Arrayed on the Ladies’ Day banquet table were yellow-green avocado pear halves stuffed with crabmeat and mayonnaise, and platters of rare roast beef and cold chicken, and every so often a cut-glass bowl heaped with black caviar. I hadn’t had time to eat any breakfast at the hotel cafeteria that morning, except for a cup of overstewed coffee so bitter it made my nose curl, and I was starving.

Before I came to New York I’d never eaten out in a proper restaurant. I don’t count Howard Johnson’s, where I only had french fries and cheeseburgers and vanilla frappes with people like Buddy Willard. I’m not sure why it is, but I love food more than just about anything else. No matter how much I eat, I never put on weight. With one exception I’ve been the same weight for ten years.

My favorite dishes are full of butter and cheese and sour cream. In New York we had so many free luncheons with people on the magazine and various visiting celebrities I developed the habit of running my eye down those huge handwritten menus, where a tiny side dish of peas cost fifty or sixty cents, Until I’d picked the richest, most expensive dishes and ordered a string of them.

We were always taken out on expense accounts, so I never felt guilty. I made a point of eating so fast I never kept the other people waiting who generally ordered only chef’s salad and grapefruit juice because they were trying to reduce. Almost everybody I met in New York was trying to reduce.

“I want to welcome the prettiest, smartest bunch of young ladies our staff has yet had the good luck to meet,” the plump, bald master-of- ceremonies wheezed into his lapel microphone. “This banquet is just a small sample of the hospitality our Food Testing Kitchens here on Ladies’ Day would like to offer in appreciation for your visit.”

A delicate, ladylike spatter of applause, and we all sat down at the enormous linen-draped table.

There were eleven of us girls from the magazine, together with most of our supervising editors, and the whole staff of the Ladies’ Day Food Testing Kitchens in hygienic white smocks, neat hairnets and flawless makeup of a uniform peach-pie color.

There were only eleven of us, because Doreen was missing. They had set her place next to mine for some reason, and the chair stayed empty. I saved her placecard for her–a pocket mirror with “Doreen” painted along the top of it in lacy script and a wreath of frosted daisies around the

edge, framing the silver hole where her face would show.

Doreen was spending the day with Lenny Shepherd. She spent most of her free time with Lenny Shepherd now.

In the hour before our luncheon at Ladies’ Day–the big women’s magazine that features lush double-page spreads of Technicolor meals, with a different theme and locale each month–we had been shown around the endless glossy kitchens and seen how difficult it is to photograph apple pie a la mode under bright lights because the ice cream keeps melting and has to be propped up from behind with toothpicks and changed every time it starts looking too soppy.

The sight of all the food stacked in those kitchens made me dizzy. It’s not that we hadn’t enough to eat at home, it’s just that my grandmother always cooked economy joints and economy meat loafs and had the habit of saying, the minute you lifted the first forkful to your mouth, “I hope you enjoy that, it cost forty-one cents a pound,” which always made me feel I was somehow eating pennies instead of Sunday roast.

While we were standing up behind our chairs listening to the welcome speech, I had bowed my head and secretly eyed the position of the bowls of caviar. One bowl was set strategically between me and Doreen’s empty chair.

I figured the girl across from me couldn’t reach it because of the mountainous centerpiece of marzipan fruit and Betsy, on my right, would be too nice to ask me to share it with her if I just kept it out of the way at my elbow by my bread-and-butter plate. Besides, another bowl of caviar sat a little way to the right of the girl next to Betsy, and she could eat that.

My grandfather and I had a standing joke. He was the head waiter at a country club near my home town, and every Sunday my grandmother drove in to bring him home for his Monday off. My brother and I alternated going with her, and my grandfather always served Sunday supper to my grandmother and whichever of us was along as if we were regular club guests. He loved introducing me to special tidbits, and by the age of nine I had developed a passionate taste for cold vichyssoise and caviar and anchovy paste.

The joke was that at my wedding my grandfather would see I had all the caviar I could eat. I was a joke because I never intended to get married, and even if I did, my grandfather couldn’t have afforded enough caviar unless he robbed the country club kitchen and carried it off in a suitcase.

Under cover of the clinking of water goblets and silverware and bone china, I paved my plate with chicken slices. Then I covered the chicken slices with caviar thickly as if I were spreading peanut butter on a piece of bread. 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.

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.

I learned this trick the day Jay Cee took me to lunch with a famous poet. He wore a horrible, lumpy, speckled brown tweed jacket and gray pants and a red-and-blue checked open-throated jersey in a very formal restaurant full of fountains and chandeliers, where all the other men were dressed in dark suits and immaculate white shirts.

