'White Tennis Shoes'. Carol Hofstader Explodes. Short-Story about a Postal Worker at Altamont on a Day When Dreams of Love failed with the Rolling Stones.

Sometimes You Have to Do What You Want

I wrote ‘White Tennis Shoes’ in Spring of 1970 while staying with a great, generous friend, Greg Gustafson, in his apartment beside playing-fields of San Jose City College. Greg was drafted by the Minnesota Twins as a Catcher. We went to Altamont on the weekend prior to Charles Manson’s arraignment for ‘conspiracy murder;’ Living in the apartment beside Greg and me was a very tidy, dutiful Postal Worker who read novels by Jane Austen and the Brontés. She wore white tennis shoes and tied their laces into closely equal bows.

The next year, May of 1971, ‘White Tennis Shoes’ and another story, ‘A Fine Lawn on Which to Lie and Wait for Chickens’, won for me a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford. The “Stegner year” with Professor Richard Scowcroft led to friendships lasting deep into this century: Chuck Kinder, Michael Rogers, April Smith, Scott Turow, Anne West, Tom Zigal.

‘White Tennis Shoes’ is the earliest of seven stories that will be published in a collection, Ramon Took Off Friday Again and Earlier Stories, Autumn of 2024.

WHITE TENNIS SHOES

She had eggs. Had she known he would stay overnight, she would have bought bacon. She had butter—I need guns, she thinks. How could she have known he would stay? Known that his coarse, hairy, dark hands and fat brutal lips would—. None of that, she thinks. The eggs were something, a start, but how did he like them? She would be out of place this afternoon. She did not have a big droopy felt hat, garish bandana, flashy blouse, spangled belt, leather vest, mammoth fur coat, nor faded jeans, boots or moccasins, bracelets, huge rings or amulets; she would be quite out of place.

He was still asleep, grumbling thickly through his blunt scarred nose. She looks at her neatly pressed, slightly baggy olive slacks. Her clothes were fit for sorting mail; in fact, her entire wardrobe could well be de rigueur for postal clerks. Most people liked their eggs sunny-side up. She wanted to look right, to fit in, but to remake herself in there, less than three hours was impossible. If he didn't like them, he could cook them to please himself. She would have to go as she was. The radio said attendance would be more than a hundred thousand, so people as unfashionable and homely as herself would be there. At least today would be an event.

They would see Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones for free. "The quintessence of rock," her cloddish, persistently analytic friend Lucy had said. Her friends said Jagger, the skinny wide-mouthed lead singer, was the most sensual man alive. "He's something, prancing around the stage like Satan incarnate, controlling everything, and with the lights and his clothes and the music, it's very cathartic"—
cathartic, she said mockingly. Her friends were hens, stupidly intellectual, readily stimulated. She would have to see. He might want her to do it again when he woke. She couldn't, she would tell him, she would. Crap, the yolk was running. Couldn't she crack an egg properly? She couldn't even see the damn things.

She walks into the living room with choppy, purposeful, very direct steps, upright, solid, and picks up her black- rimmed glasses from the white spotless surface of a table. The bland modern furniture was distributed symmetrically, drearily. Chairs were exactly opposite each other, the coffee table's center was opposite the center of the long brown couch, stacks of magazines near the ends of the coffee table were almost identically high, and each corner of the dull room had a lamp. She blows on the tear-shaped lenses and polishes them with a napkin. Glasses improve her appearance, give small individuality to her pale, nondescript face by making the tightness of her nose and mouth conspicuous. Her curly, light black hair is of medium length, set tidily, styled to cover her little ears. She is husky. Her torso dwarfs her lower body, the chest broad, almost level. Her hips are negligible, her legs emaciated, like stalks. Seeing clearly, she walks faster.

"Get up, lazy," she calls, cocking toward the door to the bedroom.

