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By Root 2202 0

And here Maggie had such a fine mind and had graduated at the top of her class. Did she want to be just ordinary? Her brothers, who had made the same kind of choice themselves (three were involved in some phase of the construction business, while the fourth welded locomotives at the Mount Clare railyards), claimed they had been looking to her to go further. Even her father wondered half audibly whether she knew what she was doing. But Maggie remained firm. What did she want with college? What did she want with those pointless, high-flown bits of information like the ones she'd learned in high school-Ontogeny recapitulates phytogeny and Synecdoche is the use of the part to symbolize the whole? She enrolled in a Red Cross training program, which in those days was all that was needed, and took a job at Silver Threads.

So there she was, eighteen and a half years old, working among old people and living with two elderly parents and her one unmarried brother, who was elderly himself, in a way. Boris Drumm had to earn his own school expenses, so he came back to Baltimore only at Christmas and spent the other holidays selling menswear in a shop near his campus. He wrote lengthy letters describing how his studies were altering his perceptions of the universe. The world was so full of injustice! he wrote. He had never realized. Writing back was hard because Maggie had very little to report. She didn't run into many of their friends anymore. Some had gone away to college, and when they returned they had changed. Some had married, which caused an even bigger change. Pretty soon the only people she saw regularly were Sugar and the Barley twins-just because they still sang in the choir-and, of course, Serena, her best friend. But Boris had never thought much of Serena, so Maggie seldom mentioned her in her letters.

Serena worked in a lingerie shop, clerking. She brought home translucent, lacy underwear in colors that made no sense. (Wouldn't a bright-red bra advertise itself through almost any piece of clothing you owned?) Modeling a black nightgown with a see-through bodice, she announced that she and Max were marrying in June, after he had finished his freshman year at UNC. UNC was a deal he had made with his parents. He had promised to try one year of college and then if he really, truly hated it they would let him drop out. What they were hoping, of course, was that he would meet a nice Southern girl and get over his infatuation with Serena. Not that they would admit it.

Max said that after they were married she could quit her job at the lingerie shop and never work again, Serena said; and also, she said (languorously lowering a black lace strap and admiring her own creamy shoulder), he was pleading with her to accompany him to the Blue Hen Motel the next time he came home. They wouldn't do anything, he said; just be together. Maggie was impressed and envious. It sounded very romantic to her. "You're going, aren't you?" she asked, but Serena said, "What do you think: I'm insane? I'd have to be out of my mind." "But, Serena-" Maggie began. She was about to say that this was nothing like Anita's situation, nothing whatsoever, but Serena's fierce expression stopped her.

"I'm no sucker," Serena said.

Maggie wondered what she herself would do if Boris ever invited her to the Blue Hen Motel. She didn't think that would occur to him, though. Maybe it was just because she was forced to rely on his long, stuffy letters for any sense of him these days, but lately Boris had begun to seem less . . . crisp, you might say; less hard-edged. In his letters now he was talking about entering law school after college and then going into politics. Only in politics, he said, did you have the power to right the world's wrongs. But it was funny: Maggie had never seen politicians as powerful. She saw them as beggars. They were always begging for votes, altering themselves to satisfy their public, behaving spinelessly and falsely in a pathetic bid fof popularity. She hated to think that Boris was that way.

She wondered if Serena ever had second thoughts