The road north from the University town passed among fields and pastures. Along the way were one or two gas stations and a cluster of modest homes built for returning World War II veterans. I especially remember the cows that roamed the pastures, often close to the road. But more important to me, the road was plied by motorists willing to give a hitch-hiking college boy a lift. I was easily identified as a student by my books. I carried a loose-leaf binder with my needed books hooked to it. In those days, textbooks were modest in design and easily carried.

On this one particular evening, after working late in the Quantitative Analysis laboratory, I was hiking along the dark road, toward my unhappy home. This was my predicament in those days, though the glow of lights on the horizon was a metaphoric reminder of the future and its possibilities. As I walked on, occasionally glancing over my shoulder, I noticed headlights approaching and raised my thumb. The car, a Kaiser Manhattan, pulled over just ahead, and behind the wheel sat a pretty girl, a classmate of mine. Her name was Mary Dennison, and she was a mathematics major. That she stopped at all was symbolic of those innocent days of the 1950s.

She drove with a skill I admired, driving being an art I hadn’t yet mastered. She wore white socks, thick and turned down. I recall the socks moving along the floorboard as her feet moved from pedal to pedal. During the twelve-mile ride to the outskirts of the next town, we spoke at intervals, at first the usual student talk about courses and professors. But after a particularly long silence, she asked an arresting question.

“What are you going to do with your life?”

“I’m not sure,” I replied. “Maybe graduate school next.”

“You’re undecided?”

“Right now I am.”

She didn’t like my being undecided. But I had to worry over military service, my student deferment, and whether to make money, or continue on as an out-at-the-elbows student. And I was, at the time, tired of being tired. I mentioned this last to Mary.

“Me, too,” she replied. “Do you ever study with anybody?”

“No—why do you ask?”

“Just wondering.”

Then came another silent interval. Did she want me to study with her? I realized that, in my too-large car coat, my worn and soiled buckskin shoes, and with my needing a haircut, I wasn’t the most attractive sight. Surely, Mary had noticed the evidence of poverty. And I never thought of myself as an interesting companion.

“Where’s the best place to drop you off?” she asked finally.

“The next corner will be fine.”

We had reached a main intersection with traffic moving in five directions. My house was a brief walk away. It was small and square and sitting on a side street near more cow-trodden pastures. I was about to climb out of the car, when she touched my shoulder—right on my tweedy car coat.

“Maybe we could study together sometime,” she said.

“Yes,” I said, after gazing into her dark eyes. “And thanks for the ride.”

“You’re entirely welcome.”

I left the car, perhaps too quickly. I was off toward home as the Kaiser, a dull green in the streetlights, moved slowly away from the curb. It was cold on that little side street where I lived, but I was preoccupied with Mary Dennison, math major and very smart, whose grades could match my own. By the time I arrived home, my parents were, once again, arguing over money—it was an endless debate. I often waited until they tired of yelling, before I went to my room and opened my books. That was one reason I was willing to accept Mary’s offer, as long as we studied at her house. But of course, it wasn’t the only reason.

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I can recall the moment I passed from childhood into adolescence. I was sitting in my sixth-grade classroom, working on my mathematics drill, when one of those messengers from the office entered the room. She was a student my age, and I noticed something about her. Those excrescences I associated with grown-up women were there and quite prominent. And the mere contemplation of her bodily features was having an odd effect on me. It took me twenty years to realize this was the worst moment of my life — for I had entered a battle of sorts, one I was doomed to loose, even when I thought I was winning.

And so, by the time Alice Mary came along, I was divorced and rather denuded of assets. I hadn’t noticed her until she came sidling along the bookstore rack where I was standing. I was trying to decide whether to buy Homage to Catalonia or forgo it until next payday. She selected a book by Ortega y Gasset and was flipping through the pages and sighing as though she wanted conversation. But I was mulling over Orwell and the eight dollars they wanted for the book.

