"Four, yes please, this way," and the waiter leads them to a red booth. The place has just recently reopened as Chinese; pink paintings of Paris are still on the wall. Ruth staggers a little; Rabbit sees from behind that her heels, yellow with strain, tend to slip sideways in the net of lavender straps that pin her feet to the spikes of her shoes. But under the silky stretch of her mint—green dress her broad bottom packs the cloth with a certain composure. Her waist tucks in trimly, squarely, like the lines of her face. The cut of the dress bares a big V—shaped piece of fat fair back. In arriving at the booth, he bumps against her; the top of her head comes to his nose. The prickly smell of her hair stitches the store—bought scent stirred up on her. They bump because Tothero is ushering Margaret into her seat too ceremoniously, a gnome at the mouth of his cave. Standing there waiting, Rabbit is elated to think that a stranger passing outside the restaurant window, like himself last night outside that West Virginia diner, would see him with a woman. He seems to be that stranger, staring in, envying himself his body and his woman's body. Ruth bends down and slides over. The skin of her shoulders gleams and then dims in the shadow of the booth. Rabbit sits down too and feels her rustle beside him, settling in, the way women do, fussily, as if making a nest.

He discovers he has held on to her coat. Pale limp pelt, it sleeps in his lap. Without rising he reaches up and hangs it on the coatpole hook above him.

"Nice to have a long arm," she says, and looks in her purse and takes out a pack of Newports.

"Tothero says I have short arms."

"Where'd you meet that old bum?" This so Tothero can hear if he cares.

"He's not a bum, he's my old coach."

"Want one?" A cigarette.

He wavers. "I've stopped."

"So that old bum was your coach," she sighs. She draws a cigarette from the turquoise pack of Newports and hangs it between her orange lips and frowns at the sulphur tip as she strikes a match, with curious feminine clumsiness, away from her, holding the paper match sideways and thus bending it. It flares on the third scratch.

Margaret says, "Ruth."

"Bum?" Tothero says, and his heavy face looks unwell and lopsided in cagey mirth, as if he's started to melt. "I am, I am. A vile old bum fallen among princesses."

Margaret sees nothing against her in this and puts her hand on top of his on the table and in a solemn dead voice insists, "You're nothing like a bum."

"Where is our young Confucian?" Tothero asks and looks around with his free arm uplifted. When the boy comes he asks, "Can we be served alcoholic beverages here?"

"We bring in from next door," the boy says. Funny the way the eyebrows of Chinese people look embedded in the skin instead of sticking out from it.

"Double Scotch whisky," Tothero says. "My dear?"

"Daiquiri," Margaret says; it sounds like a wisecrack.

"Children?"

Rabbit looks at Ruth. Her face is caked with orange dust. Her hair, her hair which seemed at first glance dirty blonde or faded brown, is in fact many colors, red and yellow and brown and black, each hair passing in the light through a series of tints, like the hair of a dog. "Hell," she says. "I guess a Daiquiri."

"Three," Rabbit tells the boy, thinking a Daiquiri will be like a limeade.

The waiter recites, "Three Daiquiri, one double whisky Scotch on the rock," and goes.

Rabbit asks Ruth, "When's your birthday?"

"August. Why?"

"Mine's February," he says. "I win."

"You Win." She agrees as if she knows how he feels: that you can't be master, quite, of a woman who's older.

"If you recognized me," he asks, "why didn't you recognize Mr. Tothero? He was coach of that team."

` "Who looks at coaches? They don't do any good, do they?"

"Don't do any good? A high—school team is all coach; isn't it?"

Tothero answers, "It's all boy, Harry. You can't make gold out of lead. You can't make gold out of lead."

"Sure you can," Rabbit says. "When I came out in my freshman year I didn't know my head from my" – he stops himself, after all these are ladies of a sort —"elbow."

"Yes you did, Harry, yes you did. I had nothing to teach you; I just let you run." He keeps looking around. "You were a young deer," he continues, "with big feet."

Ruth asks, "How big?"

Rabbit tells her, "Twelve D. How big are yours?"

"They're tiny," she says. "Teeny weeny little."

"It looked to me like they were falling out of your shoes." He pulls his head back and slumps slightly, to look down past the table edge, into the submarine twilight where her foreshortened calves hang like tan fish. They dart back under the seat.

"Don't look too hard, you'll fall out of the booth," she says, ruffled, which is good. Women like being mussed. They never say they do, but they do.

The waiter comes with the drinks and begins laying their places with paper placemats and lusterless silver. He does Margaret and is halfway done on Tothero when Tothero takes the whisky glass away from his lips and says in a freshened, tougher voice, "Cutlery? For Oriental dishes? Don't you have chopsticks?"

"Chopsticks, yes."

"Chopsticks all around," Tothero says positively. "When in Rome."

"Don't take mine!" Margaret cries, slapping her hand with a clatter across her spoon and fork when the waiter reaches. "I don't want any sticks."

"Harry and Ruth?" Tothero asks. "Your preference?"

The Daiquiri does have the taste of limeade, riding like oil on the top of a raw transparent taste. "Sticks," Rabbit says in a deep voice, delighted to annoy Margaret. "In Texas we never touched metal to chicken hoo phooey."

"Ruth?" Tothero's facial attitude toward her is timid and forced.

"Oh I guess. If this dope can I can." She grinds out her cigarette and fishes for another.

The waiter goes away like a bridesmaid with his bouquet of unwanted silver. Margaret is alone in her choice, and this preys on her. Rabbit is glad; she is a shadow on his happiness.

"You ate Chinese food in Texas?" Ruth asks.

"All the time. Give me a cigarette."

"You've stopped."

"I've started. Give me a dime."

"A dime! The hell 1 will."

The needless urgency of her refusal offends him, it sounds as if she wants a profit. Why does she think he'd steal from her? What would he steal? He dips into his coat pocket and comes up with coins and takes a dime and puts it into the little ivory jukebox that bums mildly on the wall by their table. Leaning over, close to her face, he turns the leaves listing titles and finally punches the buttons, B and 7, for "Rocksville, P—A." "Chinese food in Texas is the best Chinese food in the United States except Boston," he says.

"Listen to the big traveller," Ruth says. She gives him a cigarette. He forgives her about the dime.

"So you think," Tothero says steadily, "that coaches don't do anything."

"They're worthless," Ruth says.

"Hey come on," Rabbit says.

The waiter comes back with their chopsticks and two menus. Rabbit is disappointed in the chopsticks; they feel like plastic instead of wood. The cigarette tastes rough, a noseful of straw. He puts it out. Never again.

"We'll each order a dish and then share it," Tothero tells them. "Now who has favorites?"

"Sweet and sour pork," Margaret says. One thing about her, she is very definite.

"Harry?"

"I don't know."

"Where's the big Chinese—food specialist?" Ruth asks.

"This is in English. I'm used to ordering from a Chinese menu.

"Come on, come on, tell me what's good."

"Hey cut it out; you're getting me rattled." `

"You were never in Texas," she says.

He remembers the house on that strange treeless residential street, the green night growing up from the prairie, the flowers in the window, and says, "Absolutely I was."