Boys and Girls Together by William Saroyan Page B

although it wasn’t natural, although it had been cultivated and frequently disappeared, it was very pleasing to the ear, her voice rising sweetly in the right places in a manner so artificial as to be refreshing.
    There was the girl who had studied ballet since childhood but had learned to do other dancing because she had to live and danced almost naked in night clubs and said: ‘It’s so humiliating when they’re rude, when they say things. One night at the beginning of my number I was slapped on the buttocks (Refined) and didn’t even stop, but after the number I sat down and cried.’ She was well-made and had apleasant nature. She was shy and serious-minded and laughed when she was happy, and didn’t want to dance for a living. She was afraid of having them, though. It wasn’t just a small fear that would go away. She was afraid because her mother had died when she had been four years old, when her sister had been born, and she had heard her mother dying.
    There was the girl who wrote delicate poetry and looked like nothing until she was seen whole and then looked very much like something white and astonishing because the rest of the time she looked bleak and dull because her face was bleak and dull and her hair dry and perhaps dirty. She talked a lot about the discipline of writing poetry. (Not interesting.) She had a nice name in the poetry world and loved to work at poetry. They were walking through the slums one day and a small girl with a dirty face and a running nose said hello to her and she didn’t say hello to the girl but said, ‘I don’t know why they have them.’
    There was the girl who must have been a little crazy, who got past the desk at the hotel and climbed thirty flights of stairs because the elevator boys would have stopped her: rang his doorbell and when he opened the door walked in quickly unbuttoning her dress at the front and saying, ‘I’ve got to take a shower first because I had to walk up.’ The reason he gave some thought to her in relation to them was that she came from peasants—they were wine-makers in the old country. Her feet were fine to see, although darkand a little rough, for she had never paid much attention to herself. She had thick black hair and the whitest teeth he had ever seen in anyone who wasn’t black. She was the third from the last in a family of eleven children, and her parents had always been poor but had always managed to get a great deal of food on to the table for everybody to eat, and wine. Even if she had been the one, it wouldn’t have done, though, for she only wanted to go on the stage. She came back a second time, taking the stairs, so he let it be known that she was to be permitted to ride the elevators. She was grateful for this and said, ‘You didn’t have to do that.’ (Never forget her.)
    There was the woman who said she was the feature writer for a newspaper in South Carolina and wanted an interview but didn’t ask any questions and seemed to be under the impression that he was the man who had written a book another writer had written.
    There was the woman who did publicity for a famous nightclub and was all right until one night she said, ‘Let me do your publicity.’
    There were others and they were all just fine for him but not for them. They were right for the time, but not for afterwards.
    Well, now it
was
afterwards. He was no longer a son, and there was his poor woman, there was their mother, sitting before the fire in despair, biting the fingernails that she had had manicured a few hours ago.

Chapter 17
    He was standing at the window watching the cars and streetcars go by. They hadn’t spoken for five minutes because they’d had another fight.
    They had a fight every day, but every six or seven days they had a big one, and then the woman screamed or the man beat her. They had them all the time. The bad ones were very bad. They felt ashamed and