This poet ate his salad with his fingers, leaf by leaf, while talking to me about the antithesis of nature and art. I couldn’t take my eyes off the pale, stubby white fingers traveling back and forth from the poet’s salad bowl to the poet’s mouth with one dripping lettuce leaf after another. Nobody giggled or whispered rude remarks. The poet made eating salad with your fingers seem to be the only natural and sensible thing to do.

None of our magazine editors or the Ladies) Day staff members sat anywhere near me, and Betsy seemed sweet and friendly, she didn’t even seem to like caviar, so I grew more and more confident. When I finished my first plate of cold chicken and caviar, I laid out another. Then I tackled the avocado and crabmeat salad.

Avocados are my favorite fruit. Every Sunday my grandfather used to bring me an avocado pear hidden at the bottom of his briefcase under six soiled shirts and the Sunday comics. He taught me how to eat avocados by melting grape jelly and french dressing together in a saucepan and filling the cup of the pear with the garnet sauce. I felt homesick for that sauce. The crabmeat tasted bland in comparison.

“How was the fur show?” I asked Betsy, when I was no longer worried about competition over my caviar. I scraped the last few salty black eggs from the dish with my soup spoon and licked it clean.

“It was wonderful,” Betsy smiled. “They showed us how to make an all-purpose neckerchief out of mink tails and a gold chain, the sort of chain you can get an exact copy of at Woolworth’s for a dollar ninety-eight, and Hilda nipped down to the wholesale fur warehouses right afterward and bought a bunch of mink tails at a big discount and dropped in at Woolworth’s and then stitched the whole thing together coming up on the bus.”

I peered over at Hilda, who sat on the other side of Betsy. Sure enough, she was wearing an expensive-looking scarf of furry tails fastened on one side by a dangling gilt chain.

I never really understood Hilda. She was six feet tall, with huge, slanted green eyes and thick red lips and a vacant, Slavic expression.

She made hats. She was apprenticed to the Fashion Editor, which set her apart from the more literary ones among us like Doreen and Betsy and I myself, who all wrote columns, even if some of them were only about health and beauty. I don’t know if Hilda could read, but she made startling hats. She went to a special school for making hats in New York and every day she wore a new hat to work, constructed by her own hands out of bits of straw or fur or ribbon or veiling in subtle, bizarre shades.

“That’s amazing,” I said. “ Amazing.” I missed Doreen. She would have murmured some fine, scalding remark about Hilda’s miraculous furpiece to cheer me up.

I felt very low. I had been unmasked only that morning by Jay Cee herself and I felt now that all the uncomfortable suspicions I had about myself were coming true, and I couldn’t hide the truth much longer. After nineteen years of running after good marks and prizes and grants of one sort and another, I was letting up, slowing down, dropping clean out of the race.

“Why didn’t you come along to the fur show with us?” Betsy asked. I had the impression she was repeating herself, and that she’d asked me the same question a minute ago, only I couldn’t have been listening. “Did you go off with Doreen?”

“No,” I said, “I wanted to go to the fur show, but Jay Cee called up and made me come into the office.” That wasn’t quite true about wanting to go to the show, but I tried to convince myself now that it was true, so I could be really wounded about what Jay Cee had done.

I told Betsy how. I had been lying in bed that morning planning to go to the fur show. What I didn’t tell her was that Doreen had come into my room earlier and said, “What do you want to go to that assy show for, Lenny and I are going to Coney Island, so why don’t you come along? Lenny can get you a nice fellow, the day’s shot to hell anyhow with that luncheon and then the film premiere in the afternoon, so nobody’ll miss us.”

For a minute I was tempted. The show certainly did seem stupid. I have never cared for furs. What I decided to do in the end was lie in bed as long as I wanted to and then go to Central Park and spend the day lying in the grass, the longest grass I could find in that bald, duck-ponded wilderness.

I told Doreen I would not go to the show or the luncheon or the film premiere, 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 didn’t know what time it was, but I’d heard the girls bustling

and calling in the hall and getting ready for the fur show, and then I’d heard the hall go still, and as I lay on my back in bed staring up at the blank, white ceiling the stillness seemed to grow bigger and bigger until I felt my eardrums would burst with it. Then the phone rang.

I stared at the phone for a minute. The receiver shook a bit in its bone-colored cradle, so I could tell it was really ringing. I thought I might have given my phone number to somebody at a dance or a party and then forgotten about it. I lifted the receiver and spoke in a husky, receptive voice.

“Hello?”

“Jay Cee here,” Jay Cee rapped out with brutal promptitude. “I wondered if you happened to be planning to come into the office today?”

