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in mock surprise, "Is that on your diet?"
    She had lied to the boy at Baskin-Robbins. She told him the ice cream was for a party for her grandchildren. She didn't even have grandchildren.
    Evelyn was forty-eight years old and she had gotten lost somewhere along the way. Things had changed so fast. While she had been raising the required two children—"a boy for him and a girl for me"—the world had become a different place, a place she didn't know at all.
    She didn't get the jokes anymore. They all seemed so mean, and she was still shocked at the language. Here she was, at her age, and she'd never said the F word. So she mostly watched old movies and reruns of The Lucy Show. When the Vietnam War was going on, she'd believed what Ed had told her, that it was a good and necessary war, and that anyone against it was a communist. But then, much later, when she finally decided that it may not have been such a good war, Jane Fonda had already moved on to her exercise class and nobody cared what Evelyn thought, anyway. She still held a grudge against Jane Fonda and wished she'd get off TV and stop slinging her skinny legs around all the time.
    Not that Evelyn hadn't tried along the way. She had tried to raise her son to be sensitive, but Ed had scared her so bad, telling her that he would turn out to be a queer, she had backed off and lost contact with him. Even now her son seemed like a stranger to her.
    Both her children had passed her by. Her daughter, Janice, had known more about sex at fifteen that Evelyn did at this very minute. Something had gone wrong.
    When she was in high school, things had been so simple. There were the good girls and the bad girls, and everyone knew who was who. You were either a member of the "in" group or you were not. Evelyn had been in the golden circle; a cheerleader. She had not known the name of one person who was in the high school band or the boys in the pegged pants and their girl friends with the nylon see-through blouses and ankle bracelets. Her crowd had been the crew-cut, button-down madras shirt and pressed khakis for boys, and Ship 'n Shore blouses with circle pins for girls set. She and her girl friends smoked one Kent cigarette at their sorority meetings, and at a pajama party they maybe had a beer, but that was it. No petting below the neck.
    Later, she had felt like a fool going with her daughter to get her fitted for a diaphragm. Evelyn had waited until her wedding night.
    And what a shock. Nobody had told her how much it would hurt. She still didn't enjoy sex. Every time she would start to relax, the bad-girl image would pop into her head.
    She had been a good girl, had always acted like a lady, never raised her voice, always deferred to everybody and everything. She had assumed that somewhere down the line there would be a reward for that; a prize. But when her daughter had asked her if she'd ever had sex with anyone but her husband and she'd answered, "No, of course not," her daughter's reply had been, "Oh Mother, how dumb. You don't even know if he's any good or not. How awful.”
     It was true. She didn't know.
    So in the long run, it didn't matter at all if you had been good or not. The girls in high school who had "gone all the way" had not wound up living in back alleys in shame and disgrace, like she thought they would; they wound up happily or unhappily married, just like the rest of them. So all that struggle to stay pure, the fear of being touched, the fear of driving a boy mad with passion by any gesture, and the ultimate fear—getting pregnant—all that wasted energy was for nothing. Now, movie stars were having children out of wedlock by the carload, and naming them names like Moonbeam or Sunfeather.
    And what was the reward for staying sober? She had always heard, there's nothing worse than a woman drunk, and never allowed herself more than one whiskey sour. Now, all the best people were waltzing into the Betty Ford Center, getting their pictures made, and having