Juggernaut by Nancy Springer Page B

which seemed incongruous on her. She stood poker slim and straight, somehow looking perma-pressed all over despite the wrinkles shirring her face. “Just like high school,” she commented crisply. Men stood nearby, ignoring the leftover women, blankly staring at the couples on the dance floor.
    Under the disco ball, the Paul Jones juggernaut wheeled again. This time Marietta slow-danced with a huge man who seemed attracted to her. “My heart medicine don’t let me have an erection,” he declared, stroking her back, “but I love oral sex.”
    She escaped gratefully when the music changed. The next go-round she was leftovers. Bill, she noticed, had joined the staring men on the sidelines, ignoring her like the others. Marietta danced next with an attractive man her age who inched his hand toward her butt. She grasped his arm and hoisted it. “Oh, is that the way it is,” he complained. Her next partner, nerdy youngster, seemed to regard her as a maypole to circle around. Eventually the ordeal ended and she fled to her seat.
    “That Bob you mentioned,” Pat asked, rejoining her, “is he married?”
    Only the fact that she had completely forgotten about Bob kept Marietta from blowing her cover by knowing too much. She had to think, and thinking saved her. “I, uh, don’t know him that well. I guess not, since he came here.”
    “Oh, we have our married singles,” Deb said wryly.
    “But why? I mean, how do they get in?”
    Everyone smiled at her naivety. “Nobody checks,” put in the poker-straight older woman, Muriel. Something about her starchiness made Marietta peg her as a librarian or a head nurse.
    “You can tell,” said Pat. “They come from someplace far away. They want your phone number but they won’t give you theirs.”
    “Sometimes I think the married ones are the only ones actually trying to connect,” said Muriel almost wistfully.
    “What’s with all those guys who just stand and stare?” Marietta asked. “What are they looking at?”
    “Easy. They’re looking at the boobs bouncing,” Muriel said, her tone so undisguisedly bitter that, without meaning to, Marietta gave her a shocked look. Muriel returned the glance, opaque, expressionless. Deb saw, apparently, and intercepted.
    “Do we seem like the witches in Macbeth ?” she asked lightly. “Capering in circles?”
    “Well, it’s hard to keep smiling year after year,” Pat put in. “I mean, the brains and experience at this table… Deb, you’re a lab tech, right? And I’m a wellness administrator, Judy drives truck for UPS, Sue has her own graphic arts business, Muriel is a physician—one of the first female gynecologists in the state.”
    “Wow,” Marietta said on cue, although she was still trying to figure out what a wellness administrator was.
    “And there’s a movie producer who joins us sometimes,” Pat continued, “and—oh, some others who drop out and in, people do that a lot at these singles things. But the point is, the men…” Pat seemed to have mislaid the point.
    “Boobs,” Muriel summed up tersely.
    Men were boobs? All men looked for in a woman was boobs? Both of the above?
    “What do you do, Mary?” Pat asked.
    “I, um, I’m in civil service.”
    “Postal?”
    “Yes. Frequently.”
    They laughed, and talk moved on, Marietta saw that Bill had moved to the dance floor, with a pretty young mini-skirted girl for his partner. The evening blurred. She no longer hoped to dance. With her back to the table she watched the dancers, she watched more men and a few women arriving insouciantly late, she watched the slow wheeling of that dreadful disco ball, hearing snatches of womentalk all around her.
    “…a few drinks before they get here, then more at the bar…”
    “…only four grams of fat.”
    “Premarin and, what’s the name of that other stuff that makes you keep having your period till you’re ninety?”
    “…do you believe for one moment that guys would get annual dickograms?”
    “…so