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crazy, and crazy people feel much crazier than usual.
    In Eliza’s office, a small fierce girl, the head of that office, the “supervisor,” stood beside the huge open window, violently inhaling the sultry outside air and cursing the world. Kathleen Mooney, twenty-six, with bright yellow-brown hair and a pale, wide, often open mouth, and a truly encyclopedic knowledge of the human heart: its functioning, possible anomalies and lesions, and the probable corrective operations. She also remembered everything about every patient whose files had passed through her office during the past two years of her employment. And all this with no medical training; she had an extraordinary “scientific mind,” and Eliza had more than once thought how Josephine would dislike Kathleen—had even imagined their confrontation: Josephine’s ice versus the rage of Kathleen.
    Kathleen’s general reaction to the universe, to being alive and to most other living beings,
was
rage, simple and pure and not concealed. And the untimely heat, of course, made her worse. “Drop dead of an aneurism, or a myocardial infarction,” she audibly mouthed in the direction of the chief heart surgeon, Dr. Gilbert Branner, who was then crossing the street from the research building to the hospital. And then, turning back to the room, to her audience of two co-workers, “Lord!” she said. “He’s always touching his hair. Lord, what an old peacock that man is.”
    Next to Kathleen’s desk was Eliza’s. The third desk, nearest the door, was Miriam’s. Miriam, a tall very black girlwith thin legs, a big stomach and big breasts. Eighteen years old, still living with her mother and her brothers in a nearby ghetto called “the Project.” Her face was very black; she hated its color. Actually it had wonderful and complicated shades of brown; that was what Eliza thought of Miriam’s face—not Miriam.
    Eliza, though young herself, was the “older woman” of the group; also, since she only worked part-time, mornings, she was regarded as being of another, superior class. By Miriam she was regarded as rich: she owned a house; she went out with a lot of men, sometimes to expensive places.
    Actually, Eliza at that time was in a curious phase that neither Kathleen nor Miriam knew about: she who indeed had gone out with a lot of men, who for a time went from one love affair to another, precipitously (she sometimes had an unpleasant vision of someone playing leapfrog), had not been going out at all. Having broken, finally, with her most recent lover, The Lawyer, her improbable choice for a brief fling at monogamy (she broke with him on the night she returned from Daria’s wedding), she stayed at home with Catherine. She read a lot. She finished two new poems. But she did not need to discuss any of that at work; it was much easier to maintain her prescribed (by Kathleen) stereotype: sexy, impractical, bright but lazy. Rich.
    Kathleen’s sexual pattern, too, had just undergone a sudden change; for the first time she had “fallen in love.” Before that she had had tidy arrangements with married men; encounters that were brief and emotionally unencumbered. “Well, let’s face it, I like to screw” had been her explanation. “And I don’t dig a lot of emotional mess.” Eliza envied the practicality of that view, as she sometimes envied Kathleen’s trim and tidy athletic body; her own voluptuousness seemed messy.
    Kathleen fell in love with a boy of about her own age: Lawry, a sometime guitarist. And she, who often spoke harshly of her lovers, spoke only praise of Lawry. But Lawry, for whatever reasons (to Eliza they were very suspect), insisted thatKathleen continue with her singles’ bars and married men, and so she did. “Christ, sometimes I feel like some kind of an exhibition fucker,” said Kathleen.
    All three of those women smoked too much, especially Kathleen, who exhaled with furious gusts.
    In the heat, that day, they were all wearing summer