How's that for affectionate post-coital banality? You sacked me but good last night, nearly split my hardly gaunt form, you terrible Chicano, you. How would that be? Lousy, atrocious, quite unfunny, and he wouldn't understand anyway. Stick to monosyllables if you seek rapport with him. Be a tough little harlot, speak his language. My name's Joan Flint, and I've got more guts than a run-of-the-mill moll has corpuscles, so drop your drawers, and I'd better see a bazooka. There, you've mastered his lingo. But you are Carol Hofstadder, twenty-three, lifelong resident of San Jose, knobby-kneed sorter of cards, letters and parcels. You like folk music and tennis and the outdoors; you play the guitar poorly; you're chunky. You have the shoulders of an interior lineman in professional football and the legs of a chicken. You are highly single, although not at all singular. She knocks lightly. "Come on, sleepyhead. It's almost ten."

"Uh," he says.
"How do you like your eggs?"
"C'mere."
"I can't. The eggs will turn hard."
"Let 'em."
She steps forward, then checks, lifting her hand from the door knob skittishly, wheels, and walks across the living room toward the kitchen. "I'll serve them sunny-side up. You can't work on an empty stomach." He groans angrily.

She turns the spoiled egg, then shakes one of his pair onto a beige enamel plate. His second egg slips from the metal, landing on its yellow dome. The dome ruptures, and yolk torpidly covers a mint green tile and parts of its neighbors.

"Crap," she says.
"Huh?"
"Nothing," she replies, bending to scrape the egg from the floor with a table knife. The egg, dripping yolk sluggishly, dangles from the shiny blade. As she stands, it topples, revolving once as it falls, and hits, staining several clean tiles, dividing after impact. Double crap, she thinks, and pulls a spoon from a drawer. She returns it and grabs a fork. Slowly she raises the sections. Holding the utensils in one hand, she opens a varnished wooden door to a cupboard beneath the sink and dumps the pieces of egg into a paper sacks. "Marvelous," she says, laying the utensils in the sink next to a row of clear glasses. She puts another good egg on his plate and the spoiled one on her own.

Napkins absorb most of the yolk. She wets a sponge and kneels. By the way, wasn't she supposed to be feeling love? Scrubbing, or were the novels and poems she had read simply romantic? The morning after fornication was reportedly a period of mutual adoration. Wasn't she supposed to be lavishing him with grateful adulation, or to be struck dumb with reverence? Perhaps she should be dragging her tongue over his abdomen. Pap, bullshit, she whispers acrimoniously, wiping. There had been no ecstasy with him, only toil. She drops a napkin on the moist floor. But there should be something: guilt, respect, a smattering of devotion, something definite to prize. Especially for her, to whom last night had been the second night. Pushing the napkins flush, and identical to the first night; with Roger, a sailor, yes, a sailor who had groped to the excruciating decision that he was not mature enough for marriage, not right yet, two years ago. No, she could not be accused of promiscuity. Rather, she could be charged with unnatural stinginess in doling her body. Laughing sarcastically, barely, she remembers, "What I like about you is you're firm," his dark crude hands pressing her as if to substantiate. What could she have said? I've been working out? There should be something, rising, wadding the fouled pink napkins and flinging them into the paper sack. Where the deuce was passion?

"Ay, I don't want no cruddy egg. Give me a beer, get rid'a my hangover," he yells.

"There's none left." She closes the refrigerator door. "None left?" he says, grumbling. "Nope, you drank all of it last night."
"I had help."

"Very little."

"That's no shit."

Hearing him lumber and curse, she cringes. She had grape juice, but he would merely curse it. There must be more than the feeling of subjugation. With him and the once before, she had felt abjectly employed, an animate mat for ruthless exercise. She pours grape juice, then places the can and a glass in front of his plate and sits, listening, reckoning. She was getting old. Sprinkling salt negligently, stomach his desires, yield for the promise of security. Your vagina is a carrot. She almost laughs, but repugnance curbs her. Sipping juice, she couldn't wear these preposterous slacks. She didn't even have jeans.

He enters, barefoot, wearing black sharkskin pants and a yellowish T-shirt, ponderous, shaggy, with an incipient paunch. He is a stout, round-shouldered Mexican-American. His glossy hair has ringlets. He squeezes his bristly jaw as if it had been punched, scowling at his eggs.

"Out of booze, huh?" he asks. She frowns in sympathetic confirmation. "Too bad I killed the rum."