I sank down into the sheets. I couldn’t understand why Jay Cee thought I’d be coming into the office. We had these mimeographed schedule cards so we could keep track of all our activities, and we spent a lot of mornings and afternoons away from the office going to affairs in town. Of course, some of the affairs were optional.

There was quite a pause. Then I said meekly, “I thought I was going to the fur show.” Of course I hadn’t thought any such thing, but I couldn’t figure out what else to say.

“I told her I thought I was going to the fur show,” I said to Betsy. “But she told me to come into the office, she wanted to have a little talk with me, and there was some work to do.”

“Oh-oh!” Betsy said sympathetically. She must have seen the tears that plopped down into my dessert dish of meringue and brandy ice cream, because she pushed over her own untouched dessert and I started absently on that when I’d finished my own. I felt a bit awkward about the tears, but they were real enough. Jay Cee had said some terrible things to me.

When I made my wan entrance into the office at about ten o’clock, Jay Cee stood up and came round her desk to shut the door, and I sat in the swivel chair in front of my typewriter table facing her, and she sat in the swivel chair behind her desk facing me, with the window full of potted plants, shelf after shelf of them, springing up at her back like a tropical garden.

“Doesn’t your work interest you, Esther?”

“Oh, it does, it does,” I said. “It interests me very much.” I felt like yelling the words, as if that might make them more convincing, but I controlled myself.

All my life I’d told myself studying and reading and writing and working like mad was what I wanted to do, and it actually seemed to be true, I did everything well enough and got all A’s, and by the time I made it to college nobody could stop me.

I was college correspondent for the town Gazette and editor of the literary magazine and secretary of Honor Board, which deals with academic and social offenses and punishments–a popular office–and I had a well-known woman poet and professor on the faculty championing me for graduate school at the biggest universities in the east, and promises of full scholarships all the way, and now I was apprenticed to the best editor on an intellectual fashion magazine, and what did I do but balk and balk like a dull cart horse?

“I’m very interested in everything.” The words fell with a hollow flatness on to Jay Cee’s desk, like so many wooden nickels.

“I’m glad of that,” Jay Cee said a bit waspishly. “You can learn a lot in this month on the magazine, you know, if you just roll up your shirtsleeves. The girl who was here before you didn’t bother with any of the fashion-show stuff. She went straight from this office on to Time.”

“My!” I said, in the same sepulchral tone. “That was quick!” “Of course, you have another year at college yet,” Jay Cee

went on a little more mildly. “What do you have in mind after you graduate?”

What I always thought I had in mind was getting some big scholarship to graduate school or a grant to study all over Europe, and then I thought I’d be a professor and write books of poems or write books of poems and be an editor of some sort. Usually I had these plans on the tip of my tongue.

“I don’t really know,” I heard myself say. I felt a deep shock, hearing myself say that, because the minute I said it, I knew it was true.

It sounded true, and I recognized it, the way you recognize some nondescript person that’s been hanging around your door for ages and then suddenly comes up and introduces himself as your real father and looks exactly like you, so you know he really is your father, and the person you thought all your life was your father is a sham.

“I don’t really know.”

“You’ll never get anywhere like that.” Jay Cee paused. “What languages do you have?”

“Oh, I can read a bit of French, I guess, and I’ve always wanted to learn German.” I’d been telling people I’d always wanted to learn German for about five years.

My mother spoke German as a child in America, and during the First World War, the kids at school threw stones at her for it. My father, who spoke German too, had been dead since I was nine. He came from some bleak, manic-depressive village in the dark heart of Prussia. At that moment, my younger brother was in Berlin, participating in the Experiment in International Living, speaking German like a native.

What I didn’t mention was that every time I opened a German dictionary or book, just seeing those dense, black, barbed-wire-like letters made my mind snap shut like a clam.

“I’ve always thought I’d like to get into publishing,” I said, trying to steer the conversation back to my old, confident self. “I guess I’ll apply to some publishing houses.”

“You should learn French and German,” Jay Cee said bluntly, “and probably a few other languages too—Spanish, Italian, or better yet, Russian. Every June, hundreds of girls flood into New York thinking they’ll become editors. You need to bring more to the table than the average person. You better learn some languages.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell Jay Cee that my senior year schedule didn’t have a single gap for language classes. I was enrolled in one of those honors programs that teach you to think independently. Aside from a course on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and a seminar in advanced poetry composition, I was supposed to spend my time writing about some obscure theme in James Joyce’s work. I hadn’t chosen my theme yet since I hadn’t gotten around to reading *Finnegans Wake,* but my professor was enthusiastic about my thesis and promised to give me some pointers on twin imagery.

