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her starched blouses.
    His eyes looked at them more than they did her face. But the other girls envied her when they realized she wasn’t stuffing her bra with tissue like they were. They said she was lucky Bert was interested in her because he was a good catch.
    Maureen thought her breasts must be bait.
    The girls said she could let him do anything but never to go all the way. Not until they were married.
    So she tolerated sitting in the backseat of his father’s car, his hands groping at her blouse, one hand trying to unbutton it while the other tried to pry open her clenched knees.
    She had thought his hands on her breasts would make her feel alive. But his hands were sweaty, and his slobbery kisses on her neck only made her feel wet with spit. What she had hated most of all was the wetness in her underpants, as if she had peed on herself, only she hadn’t.
    He had called her a tease, said she was torturing him, said if she loved him she would let him go all the way. But she couldn’t.
    What if she did and afterwards, he lost interest, having gotten what he wanted? That was what the girls at school said would happen if she let him.
    One night he took her hand and placed it on his pants, against the hardness beneath. She didn’t want her hand there, on that thing, and she took it away, but he grabbed it, put it back, and placed his on top and held it there, pressing with all his strength. She wanted to get out of the car, to go somewhere, anywhere, and die. He began to move his hardness against her captive hand, breathing faster and faster until he gave a small cry. His breathing slowed. The hardness beneath his pants went away like a balloon that all the air had come out of. He took his hand off hers. Her hand returned to her, but she did not want it.
    One night, not long after this, it happened. Even now, even on this morning when she, a thirty-two-year-old woman, stared at herself in the mirror, she did not understand why, except she remembered thinking that maybe she would feel alive if she let him.
    And so she did. And he did and it was over so quickly and all she had felt was pain. She remembered lying there in the backseat, glad she was wearing a dark skirt so the bloodstains would not show, wondering how she could get rid of her underpants without her mother knowing, and she was seized by a loneliness far deeper than the one she had lived in before that night.
    Bert did not speak to her in school the next day. She saw him standing with some boys, a smirk on his face, and his friends turned to look at her as she walked by, and she knew that they knew, that everybody in school knew.
    And when her period did not come, she knew.
    She had thought her parents would be angry, but they seemed almost pleased. Her father, a crude and bitter man, said, “I’m glad you put them big titties of yours to good use.” And her mother added, “You donegood, girlie! The son of the second richest man in town is going to be your husband. You done good!”
    They had not had a church wedding, nor had there been any guests, just her parents and his at the judge’s office in the courthouse in Shireville.
    Bert’s parents were angry their son had let himself get trapped by a piece of white trash, which they told her to her face.
    Bert said it was her fault, that she had led him on, that she had teased him so much that he had lost control and couldn’t help himself.
    She had not thought loneliness could get any more vast than it had been that night in the back of his car, but when the judge pronounced them “man and wife,” and went on to say, “You may now kiss the bride,” Bert had turned away from her, reached in his shirt pocket for a pack of cigarettes, took one out along with a book of matches, lit it, inhaled deeply, then, turning back toward her, slowly blew a stream of smoke in her face and walked out.
    Her loneliness expanded until it devoured all possibilities of