wondered how she knew she had really graduated at all, and, unlike her clients, was whole and well.

Ever since I’d learned about the corruption of Buddy Willard my virginity weighed like a millstone around my neck. It

I often thought if I had been assigned to Doctor Quinn I would be still in Caplan or, more probably, Wymark. Doctor Quinn had an abstract quality that appealed to Joan, but it gave me the polar chills.

I was my own woman. The next step was to find the proper sort of man.

questions. I had toyed with the idea of telling him I planned to be married to a sailor as soon as his ship docked at the Charlestown Navy Yard, and the reason I didn’t have an engagement ring was because we were too poor, but at the last moment I rejected that appealing story and simply said “Yes”.

looked at Joan. In spite of the creepy feeling, and in spite of my old, ingrained dislike, Joan fascinated me. It was like observing a Martian, or a particularly warty toad. Her thoughts were not my thoughts, nor her feelings my feelings, but we were close enough so that her thoughts and feelings seemed a wry, black image of my own.

I thought how sad it was Joan looked so horsey, with such big teeth and eyes like two grey, goggly pebbles

I tried to think what I had loved knives for, but my mind slipped from the noose of the thought and swung, like a bird, in the centre of empty air.

But Doctor Nolan only smiled at me as if something had pleased her very, very much, and said, “I suppose you do

yes.” “Did he come back?” The story sounded rather involved for Joan to have made up out of whole cloth, but I led her on, to see what would come of it. “Oh yes. I was going to kill myself, mind you. I said ‘If this doctor doesn’t do the trick, that’s the end.’ Well, the receptionist led me down a long hall, and just as we got to the door she turned to me and said, ‘You won’t mind if there are a few students with the doctor, will you?’ What could I say? ‘Oh no,’ I said. I walked in and found nine pairs of eyes fixed on me. Nine! Eighteen separate eyes.

it, was a mirror image of my own. It occurred to me that Joan, hearing where I was, had engaged a room at the asylum on pretence, simply as a joke.

out?” “Oh, I’m not leaving,” Valerie laughed. “I like it here.” “Moving day!” “Why should I be moving?” The

crack of my good eye. The other eye hadn’t opened yet, but the eye doctor said it would be all right in a few days

chisel cracked down on my eye, and a slit of light opened, like a mouth or a wound, till the darkness clamped shut on it again.

carefully I managed to cook my hotdog just the right amount of time and didn’t burn it or drop it into the fire, the way I was afraid of doing. Then, when nobody was looking, I buried it in the sand.

She was … she was awful!”

Doctor Gordon laughed.

Doctor Gordon’s features were so perfect he was almost pretty. I hated him the minute I walked in through the door.

The reason I hadn’t washed my clothes or my hair was because it seemed so silly. I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade

dialled the Admissions Office and listened to the zombie voice leave a message that Miss Esther Greenwood was cancelling all arrangements to come to summer school.

hadn’t, at the last moment, felt like washing off the two diagonal lines of dried blood that marked my cheeks. They seemed touching, and rather spectacular, and I thought I would carry them around with me, like the relic of a dead lover, till they wore off of their own accord.

I’m so glad they’re going to die.” “Come on, give us a smile.”

The interior voice nagging me not to be a fool—to save my skin and take off my skis and walk down, camouflaged by the scrub pines bordering the slope—fled like a disconsolate mosquito. The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower. I measured the distance to Buddy with my eye.

I had never been really happy again.

“My name’s Elly Higginbottom,” I said. “I come from Chicago.” After that I felt safer. I didn’t want anything I said or did that night to be associated with me and my real name and coming from Boston.

dusky as a bleached blonde negress in her white dress and sipped daintily at her drink.

I looked yellow as a Chinaman.

“Jay Cee’s ugly as sin,” Doreen went on coolly. “I bet that old husband of hers turns out all the lights before he gets near her or he’d puke otherwise.”

Girls like that make me sick. I’m so jealous I can’t speak.

This hotel—the Amazon—was for women only, and they were mostly girls my age with wealthy parents who wanted to be sure their daughters would be living where men couldn’t get at them and deceive them; and they were all going to posh secretarial schools like Katy Gibbs, where they had to wear hats and stockings and gloves to class, or they had just graduated from places like Katy Gibbs and were secretaries to executives and junior executives and simply hanging around in New York waiting to get married to some career man or other.

For a long time afterwards I hid them away, but later, when I was all right again, I brought them out, and I still have them around the house. I use the lipsticks now and then, and last week I cut the plastic starfish off the sun-glasses case for the baby to play with.