Yet I did glance at Alice Mary long enough to notice her figure and see her dark eyes flash. She closed her book, finally, and replaced it on the rack, and by the time I looked around, she was halfway out the door. That left me with Orwell, and I decided to pay the price. A tough decision — parting with money was painful, though I parted with more of it at bookstores than I did anywhere else. I was making six dollars an hour at a combination dry cleaner’s and laundromat just down the street. While most people wanted jobs, and Help Wanted signs bloomed like azaleas all over Brightown, North Carolina, I was always looking to resume a life of leisure — to retreat into my book-lined shell. The next best thing was simple fetch-and-carry work. It required no great decisions, no fight for love and glory. A day’s work, a day’s pay — all without complication. Of course, my limited means and the job itself almost guaranteed I would never remarry. I couldn’t afford it, and I was no catch.

Anyway, that afternoon, I arrived at work to find a sleeping bag had burst in one of the washers. Laundromat customers weren’t always brilliant, and some couldn’t read labels. And so, from time to time, small disasters like this occurred. I cleaned the wet feathers from the machine and the floor and then fell into my evening-shift routine.

An odd thing about the business — the same kinds of people came to wash on the same nights. All the pretty girls might show up one night, and all the homely girls the next. Then it might be all the fat people, or all the nut cases — for this last group, I would check the phase of the moon. This particular night was pretty-girl night, and at one point, not surprisingly, Alice Mary stepped through the double-doorway. She clutched a wicker- basket full of laundry and looked around with eyes big and brown, before choosing a washer and getting down to business.

I was sweeping the floor at the time. The customers and I conversed easily as I pushed the floor debris into a neat pile. Only in the laundromat business did a pushbroom confer status. Alice Mary dawdled over her wash, and we ended up talking about writers we admired. Then, out of the blue, she asked me whether I was the manager — women often asked me that question. I always gave them a simple, honest answer: “No, I just work here.” I could sense the words bouncing in their heads — see the blinking eyes, the pensive looks. I’m not complaining, just dissecting the phenomenon of womanhood.

And yet, I did finally ask her out. She said, “O.K. — great,” with a smile quite genuine, and she kept our date the following Friday. At this point, I should describe the dating ritual as it evolved in the 1980s. I can recall an earlier attempt, after my divorce, to get back into the social swim. When I called for the woman, I offered my arm as I had always done on dates, and she shied away — yes, shied away. And as she shied, she said, “That would suggest an intimate relationship existed between us.”

It was then I began to understand the contemporary dating protocols. First you dated on Fridays, then on Saturdays — that was the big transition. You stayed together and enjoyed sex until Sunday morning. Then and only then did you hold hands or lock arms — and go to brunch, thus announcing your intimacy to the whole town. The one time I did go to brunch, alone as it happened, I felt I was invading the privacy of all those worn-looking heavy daters munching scrambled eggs, pancakes, fruit salad, and whatever else they spooned from the buffet.

Well, anyway, Alice Mary was five-foot-one and dark-haired and effervescent. The studied informality of the times suited her. She wore the designer jeans that were everywhere, and they looked especially good on her, revealing the roundness of her hips and the perfection of her posture. She liked to laugh, and I did my best to make her laugh and laughed myself when she said she would rather have gone out in my old car. I had borrowed the boss’s sporty model for the evening. It was far more reliable than my old Volkswagen, which, by now, burned as much oil as gasoline. We had a long, pleasant meal at a popular vegetarian restaurant with a menu featuring beanburgers and smoothies. At the time, it was fashionable to consume “alternative protein” sources — for some silly reason involving the worldwide protein supply.

She confessed she was a socialist. “But not as radical as my sister Lorelei.” She spoke with a semi-lisp, and I mimicked it, and she laughed. Lorelei, I later discovered, was a twenty-four-carat bomb thrower and inciter of a violent demonstration in a nearby town that wiped out a portion of the local communists.

Two nurses rooming on the third floor were having a party that evening. One of them had slipped a note under my door, bidding me to come and bring my own bottle. And so, shortly after nine o’clock, I climbed the steps carrying my fifth of Jack Daniel’s. The sounds of laughter and badinage reached me as I climbed, and I arrived on the third floor to find the nurses’ door wide open and guests overflowing into the hallway. The party had reached the point of uninhibited conversation. The kitchen was full of people  mixing drinks as they talked and blew smoke, and one man eased past me with three drinks in his hands and a filter cigarette stuck in his teeth. Sinatra sang from the hi-fi in the next room. Through the archway, I could see furniture pushed against the wall to make room for dancing, and several couples were already swaying around the floor.

