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that? Actually, she’d meant to try it.
    “I’ll go down and get them. I’ll be right back.” But she hesitated, as though afraid to break the bond of feeling between them by leaving the room.
    “You better wash your face,” Theresa said. “It’s all streaked.”
    Two months later Katherine married a forty-year-old divorced Jewish lawyer from Boston named Brooks Hendell. Her parents were tight-lipped and upset but felt much better when they’d met Brooks, who was rich, handsome and likable and who when you looked at him, as Mrs. Dunn pointed out more than once, could easily have been a northern Italian. Theresa adored him, as did Brigid.
    Brigid was going steady with a wiry, freckle-faced Irish punk named Patrick Kelly of whom her father remarked, upon beingtold he was Brigid’s steady, that with Patrick in their house and the Kennedys in Washington, the Irish were finally in their ascendancy. Theresa thought Patrick was a moron but Brigid devoted to going steady with him, to baking Toll House cookies and knitting a sweater for him, that single-minded energy and consuming love which she’d once had for baseball and other games.
    It was Katherine who persuaded them to let her go to City College. The men in the firehouse were telling her father he’d be crazy to let his daughter take a subway into Harlem but Katherine pointed out that thousands of white kids went to City College every day without getting raped or murdered. Katherine said they should be glad to have a daughter smart enough to get into college, and ambitious enough to want to be a teacher. She herself, she said, often wished she had the gumption to go back to school and get a degree. As a matter of fact, she was seriously considering it—and Brooks loved the idea.
    On the night before she was to begin college Theresa took a bath, went back to her room, locked the door, took off her robe, and looked at herself in the mirror. In this light her skin was fair but not deadly; her breasts were round and full; her ten or fifteen pounds of extra weight were concentrated on her hips and thighs and looked quite all right without clothes straining to cover them. When she was naked she generally found her body rather beautiful, although she could never in a million years have admitted this to anyone. In clothes, in front of other people, she felt ashamed of her weight, her sloppiness, always something, but it was more because of what she felt they saw when they looked at her.
    Now she took from the wall a small oval mirror and walked with it to the full-length mirror on her closet door. With her back to the large mirror she held the small one so that she could see hernaked back. A shiny, pale-pink seam ran down the lower part of her spine; near the top curve of her left buttock, the crescent scar where they’d taken the bone for the spinal fusion matched the large seam in color. She shivered. In the six years since the operation she had never looked at her naked back. She returned the small mirror to its place.
    It seemed to her that if you didn’t know about her back, if you only saw her naked from the front, you would think she was perfectly all right. The curve of her hip to right was so minute as to be invisible; certainly no one else ever noticed it. She’d never thought about the scar since it had finished healing and the itching had stopped, but now she remembered how for a long time she’d had a sense of it not as a seam in her skin but as a basic part of her. As though the scar itself were her spine, the thing that held her together. During that period she’d sometimes dreamed that she was lying on the ground . . . or, rather, the spine, the scar was lying on the ground and the rest of her was floating off into the air like chiffon veils. But every time the veils were about to float away entirely into the sky to be free, the scar would pull them back to the ground. This night she dreamed a similar dream, except that it was happening in front of