Darn shame. "Have some eggs; they're better for you." She smiles hesitantly.

He expels blasts of air from his nose and mouth in scorn. There is no beer in the refrigerator. He swears, he will have to get some wine, a gallon of Red Mountain, Burgundy. Turning, he bangs his elbow on a sharp edge of an open drawer and swears, shoving the drawer vehemently as she eats in order not to laugh. Is he supposed to eat with his fingers? There are a knife and a fork in the drawer he just closed. He sits diagonally from her.

"No spices?" she asks.
"Don't need 'em."
Hardy soul. Look at him devour, ravenous; fingers would be more expeditious.

"Bread," he says.

She gives him a sealed loaf. He untwists the plastic strip quickly. "There's cereal," she says. Mopping the yolk with a crust, he grunts. She stands. "Was that affirmative?" He looks puzzled and annoyed. "Does that mean you want cereal?" she asks, pushing the white remains of her breakfast into the paper sack with her fork.

"No. Speak English," he says, extending his empty plate. She puts it in the sink and turns a faucet. Discharging a belch-like sigh and thrusting his chair backward violently, he rises, catching the upset chair, flexes his arms so that his thumbs touch his chest, and moves loudly toward her. He brushes her nape with his middle knuckles, his thumb toying with her ear, and growls.

His signal for a purr; that is, an invitation to feast. Here, son of Battle, dig in, bracing her hands against the tile counter.

"How do you feel?" he asks, leaning over her.

"Pretty good," she murmurs as he pulls his stubbly chin across her throat. He slips his hand under the back of her blouse and kneads.

"Warm?"

My flesh turns lavalike under your caress. "Getting warmer," she answers, taut.

"Good," he says, kneading. "Horny?"

Oh Jesus, a few paws and a whisker-burn, and I'm expected to be ready for bed, likelier for floor. "A little, but we don't have time."

"We always got time," he says and kisses her cheek sloppily. He starts to turn her. She shrinks, breaks, backs up, and halts, chewing the right half of her lower lip, tangling and rubbing her hands. Her eyes are big and level. "What the ... Shit, what the hell's wrong with you?"

"Quit cursing," she cries, jabbing the bridge of her glasses.

"Huh? Quit what? The hell I will. Are you crazy? Stop shaking." He looks at her wildly. He moves, and she retreats. He draws back his fist, then spits air and pivots, swearing disdainfully.

She blinks incessantly. "I'm sorry," she says presently, grasping the counter's edge to stop her trembles. "I didn't mean to ... you surprised me." Hitching his pants by a belt loop, he repeats an oath. "I didn't know what ... what I was doing."

"Sure. You didn't know you was jumping away from me."

"I just wasn't ready." He faces her dramatically. It's too early. "You're so" ... I'm so what? he would demand. Terrible, she wouldn't say.

Again he spits air. "What are you? A goddam clock watcher?" He sweeps the back of his hand before her face.

"No, but ..."
"But what?" She quivers, unable to meet him. "Huh?"
"I didn't feel like it."
"You felt like it last night."
"It was different then."
He walks into the front room and returns with a cigarette between his lips. "Have it your way. I'm no mad dog." Rhinoceros. "No."
"Remember that. I'm no mad dog. I can hold out. At least 'til t'night." He glares. "An' you better ..." He curtails the threat scornfully. He walks to the bedroom, intentionally bumping his shoulder against the doorway. He comes back shortly, wearing a three-button black leather coat over his soiled tight undershirt. "I'll get the wine, and we'll roll."

"Are you sure you want to go?" she asks, stationary. "Yay, whaddya think? Sure I'm sure."
"You didn't seem too enthusiastic yesterday."
"It was different then," he says with affected effeminacy. I'm not gonna miss Jagger, not for free," he says normally, and goes.

She prepares to wash dishes. Watching the bubbles proliferate, she is Dussidia Waswishy Jane. Droplets scare her green. She would rather bark her shins on a salted cutlass than be forced to go to the bathroom in the middle of a show. Her sniveling prowess is legendary. She wears iron panties insulated with seven layers of Reader's Digests. Queen Victoria is her patron saint. With her spare legs inflexibly crossed, she lives in a petticoat made of dry suds, testing the water's heat with her little finger. She removes a small plate and scrubs it earnestly with a sponge until it escapes from her shivering hand into the water like a squirt.