“I’ll see what I can do,” I told Jay Cee. “Maybe I can squeeze in one of those accelerated elementary German courses they’ve set up.” At the time, I thought I might actually do it. I had a knack for convincing my Class Dean to let me bend the rules. She saw me as an interesting experiment.

In college, I had to take a mandatory course in physics and chemistry. I had already taken botany and excelled in it. I didn’t miss a single test question all year, and for a while, I toyed with the idea of becoming a botanist, studying wild grasses in Africa or the South American rainforests. You could win big grants to study unusual topics in remote places much more easily than getting funding to study art in Italy or English in England; there’s less competition.

Botany suited me because I loved dissecting leaves, putting them under the microscope, and drawing diagrams of bread mold and the odd, heart-shaped leaf in the fern’s life cycle—it all felt so tangible.

But the day I stepped into physics class, I knew it was going to be dreadful.

A short, dark man with a high-pitched, lisping voice named Mr. Manzi stood in front of the class in a tight blue suit, holding a small wooden ball. He placed it on a steep, grooved slide and let it roll down to the bottom. Then he started talking about *a* as acceleration and *t* as time, and suddenly, he was filling the blackboard with letters, numbers, and equal signs, and my mind just shut down.

I took the physics textbook back to my dorm. It was a massive tome, printed on thin, mimeographed paper—four hundred pages long, with no illustrations, just diagrams and formulas, between brick-red cardboard covers. Mr. Manzi had written it to explain physics to college girls, hoping to get it published if it worked on us.

I studied those formulas, went to class, watched balls roll down slides, and listened to bells ring. By the end of the semester, most of the other girls had failed, but I got a straight A. I overheard Mr. Manzi telling a group of girls who were complaining that the course was too hard, “No, it can’t be too hard; one girl got a straight A.” “Who is it? Tell us,” they demanded, but he just smiled and didn’t say anything, giving me a sweet, conspiratorial smile.

That’s when I came up with the idea of escaping the next semester of chemistry. Even though I got an A in physics, the subject made me feel panicked and sick. What I couldn’t stand was how everything was reduced to letters and numbers. Instead of leaf shapes, enlarged diagrams of the pores through which leaves breathe, and fascinating words like carotene and xanthophyll on the blackboard, there were those hideous, cramped formulas written in Mr. Manzi’s special red chalk.

I knew chemistry would be even worse because I had seen a big chart of the ninety-odd elements in the chemistry lab, where perfectly good words like gold, silver, cobalt, and aluminum were shortened to ugly abbreviations with different decimal numbers after them. If I had to cram more of that into my brain, I’d go mad. I’d fail outright. It was only through sheer willpower that I dragged myself through the first half of the year.

So I went to my Class Dean with a clever plan.

I told her I needed time to take a Shakespeare course since I was, after all, an English major. We both knew I would get a straight A in chemistry, so why should I take the exams? Why couldn’t I just attend the classes, absorb the material, and forget about grades or credits? It was a matter of honor among honorable people—content over form—and grades were really a bit silly anyway, weren’t they, when you knew you’d always get an A? My plan was bolstered by the fact that the college had just dropped the second year of mandatory science for the classes after mine, so my class was the last to suffer under the old rule.

Mr. Manzi fully supported my plan. I think he was flattered that I enjoyed his classes so much that I wanted to take them without any materialistic reason like credits or an A, but for the sheer beauty of chemistry itself. I thought it was quite ingenious of me to suggest sitting in on the chemistry course even after switching to Shakespeare. It was an unnecessary gesture that made it seem like I couldn’t bear to give up chemistry.

Of course, I would never have succeeded with this scheme if I hadn’t aced the first semester. And if my Class Dean had known how scared and depressed I was, how I seriously considered getting a doctor’s note saying I was unfit to study chemistry because the formulas made me dizzy, I’m sure she wouldn’t have listened to me for a minute. She would have made me take the course regardless.

But as it turned out, the Faculty Board approved my petition, and my Class Dean later told me that several professors were touched by it. They saw it as a real step toward intellectual maturity.

I had to laugh when I thought about the rest of that year. I attended the chemistry class five times a week and didn’t miss a single one. Mr. Manzi stood at the bottom of the big, rickety old amphitheater, making blue flames, red flares, and clouds of yellow stuff by mixing the contents of test tubes, and I blocked out his voice by pretending it was just a distant mosquito. I sat back, enjoying the bright lights and colored fires, and wrote page after page of villanelles and sonnets.

Mr. Manzi would glance at me occasionally, see me writing, and send me a sweet, appreciative smile. I guess he thought I was diligently taking notes on all those formulas, not for the exams like the other girls, but because his presentation fascinated me so much I couldn’t help myself.