ht he detected the flash of a dimple. He did. Remember, she was
very young and, being fanciful enough to find the witch in the face of
her rooming house, the waves at Coney Island, peanut cluttered as they
were apt to be, told her things. Silly, unrepeatable things. Nonsense
things. Little secret goosefleshing things. Prettinesses. And then the
shoot the chutes! That ecstatic leap of heart to lips and the feeling
of folly down at the very pit of her. Marylin did like the shoot the
chutes!

"All right, Getaway--to-morrow--Coney!"

He did not conceal his surge of pleasure, grasping her small hand in
both his. "Good girlie!"

"Good night, Getaway," she said, but with the inflection of something
left unsaid.

He felt the unfinished intonation, like a rocket that had never dropped
its stick, and started up the steps after her.

"What is it, Marylin?"

"Nothing," she said and ran in.

The window in her little rear room with the zigzag of fire escape across
it was already full of dusk. She took off her hat, a black straw with a
little pink-cotton rose on it, and, rubbing her brow where it had left a
red rut, sat down beside the window. There were smells there from a city
bouquet of frying foods; from a pool of old water near a drain pipe;
from the rear of a butcher shop. Slops. Noises, too. Babies, traffic,
whistles, oaths, barterings, women, strife, life. On her very
own ceiling the whisper of footsteps--of restless comings and
goings--stealthy comings and goings--and then after an hour,
suddenly and ever so softly, the ball-of-a-foot--squeak!
The-ball-of-a-foot--squeak!

Marylin knew that step.

And yet she sat, quiet. A star had come out. Looking up at the napkin of
sky let in through the walls of the vertical city, Marylin had learned
to greet it almost every clear evening. It did something for her. It
was a little voice. A little kiss. A little upside down pool of light
without a spill. A little of herself up there in that beyond--that
little napkin of beyond that her eyes had the lift to see.

* * * * *

Who are you, whose neck has never ached from nine hours a day, six days
a week, of bending over the blue-denim pleat that goes down the front
of men's shirts, to quiver a supersensitive, supercilious, and superior
nose over what, I grant you, may appear on the surface to be the omelet
of vulgarities fried up for you on the gladdest, maddest strip of
carnival in the world?