He drove them to a spot roughly five miles from the concert site, disregarding, often rudely, advice to stop earlier on the freeway, swilling, fulminating, honking. He parked his old brown sedan at the tail of the shortest line of cars. Ahead, three lanes were full of vehicles as far as she could see, craning. The fourth, inside lane was clogged with bands, trios, pairs of pedestrians. Solitary walkers were rare. It was a great mob, a great school of various humanity. Some boys were bare-chested, some girls wore shabby fur coats, some were painted and dancing, most were dressed dully, eager yet watchful, many were gaudy, some ragged or slovenly, a few with flags hoisted, debating amicably, most, a huge majority trudging quietly. Many were evidently muddled. Drugs were hawked stridently. Motorcyclists cutting through the mob were envied and profaned. Police were occasional and busy, not sullen, wondering at the congestion's magnitude, sweating, resigned. The mild heat was not tempered by breeze. The drab, roundish, grassy hills that rolled along the freeway appeared parched. She gawked jerkily, unsteadily. Hairstyles particularly attracted her: giant mounds of fuzz, bigger than the heads on which they had grown; ungoverned tresses that streamed to waists; frizzy ringlets unruly but tense. She commented. Just hair, he said. She couldn't bear him, opening. Wait, one more pull, he said, lifting the jug of wine. You need one too. As he sucks she grips the armrest desperately, then sags. He was so detestable. People sang and played instruments. But look at her: what an incongruity, what an absurd sore thumb in strictly pressed slacks, cute checked blouse, white tennis shoes, monstrous charcoal overcoat, and this idiotic, bright, token scarf. She didn't need a drink. She needed a bonnet, a hula hoop, and a lollipop. Here, he said, passing the jug. And to top it off, she was tipsy, he had compelled her to become quite drunk. She would collapse before her first step and would be trundled to the post office in a playpen. She swallowed painfully. Drink, he said. She tried again, drinking less, and lowered the jug hastily with a screwed face. He swore derisively and said to get out.

They walked swiftly in a fairly straight course. He led, pushing, splitting groups without apology, colliding implacably, and she trailed, dogging with intermittent wobbles. Goddam hippies, he observed, they sleep so much they forget how t' move their legs. She looked away. People eased past them, walking in the opposite direction. Were they going the wrong way? No one in the crowd had said definitely which was the right way. She suspected that most, perhaps nearly all of them, did not know where they were going.

She was about to ask. Before her, an attenuated boy with a stringy mustache, wearing faded blue overalls patched with star-like pieces of the American flag, was talking to two couples in comparatively formal dress.

"Turn around, brother. You can't get within a mile of the stage."

"It's a mess, really," his clinging girlfriend added.
"That bad?" asked the couple's trim spokesman. "Worse," said the boy, angling forward, towing.
The foursome conferred as she moved past. Had the boy spent more time fixing his appearance than the spokesman? Golly, she didn't have a clue. Were alligators as virile as crocodiles? His yell startled her, weaving. C'mon, he said, bolstering her momentarily, you can't be drunk. He let go, and she followed him. Why couldn't she be drunk as a carton of grommets? She was a citizen, she owned five credit cards, and if she didn't eat two square meals per day of dry suds and lollipops, she was fit to be tied. C'mon, keep up, he ordered, glowering. A bearded man clothed in a makeshift haik said acid, psilocybin to the boys in front of them and repeated the words behind them. The grade seemed endless.

He yanked her onto the back of a jeep and they rode in a gully and over rutted hills, the jolly driver warning them frequently to hang on, to the concert site's periphery. A dip had almost spilled them, and he had put his arm around her waist, withdrawing it when the jeep was controlled. She didn't care. His ugliness struck her.

Before the stage, bodies covered the basin's arid floor, packed and sprawled, helplessly intruding on one another. Fires burned on the shallow tub's rear rim. Cars, trucks, vans and buses were among the crowd. Two separate scaffolds stood above them. The ground sloped gradually toward the big precarious stage.

