both say, "Oh. Gee, hello."

Well, we're both pretty surprised, because this is the girl I met out at
Coney Island that day with Nick when I had Cat with me, and now we're both
a long way from Coney Island. This girl isn't one of the two giggly ones.
It's the third, the one that liked Cat.

We've both forgotten each other's names, so we begin over with that. I ask
her what she's been doing, and she's been at Girl Scout camp a few weeks,
and then she earned some money baby-sitting. So she came to think about
records, like me. I tell her I've been at Coney once this summer, and I
looked around for her, which is true, because I did.

"It's a big place," she says, smiling.

"Say, you live out there, don't you? How come you get all the way in here
by yourself? Doesn't your mom get in a flap? Mine would, if she knew I was
going to Coney alone."

Mary says, "I came in with Mom. Some friend of hers has a small art
exhibition opening. She said I could go home alone. After all, she knows
I'm not going to get lost."

I say, "Gee, it'd be great to have a mother that didn't worry about you
all the time."

"Oh, Mom worries." Mary giggles. "You should have heard her when I said I
liked _Gone With the Wind_ and I didn't like _Anna Karenina_. I pretty
nearly got disowned."

"What does she think about science fiction?" I ask, and Mary makes a face,
and we both laugh.

I go on. "Well, my mom doesn't care what I read. She worries about what I
eat and whether my feet are wet, and she always seems to think I'm about
to kill myself. It's a nuisance, really."

Mary looks solemn all of a sudden. She says slowly, "I think maybe it'd be
nice. I mean to have someone worrying about whether you're comfortable and
all. Instead of just picking your brains all the time."

This seems to exhaust the subject of our respective mothers, and Mary
picks up the record of _West Side Story_ and says, "Gee, I'd like to see
that. Did you?"

I say No, and to tell the truth I hadn't hardly heard of it.

"I read a book about him. It was wonderful," she says.

"Who?"

"Bernstein. The man who wrote it."

"What's _West Side Story_ about, him?" I ask cautiously.

"No, no--he wrote the music. It's about some kids in two gangs, and there's
a lot of dancing, and then there's a fight and this kid gets--well, it
isn't a thing you can tell the story of very well. You have to see it."

This gives me a very simple idea.

"Why don't we?" I say.

"Huh?"