When She Was Good by Philip Roth

scared, and so they had to stop everything while she worked to pick up the stitch with a bobby pin, before her mother saw it in the morning and wanted an explanation. Then on the Saturday before graduation it happened; in the pitch-black living room he got two fingers down onto her nipple. Bare. And the next thing he knew she was off visiting her married sister in Superior, and he was in the Army.
    As soon as he was shipped to the Aleutians—even before the first shock of the place had worn off—he had written Bev asking her to get the University of Minnesota to send him an application form. When it arrived, he began to spend a little time each evening filling it out, but shortly thereafter it became evident to him that letters from Bev herself had just stopped coming. Fortunately by this time he was more adjusted to the bleakness of his surroundings than he had been on that first terrible night, and so was able to admit to himself that it had been pretty stupid to think of choosing a university because a girl he once knew happened to be a student there. And absolutely idiotic is what it would have been if after being discharged he had gone ahead and showed up in Minneapolis, to find that this girl had picked up with somebody new, neglecting however to tell him anything about it.
    So the application remained only partially completed, though it was still somewhere among “his papers,” all of which he planned to go through as soon as he could have two or three uninterrupted days so as to do the job right.
    The cheerleader Roy was sort of interested in was named Mary Littlefield, though everybody called her “Monkey,” he soon discovered. She was small and had dark bangs, and for a short girl she had a terrific figure (which you really couldn’t say was the case with Beverly Collison, whom in his bitterness Roy had come to characterize, and not unjustly, as “flat as a board”). Monkey Littlefield was only a junior, which Roy figured was probably too young for him now; and if it turned out that she didn’t have a brain in her head, then it was just going to be curtains for little Monkey, even before the first date. What he was in the market for this time was somebody with a little maturity in her attitudes. But Monkey Littlefield did have this terrific figure, with these really terrifically developed muscles in her legs, and that she was a big-shot cheerleader didn’t faze him as it had with Ginger Donnelly two years before. What was a cheerleader, anyway, but a girl who was an extrovert? Moreover, Monkey lived up in The Grove,and so she knew who Roy was: Ellie Sowerby’s cousin and a good friend of Joe Whetstone’s. He imagined that she knew he was an ex-G.I. simply because of his clothes.
    When she and her cohorts started in practicing their cartwheels, Roy would lace his fingers together behind his neck, cross one ankle over the other, and just have to shake his head; “Oh, brother,” he would think, “they ought to know what it’s like up in the Aleutians.”
    By then it would be nearly dark. The team would begin drifting off the field, their silver helmets swinging at their sides as they headed for the locker room. The cheerleaders would pick up their coats and schoolbooks from where they lay in piles on the first row of bleachers, and Roy would raise himself up to his full six feet three inches, stretch his arms way out and yawn so that anybody watching would just think of him as being more or less easygoing and unruffled. Then, taking one long leap to the ground, he’d plunge his hands down into his pockets and start off toward home, maybe kicking high out with one foot, as though practicing his punt … and thinking that if he had a car of his own there would probably be nothing at all to saying to Monkey Littlefield, “I’m going up to my cousin’s, if you want a lift.”
    Buying a car was something he had begun to give a lot of thought to recently, and not as a luxury item either. His father