They wormed through the crowd, the compression of people often stymieing even him. Following in staggers, buffeting, she notes, amazed and disappointed, thinking incoherently. Tottering forward, she was a part of festive squalor. It was a listless congregation: babbling and indolent, milling and aimless, their costumes fantastic yet common, the few erect ones were slack, almost all languid on blankets, foam, sleeping bags, cushions, bedding, seeking ecstasy but despairing its likelihood, their flagrant manners disguising ennui, waiting for joy to be provided, like flamboyant plankton. He scowled at her for dawdling. Excusing herself, detesting him, sidling, their calculated outlandishness, anxious for rapture, vicarious stardom ... But she was getting carried away. She tripped on a thigh and caught herself on Bob's back. "Hey, watch where you're fucking—," the blond kid began, stopping as Bob spun. "Sorry, but you practically kicked me," the kid said. Can't you stand up? Bob yelled at her. He snarled at the kid, brandishing his jug. They continued. Struggling behind him, they yearned for salvation from inertia. They would embrace any messiah who had proper credentials: idolatrous advance billing, a grand enough hype. Jesus had as dandy agency and the best brochure in the business; his stock among them was rising predictably, neck and neck with the well-known Devil's, wedged backward by a stalled train of grim people, stealthily dabbing her wet armpit, her back being nudged. She began to turn her head and swear but refrained. Goddam it, we can't move, he said. Now see, she had a man to remove her irritations. You too, stop pushing me, he told her hotly. She felt close to retching with disgust.

They sat near a scaffold about a quarter mile from the stage and heard a band play mostly country music. Persons were contorted to accommodate other bent persons. They were cramped and irascible. Boys perched on the scaffold were instructed to dismount immediately and cursed by the listeners situated around it, who believed it would fall and kill them. Many arguments and threats were exchanged by the disputants. Between songs, choruses of "Get down!" thrived. The viewers stayed aloft, but were conciliatory. She got a cramp. Next to her, two men fought. Both were reluctant, and neither was injured.

There was plenty of marijuana around her. That's what she needed: some good old Mary Jane, one fat reefer to set her dozing, wiggling circumspectly to relieve the knot in her leg. She had never smoked marijuana. One puff, and she would swoon. Get the fuck off the scaffold, he bellowed above the racket. What eloquence, a perfect Cicero. "Right on!" someone behind them commended him. "Down, down, down." His voice is prominent. Now he is a member, welcomed to the shrill myna's ranks simply by—. Was sniping mentally at him all she could do? Staring downward, not shifting for fear of touching, jarring someone, she could not be so dreadfully palsied. C'mon, he said, elbowing her. Down, she said lamely, then was silent. Those hideous maroon suede boots with tarnished gold rings to manage their zippers, the pegged black trousers and the paisley shirt with its foolish oversize collar, and that wild greasy pompadour—a prize for a boobess.

There was talk of Hells Angels and beatings. They did not concern her. She refused to drink, and he ridiculed her. He swilled, taunted, shouted. She saw herself considerably past thirty, submitting to three dumb awful sons, and him arriving home, fuming, prowling, reeking of fiberglass, or perhaps in a service station attendant's uniform, potbellied, ordering a beer, plopping in a mushy rent armchair and consuming his evenings in front of a television set's blurry picture, slouching, with grating howls at abominable jokes, she drudging, the room stinking and impossibly disordered, the secondhand furniture littered with toys, diapers, boxing and wrestling magazines, then c'mon, let's hit the sack, to produce another copy of his boorish self, she would, she. Looking away from him hurriedly, he could hold out 'til t'night when she had better. She couldn't. She would rather be solitary than, folding, almost plunging into a girl's lap to make space for a boy's foot, rigid as a second boy swayed, agape, and fell forward, slurring Oh Oh, trying to brace himself with a hand on the back of a longhaired man's head before his chest hit the man's shoulder and he crashed, rolling, between the man and a girl.

The man wrung the thin short boy's orange collar. "Peace," said the boy.
"Eat shit."
"Remember Woodstock, man."

"I was there, man." He released the boy contemptuously. After brushing himself to remove dirt and fright, the boy progressed to the scaffold.

