“I wasn’t sure. You were pretty quiet the whole night.”
“I didn’t really know what to say,” Lily admitted. She still didn’t. She had wanted to talk about it with Kath all day—to comb through what had happened and what had not happened the way she and Shirley would have dissected a YWCA dance. But now, as she and Kath walked together through the cloudy, windy afternoon, she felt the same strange shyness that had gripped her after they left the club on Friday night.
“The first time I went,” Kath said, “I was a little . . . overwhelmed, I guess. Jean told me it was the same with her. It’s like you’ve been told about chocolate your entire life but you’ve never tried any, and then all of a sudden someone gives you an entire box, and you end up eating all of it, and you feel sick.” Kath shot her a quick glance. “You just have to get used to it—to having chocolate more often.”
They had arrived at the bottom of the steps, and Kath fell silent as they both started climbing. That morning when Lily got dressed she had come across the blouse she had worn to the Telegraph Club, folded in her bottom dresser drawer. When she started to move it out of the way she caught the faint odor of cigarette smoke, and then something else. She pulled it out and pressed her nose to the cloth, where she smelled the bar itself—a stale, boozy scent. （Standing against the wall of the club, plucking the fabric of her blouse away from the sweat on her back, the air thick with the exhalations of all those women.） She should wash the blouse before her mother discovered it, but she couldn’t bring herself to put it in the laundry basket. She wanted to preserve it like a piece of evidence.
It wasn’t like chocolate, Lily thought. It was like finding water after a drought. She couldn’t drink enough, and her thirst made her ashamed, and the shame made her angry.
At the top of the stairs, she paused and turned to Kath. “I want to go again,” she said.
She watched a smile rise from Kath’s mouth to her eyes. The corners turned up. Her lashes, Lily noticed, were light brown.
An understanding seemed to bloom between the two of them. It felt like a coin dropping into one of the automated dioramas at Playland’s Musée Mécanique, and a mechanized scene was now about to play: miniature women on circular paths would begin to move toward and around each other, as if in a dance.
“Then we’ll go again,” Kath said.
Lily smiled back at her, feeling a surge of happiness, and together they continued up the crest of Russian Hill.
They had only gone half a block when Kath reached into her book bag. “I almost forgot.” She pulled out a magazine. “I saved this for you. My brother had it, and he didn’t want it anymore, but I thought you might like to read it.”
Kath was holding out an issue of Collier’s magazine. The front cover was a painting of several strange-looking spaceships flying in formation toward a red planet. The headline asked, CAN WE GET TO MARS? IS THERE LIFE ON MARS?
Lily felt a sudden tightening in her chest. She took the magazine from Kath’s outstretched hand. “Thank you. I can’t wait to read it.”
23
At fifteen minutes past ten o’clock on Wednesday morning, the fire alarms went off. Lily’s heartbeat thundered up into her throat at the sound, until Miss Weiland waved her hands and shouted, “All right, all right, you knew this was coming. Everyone go in order to your places—in order! Do not run!”
It was the air-raid drill. Lily had completely forgotten about it. Last summer there had been a citywide one, involving mock evacuations and what seemed like hours of ambulance and fire truck sirens crisscrossing the hills. In the newspaper the day after, Lily had read that 169,000 imaginary San Franciscans perished in the wake of a fictional atomic bomb that had struck at Powell Street.
Now everyone got up, abandoning their notebooks and pencils, and headed for the hallway. High school students were too large to duck and cover under their desks, so they’d been told to go as far from exterior windows as possible, and to lie facedown on the floor, covering their heads and necks with their hands. Teachers had to do the drill too, and it was always disconcerting to see them dropping down like the students.
Lily followed her classmates into the hall and found a space on the floor, lying down and folding her arms over her head. If she smashed her elbows over her ears, it dulled the shrieking of the alarm a little, but it was an uncomfortable position, with her forehead and nose pressed against the polished concrete, and it was hard to breathe.