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myself with my sandals, got them off and still holding onto their straps, ran west down the beach to the little rippling waves of the ocean that flowed everywhere and nowhere.

Chapter Three
    I kept walking down the beach wishing for Tony Gregory even though it wouldn’t have been any easier to deal with Emmett if he had been there. It would have been worse, lots worse. They would have despised each other on sight. Even so I tried to see him in front of me, blonde, fair as I was and blue-eyed too, we’d joked about kinship. His family was mostly Scandinavian while mine were, as far as anyone had traced them, French followed by generations of Scotch-Irish. When I wrote to him, I could visualize him better. Now, outside, he faded before I could get his face in mind. Why was he so hard to hold onto? I slowed to a walk swinging my sandals, one in each hand, watching the Gulf’s trash wash up. There must have been a storm somewhere. Sargassum littered the shore in steaming rust-colored piles that straggled across the sand and filled the air with the medicinal smell of iodine reminiscent of falls, cuts on knees, and the stinging remedy used by adults all my childhood, of medicine cabinets, doctor’s offices, of scabs and scratches, the unending novelty of one’s own blood flowing and the need to staunch it immediately. Mercurochrome we sometimes called “monkey blood,” but iodine remained iodine, the more painful sovereign remedy.
    A sandpiper zigzagged in front of me scarring the sand as it ran. I hadn’t told Emmett about Tony. Why should I have? He would never have understood me. I didn’t understand my reactions myself. I guess I felt abandoned, loved and lost though not for any particular reason. I’d been the one who had to leave.
    Away at summer school in Colorado for six weeks earlier that summer, I’d fallen in love with Tony Gregory, the guy with two first names, he called himself. My timing was terrible. I’d just finished my freshman year; he was in second year law school and unhappy. Family expectations pushed him. He thought he’dfinish even if he hated law school. Just then it seemed that a number of the boys I knew went to school to please someone else. Maybe it was only the time. A lot of fathers came back from military service full of regret about time lost during the war and directed their sons to make something of themselves. Tony said his father was one of those.
    The boys I studied journalism with had made their own choices. Many of them disparaged themselves. “Going to change the world, aren’t we! Make it over. Tell the truth! Free the people!” They grinned mightily and falsely. Just beneath the self-mockery they carried on their crusades, stayed up all night chasing stories, meeting the campus paper’s deadlines. Some worked part-time waiting tables in dorms or sorority houses or in small cafes around the campus, places already dependent on students’ schedules. The
Daily Texan
was a scaled down version of a big city daily. We were in training.
    “Trade school,” was our name for the journalism program, and most everybody loved it. I wasn’t altogether sold on the program. Sometimes news was immensely important; sometimes it was immensely trivial, and I couldn’t decide if the two balanced. So much of the work was repetitious. How many days of the rest of my life did I want to spend reporting meetings, trying to find fresh angles about annual parades and rewriting other rewrites about the history of campus buildings? Maybe, I told myself, I found it hard to be enthusiastic because I was a novice who was only assigned the easy stuff. If I continued, I might get to do something worthwhile—and I liked the other journalism students. After the paper had been put to bed we sometimes met in a little dark bar near campus for a few beers. Nobody had the money for anything more or the time for a serious hangover.
    Tony had both. He voted for Eisenhower and drank Scotch just as his father