Woodstock had been a miracle, she thought. It was supernatural that half a million people could live together on a small farm for a weekend without riot, panic, famine, or division, nearly without death, in idyllic union. Probably imperative cohesion; they had to be nice or annihilate themselves. "Get down, you motherfuckers," came from behind her. Couldn't they be quiet, sensible? She did not belong here, with strange people alien to her. "Excuse me ... excuse me ... sorry," said a pimply sylph winding through the crowd. They seemed fatigued and bitter, she thought, drifting into allegory, scrunching, as if, having marched impatiently and seen that their parade had gained no legitimate fruit, having sped hastily, expectant of reward and hungry, into conflict and been denied compensation for their wounds, and having seen timeless urban vices murder a fresh society they had conceived but never planned, they had retired to mull their futility, had traded their banners for blankets, each in his or her current dormancy resenting inexplicable failure and blaming the other for it, bitter impotence smearing their pleasure. But what did she know about them? She knew as much about them as a titmouse did. She would do better to find out why her upper body was a cask and her legs were arrows. Booze and excessive sex were responsible. Horny? She craved goring round-the-clock. If you had the tusk, she had the slot. What's so funny? She shook her head, and he frowned, then drank.

Beside her, an obese girl with gross makeup cuddled a scruffy impassive boy. He responded after a few minutes by rubbing her back mechanically. They separated, gazing at one another blandly, then clasped again. She contracted, dropping her eyes from them, chilled.

Slowly flexing her stubby hands, ninny, bothered by mean squeamish twinges of abhorrence, no—jealousy, you stupid callow prude. She couldn't move. No one could move without aggravating someone else. Under the scaffold a tiny girl was cleaved to a small wiry boy, rocking. "Six days on the road, and I'm gonna make it home t'night," was the refrain of the song being played. Most of its other words could not be made out by her. She tried to stretch, and her elbow slid off a quart bottle. Cigarette butts sloshed in the scant wine in the bottle. Crap, sitting up recklessly, huddling, looking around. What will these people do later? When middle age ambushes and captures them, when regular constipation, fitful sexual performance, astigmatism, flabbiness and interminable tedium arrive, unannounced and inexorable, when spines become untrustworthy, breasts flag, and colds are dangerous, what will these deliberately ragged, blase people be doing? They will likely be bustling around patios: the husband bolting from picnic table to barbecue, loaded with seasonings for some adored hunks of meat, while the wife mothers salads fussily and reminds him to limit his drinking.

"Pardon me, nature calls," lisped a feminine voice behind her.

Pressing her glasses' bridge against her nose and scratching her wrist, her prospects? There was little doubt— spinsterhood, of course. She had trained for it for years, practicing the nuances of clumsiness tirelessly. Add to her diligence a remarkable innate aptitude for gaucherie and a gift of utter homeliness, and it is obvious that her solitude is inevitable. She needn't worry. She was a marvel. "Please sit down, we can't see," said a girl in front of her. She was classic, she should be exhibited. "If everybody sat down, everybody could see," said the girl. She should be exhibited in bed, in the act of copulation. There and then the qualities which made her a cinch to be the ultimate nonpareil old maid would be most manifest, would glare as they were highlighted. "He's not gonna sit down, none of 'em are," said a masculine voice to her right. "Sit down, you motherfucker," the girl yelled. The erect man turned. "Suck a turd," he said. "If ya want'a see, stand up." Yes, she should be seen in the hay, numb, like dank stone, wishing for a stopwatch to time the period spent under siege, reacting in agonies of hesitation, almost a clammy statue. I'm gonna kick ass, he said. Godspeed, Bobby, sic him. You'll just start a brawl, she said. That's what I want t' do. He budged, but didn't rise. She squinted at him, then looked down sharply when he faced her. Tightening the muscles in her limbs until they hurt, later, after she had barnstormed the globe, how she would revel in the schoolchildren's caws of ice-box and cold-cunt, and how snug she would be with the long frigid ache of loneliness moored in her tummy.