I recognized the short, squat, moustached woman in the black uniform as the night maid who ironed day-dresses and party-frocks in a crowded cubicle on our floor.

The city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all, for all the good it did me.

Walking has never fazed me. I just set out in the right direction, counting the blocks under my breath, and when I walked into the lobby of the hotel I was perfectly sober and my feet only slightly swollen, but that was my own fault because I hadn’t bothered to wear any stockings.

I felt myself shrinking to a small black dot against all those red and white rugs and that pine-panelling. I felt like a hole in the ground.

“Stick around, will you? I wouldn’t have a chance if he tried anything funny. Did you see that muscle?” Doreen giggled.

“Listen, Elly, do me a favour.” She seemed to think Elly was who I really was by now.

Great white bearskins lay about underfoot, and the only furniture was a lot of low beds covered with Indian rugs. Instead of pictures hung up on the walls, he had antlers and buffalo horns and a stuffed rabbit head. Lenny jutted a thumb at the meek little grey muzzle and stiff jackrabbit ears.

wouldn’t have missed Lenny’s place for anything

I couldn’t help it.

but because his presentation fascinated me so much I couldn’t help it.

She knew and I knew perfectly well I would get a straight A again in the chemistry course, so what was the point of my taking the exams, why couldn’t I just go to the classes and look on and take it all in and forget about marks or credits?

Jay Cee said mercilessly

told Doreen I would not go to the show or the luncheon or the film première, but that I would not go to Coney Island either, I would stay in bed. After Doreen left, I wondered why I couldn’t go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn’t go the whole way doing what I shouldn’t, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired.

I felt homesick for that sauce. The crabmeat tasted bland in comparison.

I’d discovered, after a lot of extreme apprehension about what spoons to use, that if you do something incorrect at table with a certain arrogance, as if you knew perfectly well you were doing it properly, you can get away with it and nobody will think you are bad-mannered or poorly brought up. They will think you are original and very witty.

Then I picked up the chicken slices in my fingers one by one, rolled them so the caviar wouldn’t ooze off and ate them.

ooking too soppy.

Buddy Willard

I began to feel if it was a good enough present I wouldn’t mind about what happened, because I felt so pure as a result.

Poisoned,” she said briefly. “Poisoned, the whole lot of you. I never seen anythin’ like it. Sick here, sick there, whatever have you young ladies been stuffin’ yourselves with?”

Finally I could see the nice girl was going to end up with the nice football hero and the sexy girl was going to end up with nobody, because the man named Gil had only wanted a mistress and not a wife all along and was now packing off to Europe on a single ticket.

thought what a long way I had come.

help. My mother had taught shorthand and typing to support us ever since my father died, and secretly she hated it and hated him for dying and leaving no money because he didn’t trust life insurance salesmen

I wished I had a mother like Jay Cee. Then I’d know what to do.

Jay Cee had to flatter the more famous man at the same time as she was careful not to hurt the less famous lady.

handed and curious every Saturday night and having some senior introduce me to her aunt’s best friend’s son and finding some pale, mushroomy fellow with protruding ears or buck teeth or a bad leg. I didn’t think I deserved it. After all, I wasn’t crippled in any way, I just studied too hard, I didn’t know when to stop.

that Prom.

I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree. It seemed to me Buddy Willard and I were like that Jewish man and that nun, although of course we weren’t Jewish or Catholic but Unitarian. We had met together under our own imaginary fig-tree, and what we had seen wasn’t a bird coming out of an egg but a baby coming out of a woman, and then something awful happened and we went our separate ways.

figs with the Jewish man any more but a mean-faced Catholic kitchen-maid came to pick them instead and counted up the figs the man picked after they were both through to be sure he hadn’t picked any more than she had, and the man was furious.

before I could do that, and now I had to humour him along till he got well again and could take the unvarnished truth.

now saw quite clearly that Mrs Willard had simply traded her open house in Russia for my bite to eat in New York.

collected men with interesting names. I already knew a Socrates. He was tall and ugly and intellectual and the son of some big Greek movie producer in Hollywood, but also a Catholic, which ruined it for both of us. In addition to Socrates I knew a White Russian named Attila at the Boston School of Business Administration.

And that’s how Buddy had lost his pureness and his virginity. At first I thought he must have slept with the waitress only the once, but when I asked how many times, just to make sure, he said he couldn’t remember but a couple of times a week for the rest of the summer. I multiplied three by ten and got thirty, which seemed beyond all reason.

simply told everyone that Buddy had TB and we were practically engaged, and when I stayed in to study on Saturday nights they were extremely kind to me because they thought I was so brave, working the way I did just to hide a broken heart.

I couldn’t see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.