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By Root 1644 0

Yale people, a druggist who had a Marlboro cigarette pack filled with reds that he passed around, and a neighbor woman and her six-year-old son, whom the druggist teased. The druggist showed the little boy the cigarette pack full of pills, saying, “Now, how would a person light a cigarette like this? Which end is the filter?” The boy’s mother wouldn’t protect him, so Penelope took him away, into the bedroom, where she let him empty Dan’s piggy bank and count the pennies. Marielle was also there, with her hair neatly braided into tight corn rows and wearing glasses with lenses that darkened to blue. Cyril came late, pretty loaded. “Better late than never,” he said, once to Robert and many times to Penelope. Then Robert and Cyril huddled together in a corner, saying how dreary the party was, while the druggist put pills on his tongue and rolled them sensually across the roof of his mouth. At midnight Dan got angry and tried to kick them all out—Robert and Cyril first, because they were sitting closest to him—and that made Penelope angry because she had only three friends at the party, and the noisy ones, the drunk or stoned ones, were all Dan’s friends. Instead of arguing, though, she cried. Robert and Cyril left finally and went to Cyril’s and had a beer, and then Robert went back to Dan’s apartment, trying to get up the courage to go in and insist that Penelope leave with him. He walked up the two flights of stairs to their door. It was quiet inside. He didn’t have the nerve to knock. He went downstairs and out of the building, hating himself. He walked home in the cold, and realized that he must have been a little drunk, because the fresh air really cleared his head.

Robert flipped through the Yale catalogue, thinking that maybe going back to school was the solution. Maybe all the hysterical letters his mother and father wrote were right, and he needed some order in his life. Maybe he’d meet some other girls in classes. He did not want to meet other girls. He had dated two girls since moving to New Haven, and they had bored him and he had spent more money on them than they were worth.

The phone rang; he was glad, because he was just about to get very depressed.

It was Penelope, sounding very far away, very knocked out. She had left Marielle’s because Marielle’s boyfriend was there, and he insisted that they all get stoned and listen to “Trout Mask Replica” and not paint the bathroom, so she left and decided to walk home, but then she realized she didn’t want to go there, and she thought she’d call and ask if she could stay with him instead. And the strangest thing. When she closed the door of the phone booth just now, a little boy had appeared and tapped on the glass, fanning out a half circle of joints. “Ten dollars,” the boy said to her. “Bargain City.” Imagine that. There was a long silence while Robert imagined it. It was interrupted by Penelope, crying.

“What’s the matter, Penelope?” he said. “Of course you can come over here. Get out of the phone booth and come over.”

She told him that she had bought the grass, and that it was powerful stuff. It was really the wrong thing to do to smoke it, but she lost her nerve in the phone booth and didn’t know whether to call or not, so she smoked a joint—very quickly, in case any cops drove by. She smoked it too quickly.

“Where are you?” he said.

“I’m near Park Street,” she said.

“What do you mean? Is the phone booth on Park Street?”

“Near it,” she said.

“Okay. I’ll tell you what. You walk down to McHenry’s and I’ll get down there, okay?”

“You don’t live very close,” she said.

“I can walk there in a hurry. I can get a cab. You just take your time and wander down there. Sit in a booth if you can. Okay?”

“Is it true what Cyril told me at Dan’s party?” she said. “That you’re secretly in love with me?”

He frowned and looked sideways at the phone, as if the phone itself had betrayed him. He saw that his fingers were white from pressing so hard against the receiver.

“I’ll tell you,” she said. “Where I grew up, the cop cars had red lights. These green things cut right