High, Elsie didn’t make the anxious pushing mouth that Alice Stottlemeyer had during spin-the-bottle but somehow let her lips melt into his, at this warm moist spot where their bodies joined. She was a short girl, in her sweated-up taffeta dance dress, and he, six feet tall at seventeen, the recent beneficiary of the Mackenzie ranginess. She had to tug down at him to keep his face tight to hers; she wanted to kiss more, there behind a broken Coke machine, where the overhead fluorescent light was flickering. Her eager small body molded itself to his; he remembered hearing how Carol Wisniewski had let herself be fucked by Marty Naftzinger standing up in the narrow space between the Rec Hall and the hosiery mill, and saw that it could be done.

Not that he and Elsie ever—in a word they never used between them—fucked. He was too smart for that, too anxious to avoid wasting his one life. He knew that fucking led to marriage and he was not ready for that. In the heat and urgency of that first kiss he recognized that she had had her eye on him, as the phrase went—he had been an exotic, aloof arrival at the school, and somehow the idea of him had wormed its way excitingly into Elsie’s head. So between them there was always this tilt, this unbalance: she had desired him before he knew what was up. Nevertheless, he responded; he loved her, as far as he could shake the embarrassment of her not being a Willow girl. She was only, in her swinging skirts and white bobby socks, an imitation, a feed merchant’s daughter.

He would afterwards associate Elsie with the inside of a car—its stale velour, its little dim dashboard lights, its rubber floormats and chill metallic surfaces. Chill to begin with: after an evening of driving around, the heater made a cozy nook in the dark. On dates, they took his parents’ stuffy pre-war Chevy, the second-hand car the Mackenzies had bought as part of their move to the country house. His father was generally back from Norristown by six, and Owen was granted the car for the gasoline-powered roaming that is, in common American wisdom, a teen-ager’s right.