Big joke. A scream, she would like to scream. But she was mute. She had snagged him, hooked but not gaffed him, she had better. Here, he said, extending the wine, you're dead. Accepting it indifferently, elixir designed to restore her at least 'til after t'night, cradling the jug on her thighs. Drink it, don't just give it the goddam evil eye. No thanks, handing it to him smoothly. Whaddaya mean, No thanks? He touched the jug without supporting it. I mean I'm full, and I politely reject your—, she began crisply. He seized the jug with a shallow growl that bared his large decayed front teeth. You know what you can do, he said. Her head swung lazily, her eyes scanning him bleakly, and he snapped backward with a disdainful wheeze and drank ardently at length. Her champion, her future; quite a catch, this Bob Vasquez, carpenter's apprentice, her. It was hopeless. But she had invested her entire, albeit meager, fortune in him—patience, virtue, servility. She must show a return. Her friends and family expected her to show a clear forever-and-ever return. They asked too much from a month's work.

"Could you move up a for a second? I have to get some feeling back into my legs," said a sallow boy with curly hive-like hair, smiling vaguely, a copper talisman hanging from his skeletal neck. She complied, pained. "Thanks a lot." A fierce wretchedness came over her, a fierce misery came into her like cold heavy smoke. All she did was give. She was cowed, then exploited. And after her worth was drained, her goods stale, her firmness no longer charming, she would be shrugged off, despoiled and obsolete. She just gave. She yielded her honor at his feet and said, Okay, buddy, punt, and when you've had a satisfactory workout, I'll buff and buss your shoes. She just gave, ignobly, horribly. But she didn't need. She had books, records, homeliness, gaucherie, dry suds. And she was so wretched, giving but not needing. The tune ended. The toes of the boy's cowboy boots rhythmically grazed her back. She could have licked her knees without moving them or her head. Her arms were strained. He rapped the jug's base.

"Kill us all," he mumbled savagely. Cautious motion increased marginally around them. Move your damned inconsiderate feet, she thought, relaxing to pressure their departure. They braced her. "We can get closer," a girl said behind her.

"Get off the fuckin' scaffold." “Why don't you shut up?" she said calmly.
He jerked, somewhat bleary with drunkenness but astonished. "Huh?"
"Why don't you skin a buttercup?" she mocked, glaring. "Why don't I what?" he asked, his eyes small and bright. She began to laugh. "No, I said you should you rest your fat busy tongue and do everyone a favor," she said. Then things went apart inside her. She flushed abruptly and bit her lower lip viciously. "Shut up," she bawled, shifting on her hip and driving her elbow against the boy's calf.

"Hey," he cried, shooting his legs up instantly as he leaned forward. "You just had to ask."

Bob grabbed her upper arm and pinched and shook it. "You don't tell me t' shut up, bitch," he said. "You're the one who better watch your mouth, 'cuz—.

Quitting her hysterical giggles, she protruded her quivering lips. She scrutinized their vibrations with fixed wide eyes, chattering. She watched her mouth. "It's in fine shape, though a trifle nervous. Now unhand me, varlet," she said asininely, passive.

The boy rose, wobbly, unable to suppress a burp. "Let's see, I lost her over by the can," he said to himself, looking at a row of outhouses, and reeled sideways.

"You drunk bitch." Bob shook her.

"Bitch," she exclaimed. Come, that's a terrible misnomer. Shrinking violet, musty petunia, but bitch, hah. I won't even be a dam. She twisted suddenly, inhaling loudly, trembling. "Let go. I don't need— I'm going home ... in my hula hoop ... to my magazines ... you stupid, stupid bull ... to reflect in safety ... if that's possible. I don't know." Her delirious speech petered to unintelligible sputters of panic. Her eyes bulged as she wrenched away. Dazed, Bob released her. She stood, repeatedly pulling a curl that had stolen over her forehead, her glasses slightly askew. A few bewildered spectators had gathered. With a twitch of violent regret, he swore, dropping the uncapped jug, jumped upright and reached swiftly for his former hold.

"You're not stayin' for the Stones?" he asked. The little audience did not have time to laugh.

His forearm easily blocked the wide arc of her punch. As she pitched forward he slapped her cheek, accidentally jolting her glasses and sweeping them loose with a finger. He tried to arrest his arm, but cast them several yards to a rare patch of vacant dirt.

