Girls In 3-B, The by Valerie Taylor Page B

slacks as too casual and the flowered jersey as too suburban, pulling out most of her eyebrows and penciling in new ones. This was her debut into the world of creative people. She felt a little frightened.
    Suppose they didn't like her? Suppose she didn't fit in?
    It's only an extra-curricular activity she reassured herself, just a group some professor has to sponsor. They're not even professional authors. She hated to agree with Jack at any point where the arts were concerned, but it comforted her to feel a little scornful in return for the scorn these more assured people might presumably feel for her.
    Someone asked, "Are you a Freudian or a Jungian?" and she turned to answer, but the questioner was lost in a babble of other voices. The bearded boy shambled over and sat down at her feet. "What do you do to release your inhibitions? I don't have any inhibitions myself -- I just do whatever I feel like doing."
    "Hard on the bystanders."
    "What in hell do I care about bystanders? I'm completely self-centered. To develop talent it's necessary to be altogether self-oriented."
    The girl in pink-rimmed glasses nodded.
    The girls, Annice decided while she munched potato chips, were nothing much to look at. Here as in high school the serious-minded femmes were the homely ones. Except for a little Nisei girl who looked like a painting on silk, they were mostly eye-glassed, too fat or too bony, not so much ugly as lacking in some assurance that pretty girls wear from the day of their first lipstick. Annice identified their look of self-depression without any trouble because she herself had worn it until she was almost sixteen. It was the opposite of charm. She had been rescued by an invitation from the captain of the high school basketball team, whose girl fortunately ruptured an appendix on the day of the Junior Prom; grace and poise settled over her with the folds of the formal her mother was persuaded to buy, disclosing -- as it were -- curves she had never known she had. Except for a woman of thirty-five who in spite of gray-streaked hair and a comfortable dumpiness gave off the unmistakable aura of successful sex, the females at this poetry-reading were the type who failed to attract men mainly because they didn't think of themselves as desirable.
    Probably here to find a man, she thought unkindly, forgetting that although she had come here with one she was looking around for better pickings.
    The boys were more interesting. Used as she was to student fads and eccentricities in dress, she paid no heed to the corduroy trousers, the blue work shirts, the Ivy League stripes and button-down collars or the green velvet-frogged smoking jacket worn by the balding, round-bellied host. Most of them wore moccasins with white sweat socks or no socks. Three or four with bumpy intelligent faces and harsh South Chicago voices she thought were Jewish, but it was hard to tell because this year everybody made a fad of Yiddish slang -- he's a schlepp, she's a no-goodnik, you should read a book already. There was a young Arab with a thin startled face, conspicuous here for his tailoring. The Jewish boys kept handing him peanuts and potato chips and refilling his glass, very politely, and after a while he started looking around uneasily like a trapped rabbit. Later, much later, she noticed that he had left.
    There were three or four boys with beards, none as well developed as Alan's, and one weedy boy had an aggressive British moustache. Definitely, in this crowd the men were the ones to notice. She turned an aloof profile to Alan, and after a few glances away he reached up and pulled her down on the floor beside him. "What's your name, woman ? ”
    "Annice."
    "Anise like you drink ? "
    "I don't drink anything."
    "Releases the inhibitions. I don't drink because I haven't got any inhibitions. I live with complete selfishness.”
    "You said that before."
    "It's still true. I'm completely unable to feel tenderness or compassion for anybody, even the