You’ve got to grow up, he’d said, everybody does.

“Do you want an egg?” Her mother called. “It’s what I’m having. I didn’t expect you.”

“No, Mom, it’s okay.”

She took from her drawer a panty girdle; she had two, worn so far only once each, a Little Godiva by Warners and a Magic Lady by Exquisite Form. When she had got into the one she chose and felt its grip around her, she picked a cashmere skirt to go over it, soft over strong. She thought: This isn’t so hard.

She drew on pale stockings. Once in a poem she had compared her mother’s peeled-off nylons to rags of sunburned skin. The skin of her own legs was weirdly cold, her knee a cold stone, her toes nearly numb. The stockings went clipped to the stretchy clips that dangled from the girdle. The poem was called “Skin.” Ben’s leather jacket was in it too. It would be one of the poems that eventually Kit lost, that was lost for good, burned up and lost.

8.

The house on East North Street where Jackie had found a room was a bleak frame place of dirty white clapboard, as square and plain as an old farm wife; but there was a tangled grape arbor that would be green in summer, and tall elms along the road whose graceful lyre-shaped arms would be full of languid leaves (only they wouldn’t; the blight of those years would reach them that spring, and they’d begin to die). Jackie took Kit up the back steps to the kitchen door, called a greeting into the summer kitchen (where boots and coats and unreturned bottles were piled) to let his housemates know he was there, and led her in.

“Howdy, Max.”

Max looked around the book he held up before him propped in the fingers of one big hand, and nodded to Kit.

“Don’t get up,” Jackie said. “Don’t feel you have to.”

“I had no plans to,” Max said. His soft accent was country, like Jackie’s, but some other country, farther west or north.

“This here is my friend Christa Malone.”

“Hi, Christa Malone.”

“Kit,” she said.

“You’ll like Max,” Jackie said, pulling off his long scarf. “Max, Kit’s a writer. A real writer. A poet.”

“Well say,” Max said with sweet careless awe.

“Do you write?” Kit asked.

“Just letters,” Max said, and laughed. All this while he had held the book up before him (it was called To the Finland Station) and now he let it down. “What poets do you like?”

“Oh gee,” said Kit. “Oh lots.”

“She reads Bode Lare,” said Jackie. “In French.”

“Well I should hope,” said Max. “You’ve heard about this guy Falin?”

“She’s taking his course, for Christ’s sake. A freshman.”

“Huh.”

“She’s kind of in love with him too. Am I right? Anyways I hear a lot about him.”

She wouldn’t answer that, shook her hair and lifted her chin as her mother did when something was said in her presence that she chose not to hear.

“Well. So. Welcome to our house, Kit,” Max said. “Bienvenue.” And he raised his book again.

Jackie took her around. The house was comically grim in some ways, the window frames black with years of fingerprints, the furniture and walls covered with materials that someone must have chosen long ago, but which were so resolutely ugly that you couldn’t imagine how or why, indecipherable squiggles of brown on brown or lurid false flowers and fruit. The rooms were piled with the gear of four men in amazingly thorough disarray, books stuffed into shelves made of concrete blocks and boards and piled-up orange crates, records in a stack beside the record player and soda bottles clustered on the refrigerator’s top: she thought it was the happiest place she’d ever been in. Jackie’s room held a walnut double bed clad in a ratty quilt and a dresser and mirror that matched it, like the furniture a ship’s captain might own, and a huge plush armchair.

“All mine,” he said. “Twelve bucks a week.”

It smelled of his tobacco and his woolens and his maleness. She thought of having her own room, in a house like this; a chair like that one, a lace curtain, a whispering radiator. Girls couldn’t: not unless they were married. “Nice,” she said.

That spring she and Jackie went to the movies, and to restaurants to eat what he called pizza pie; they sat in student lounges together and she listened to him talk; they went to lectures and readings and they studied together at the library. Everybody did those things and she thought it was strange and remarkable that she was doing them too, that these things had been waiting here for her to do, who so far in her life had done so little that everybody else did. But the house on East North Street wasn’t like the places everybody went, and it had been waiting for her too.

Max was the one renting the house, to whom the others paid rent—Jackie; and Rodger, a fastidious Negro; and the new housemate they’d just acquired, a graduate student who was not taking any classes just then: his name was Saul Greenleaf, and with his round steel-rimmed glasses and his tight shabby overcoat and almost shaven head he looked like he had emigrated from a Dostoevsky novel, or had decided to seem so. The place was too far out of town to live in without a car, and that meant no undergraduates under twenty-one: they each had one, except Rodger, who got back and forth on a comical Vespa, perched on its little seat, his porkpie hat and earmuffs on his head.

“But are they really Communists?” she asked Jackie in the Beetle, going back to campus on a Thursday night, trying to beat the clock.

“Now how am I supposed to answer that?” he said. “I mean right now at this moment. You know I’d be accusing them of being members of a criminal conspiracy?”

“It’s what you said,” she said. “My Commie cell.”

“Oh, hell, girl. Oh my lord.” And he wiped the little windshield with the back of his gloved hand in apparent exasperation.

Kit had only ever half-believed in the existence of Communists in America; they were like fairy-tale bears or the burglars that crept into Dagwood’s house in the midnight. At twelve she watched the robotic conspirators of I Led Three Lives on TV and wondered why they spoke without their Russian accents. If they were Communists, why did they sound American? George had taken the family through Washington, D.C., on their way from one city to another, and there they toured the FBI headquarters and the government buildings; and, because the committee was in recess, they could look into the room where Senator McCarthy held his hearings: far smaller-seeming than the blackish crowded pit they watched on television where the draconic senator talked and talked and never listened. He’s an ugly son of a bitch, George would say, but he’s our ugly son of a bitch. And Marion begged him not to swear.

But Max said: “Last summer I spent working these peace booths at state fairs. We’d go around in this bigole pickup with this knocked-down booth in the back and boxes of literature. People’d come up to me and hear me talking about colonialism or the bomb or who was responsible for the Cold War, and they’d start railing on Communists. Communists, these damn Communists. And I’d say hey, hold on now, you’re talkin’ about my mother. They’d look at me like I’d turned into a Russky before their very eyes. It certainly shut ’em up.” He smiled to remember, delighted. “They were good people. Country people. Didn’t want to say anything bad about a fellow’s mom.”