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magazines. I could imagine, though, in a postcoital moment, Randy laughing casually across a mussed bed at an invisible femalefigure. I held him in such high esteem. Just a glance in my direction had my pulse quick for hours. But that’s enough of him. Good-bye for now, Randy, good-bye.
    Here’s what I looked like that Friday: brittle, fake alligator loafers with thick, worn heels and chipping gold buckles; white stockings which made my thin legs look wooden, doll-like; large yellow bouclé skirt that hung past my knees; gray wool jacket with sharp shoulders over a white cotton blouse; small brass-colored cross; hairdo several days old by now; no earrings; lipstick of a shade the store called Irreparable Red. I must have looked nineteen going on sixty-five in that foppish approximation of decency, that adult costume. Other girls were married by my age, had children, settled. To say I didn’t want all that would be too generous. All that simply wasn’t available to me. It was beyond me. By all appearances I was a homebody—naive, disinterested. If you’d have asked me, I would have told you I believed that a person had to be in love to make love. I’d have said I thought anyone who does, and isn’t, is a whore.
    In hindsight, I don’t think I was so off-base in my desire for Randy. A union wouldn’t have been completely preposterous. He was employed, in good health, and it wasn’t completely unfeasible, I don’t think, that he might date me. I was a live young woman in his vicinity, after all. Despite my paranoia, there wasn’t anything outright offensive about the way I looked back then. I was unattractive in temperament most of all, but many men don’t seem to care about things like that. Of course Randy must have had other women to turn to. I wouldn’t have known what to do with him if I’d actually snagged him anyhow.By the time I turned thirty I’d learned how to relax, wink in the mirror, fall charmingly into the arms of countless lovers. My twenty-four-year-old self would die from shock at the quick death of my prudence. And once I left X-ville and filled out a bit, bought some clothes that fit me right, you might have seen me walking down Broadway or Fourteenth Street and thought I was a graduate student or maybe the assistant to some famous artist, on my way to pick up his check from the gallery. What I mean to say is that I was not fundamentally unattractive. I was just invisible.
    That afternoon the mothers came and went. Sheaves of completed questionnaires got tossed in the trash along with glittering piles of caramel candy wrappers like heaps of dead insects. “Do you believe there is life on Mars? What qualities do you value most in your state officials?” Every day I picked up a dozen snot-filled tissues marked with lipstick like fat, dead, pink-tipped carnations. “Can you speak a foreign language? Do you prefer canned peas or canned carrots? Do you smoke?” A bell rang to signify that someone, one of the boys, had done something that would result in heavy punishment. James got up off his stool and mechanically walked down the corridor, wringing his hands. I squeezed the used tissues in my fists, added them to the papers and wrappers in the garbage.
    â€œTake out that trash, Eileen,” said Mrs. Stephens, looking up at me from behind her armpit as she reached down to her desk drawer to retrieve a fresh box of candies.
    â€œIf there was life on Mars, it’s dead now,” one mother wrote.
    â€œA man should be broad-shouldered and have a mustache.”
    â€œA little French.”
    â€œPeas.”
    â€œSix packs a week. Sometimes more.”
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    B efore I left Moorehead that Friday, Mrs. Stephens asked me to decorate the Christmas tree which the janitor had dragged into the prison waiting room, empty now that visiting hours were over. I remember it was a voluptuous pine and the