The sallow curly-haired boy had been pushed by an unshaven man in a threadbare blue denim jacket and torn jeans whom he had blundered against. He floundered backward, protesting indistinctly. The man followed him. His cowboy boot's heel shattered the right lens of her glasses. He stopped, looked down frantically, teetered and fell, his skull hitting a scrambling girl's back. "Sorry—he—I couldn't see—," he began, crossing his wrists above his face. The man clubbed his face, then lifted him by the hair and struck his stomach. His cries were stopped by a gasp. The man dropped him and kicked his ribs halfheartedly, scornfully. He joined three associates who were looking belligerently at the immediate crowd, becoming the fourth point of a rough square. "People should watch where they're going," he said. "No tellin' who they'll run into," said one of his friends. The boy was nursed, and the men were castigated.

She had revolved twice before rushing to her left, impeded and cursed by distorted shapes, sobbing as she clambered. Bob stood in place.

The fighter was playing with her glasses. "I wonder who these belong to. Not much good, but, ya know, I bet they can be fixed." His face showed profound disappointment. He was called names. "Nobody wants 'em? Then they'll have t' be disposed of," he said. They landed near his boot.

Choking, fighting off spectator's restraints, she bumbled in front of him. He laughed and fondled his bristles as she peered around. The broad scar on his upper lip was less evident when he smiled. "The proud owner," he said. "A sight for sore eyes," said another friend. Onlookers urged her to flee from the man or to kick him in the balls.

She knelt and pawed, missing, then glided her hand over the dirt until it met her glasses. As she rose the fighter snatched them. "Lemme help you, dear," he said. She whirled crazily in a circle. Her red face was swollen, and her blouse was untucked from her baggy rumpled slacks. Her hair was fluffed. She gurgled uncontrollably. "Hurry up, her eyes'r gonna pop out," said the friend who had spoken first. The fighter jabbed the totally cracked lens from its rim with the second joint of his index finger, cutting himself. The crowd called him names.

"Whoa," he said.
She froze.
He set the glasses' bridge on her nose and adjusted it to a proper fit. Her right eye winked rapidly. Her swallows were perceptible. "There," he said. She looked silly and pathetic. The four men roared. Soon most of the growing throng began to accompany them. The crowd's mirth became louder than the men's guttural roars.

She rotated spasmodically, her head darting from the man to the spectators, pecking air. She thought the raucous laughter would explode her into tiny pieces. She crouched as if to spring, whipping her hands toward her ears, then suspended herself, holding her breath. Her sobs ended. She made fists, but relaxed her fingers to limpness as she straightened and turned to confront the fighter directly with her tense face. The noise diminished.

"Hah," she said keenly and acidly. She turned very slowly, prolonging the sound as her gaze inched over half the circle. There was near silence until the fighter guffawed. She jerked as if electrocuted, then wailed and tore off her glasses and hurled them downward.

She sprinted toward the inner border of the audience. It parted for her.

"That chick is really freaking," said the pimply sylph.

Nobody was able to stop her. She bleated nonsense at them and scratched them, and they abandoned her. A little farther along, colliding heedlessly, she was reviled. She moved hard and long and and uphill and downhill. She was like a tortoise without her shell. She was like a mad, panting, parched bunny.

She ran on the freeway, jogging periodically, ignoring hails, banging her knees on a fender. When she climbed into the Volkswagen van that pulled over for her at the bottom of the hill she told the couple that she wanted to go as close to San Jose as she could get. She was in luck; they lived in Los Gatos.

The bus rolled westward on 580. The driver said it was funny that he and his girlfriend had prepared for this thing for a week and now they got here and turned around. "Too many people. Too much bad karma," he said.

His girlfriend was turned toward the back seats and staring. "It looks like it didn't go so well for you," she said. "Frankly it looks almost like you got beat up."

"Yes," Carol, the rider who hadn't hitchhiked, answered. Her silent distraction afterward was enough to stop solicitous questioning.

Except for the stereo, the van was quiet. Carol stared at the scratches and dirt on her hands and decided that it was foolish to anticipate letters.