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showed a sort of haughty, imperial delight. I felt a strange inkling of pity for her. But like an evening chill, this sympathy passed through me and announced itself with the brevity of a shiver. After only a minute or two of sitting at the table, she insisted we take to the dance floor straightaway, and so we did.
    It will come as no surprise when I say Leonard and I were a bit of an awkward abomination on the dance floor together. After three songs’ worth of strained shuffling and tripping over each other’s toes, I was dripping with perspiration from the effort and could no longer take Helen’s mirthful shrieks and jibes whenever she and Bernard clipped close to us on the dance floor. I suggested to Leonard we sit it out for a bit. Ever silent, he nodded sternly and did not attempt to feign any great disappointment. We sat back down at the same table in the corner. There was a wilted carnation in the lapel of his plaid jacket I hadn’t noticed previously. I commented on the “pretty” flower (it wasn’t—I was merely trying to make conversation), and he very mechanically extracted it and handed it to me.
    “Oh—no,” I said. “I wasn’t hinting.”
    “Take it. It’ll have gotten crummy by morning anyway.”
    “All right.”
    I took the flower, but didn’t know what to do with it. It didn’t belong in my hair (carnations aren’t really that sort of flower, are they?). After several minutes, I managed to get the thing tucked into one of the black satin ribbons tied about my torso.
    “Thanks.”
    “S’all right.”
    The four-piece “orchestra” changed to a waltz, and we watched Helen and Bernard change their movements accordingly. A sweaty sheen was beginning to break out over Helen’s fleshy brow, and her rouge had begun to run in ruddy rivulets down her cheeks, but her face bore a look of fierce determination that suggested all who witnessed her fatigue would do well not to comment on it. As we observed the couple’s enthusiasm for dance tip slightly toward obstinacy and then back again, Leonard drummed his fingers on the table. I believe if Leonard and I shared anything that night, it was an acute awareness of being there solely to serve as chaperones for Helen and Bernard.
    “What do you do, Leonard?”
    “Benny and I are clerks over at McNab’s.”
    “Do you like it?”
    “S’all right.”
    “Been there long?”
    “Going on four years.”
    “I see.”
    And so forth. I won’t repeat the entire sum of idle chatter that Leonard and I occupied ourselves with that evening, as I’m afraid most of it was interchangeable and utterly unremarkable. It would seem this is the gift modernity has bestowed upon our generation: the practice of “dating,” an awkward procedure where a man and a woman find themselves talking rot to each other in a darkened room. If it were up to me, I would say modernity can keep it, as I want no part.
    When Helen and I crawled into our beds later that same night, we were both exhausted—she from the efforts of dancing and me from the efforts of making conversation with a man who if he were any duller might be declared catatonic by those in the medical profession. I could hear her sighing happily behind her side of the sheet that divided our room. I knew there was a sort of code to these sighs—Helen wasn’t given the rush by boys very often. She was absolutely desperate to be given the sort of rush the female protagonists were always getting in the stories she pored over in the pages of
The Saturday Evening Post
.
    “Thank you, Rose,” she murmured in a very sleepy, pleasant voice. I have always known Helen to be an overly expressive person, but I realized this moment was the first time I had ever heard her express a sentiment of gratitude. For the second time that evening, I felt a tiny inkling of warmth toward her. She only wanted to be liked, after all—and this was something I could tolerate, even if Helen’s primary desire was to be liked by boys as