I poured myself a double and sidled into the next room, searching for familiar faces through the haze of cigarette smoke. Most of the young crowd smoked in those days, and few of us gave a damn about staying in shape. I passed a couple standing so close together they were nearly touching noses. The man worked in the office next to mine at good old North Chemical and Photographic. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and spoke in his usual corporate staccato. The woman, lovely and Italian, blinked at his bursts.

I nodded hello to two graduate students from India. One of them was a Sikh, who wore a turban and eventually married one of the nurses and, with her, disappeared into the storied masses of his native land. The other settled in Uganda and later died there in some violent political episode. Standing next to them, and hardly conversing, was Anna.

She and I had gone out together perhaps a year earlier. I remembered how tense she was, how her cigarette trembled in her fingers, how she would glance about as though she expected something to come crashing through the walls. She appeared calmer now as I studied her face. Her smile was genuine, her dark eyes approving.

“Well—Anna,” I said, having forgotten how beautiful she was.

“How are you, Terry?” She had learned the American idiom, but still spoke in the rhythms of her native Hungary.

“Fine, I suppose. This is a busy place.”

“It’s Friday.”

“Still studying?”

“Part-time. I work at the bank.”

“Are you seeing anyone?”

“No—no one in particular.”

“Mind if I call?”

“Go right ahead. Why did you stop calling?”

“I—uh, can I get you a drink?”

“Don’t change the subject.”

Why did I stop calling? Ah, yes—that red-headed nurse had turned my head. We had quite a fling, as people described such affairs of passion and spontaneity. Anna had heard about it, of course, and she was looking at me with a wry grin.

“Still planning on law school?” I asked, changing the subject anyway.

“Yes—someday.”

I eyed the soft tan of her gypsy face and the long dark hair that flowed across her shoulders.

“Are you with anyone?” I asked.

“Not really. I came over with Larry and Andrea.”

“May I see you home?”

“Sure,” she said quietly.

Just then, Larry and Andrea danced near and stopped to chat. Larry Fazio and I golfed and skied together, and Andrea was the secretary for the Director of Purchasing at good old North Chemical and Photographic. Erroll Garner finished a set on the hi-fi. Sinatra returned. Larry decided to change partners and danced away with Anna. I did the same with pretty, blue-eyed Andrea. And so, Anna and I went our separate ways around the room, dancing, drinking, smoking, and talking until we were hoarse.

On one of my trips to my bottle in the kitchen, I noticed some odd-looking newcomers. They were graduate students and among the arty cranks showing up on college campuses. One was fat and wore a dark sweater under his bib overalls. He was laughing over the Bay of Pigs. Another wore baggy corduroy trousers that hadn’t been cleaned recently. He stood hangdog, smoking the foulest cigarette that had ever insulted my nostrils. The woman with them had an ashen face, wore a baggy dress, and was speaking of Zen. I listened for a bit and then retreated to the innocent air of the next room.

Later, the two nurses set out a buffet, and we all gathered to feed ourselves. The three newcomers drifted among us. The fat one began again, this time praising Khrushchev and the Berlin Wall. I think he said the wall was “the boundary between thesis and antithesis.” By then, I was in a fog from my intake of whiskey, but I could still see Anna glaring at him. Her lips began to tremble. She reached for a bowl on the buffet and set it on the palm of her hand as though she were about to put the shot.

“Anna,” I whispered—firmly enough to make her pause. She stayed angry, and I touched her shoulder. “Do you really want to bean that guy with the Swedish meatballs?”

“How I loathe such people,” she said in a fearful Hungarian hiss.

“Remember the nurses—our friends. Don’t make a scene.”

Anna relented. Her fine breasts stopped heaving, and her look softened. She put the bowl back in its proper place. “Maybe I should go now.”

“Yes, and I should, too.”

We found Anna’s coat and said good-bye to the nurses, two good-natured girls from the nearby hospital. They were delighted that Anna and I were leaving together, seeing it, I suppose, as evidence of a successful party.