Come and Join the Dance by Joyce Johnson Page B

a machine in motion. She remembered the proud, shy way Kay had said, “Peter’s taken on my education.” If it was true that Kay went to bed with people, of course she’d go to bed with Peter. But Kay hadn’t told her, and she had always assumed that Kay told her everything. The wheels were turning much too fast. She wanted to get out of the apartment immediately. She didn’t want to look up the hall to the bedroom. And she didn’t want to care. “I think I’m going,” she said to Anthony. “Tell Kay I’ll see her.” She got up and walked to the door.
    â€œNow you’re angry,” Anthony said sadly.
    She shook her head. “No … ”
    â€œOh look, don’t go. Christ, that’s so silly.”
    â€œI just—want to, that’s all. Besides, we weren’t getting along very well.”
    He had stood up now. “I really do think you’re very pretty,” he said.
    â€œThank you.”
    â€œAnd it’s really true that I’m hungry. All I had yesterday was a frankfurter.”
    She looked at his face and saw for the first time how white it was, how dark and huge his eyes were. There were two buttons missing from his shirt. “I can lend you a dollar.” She felt embarrassingly overfed.
    â€œWell gee … fifty cents would be fine. I don’t know when I can pay you back.”
    â€œThat’s all right.”
    â€œWhy don’t I go down with you now? I’ll have breakfast and talk to you. And you’ll have coffee… . Okay?”
    Why not? she thought, why not? She knew she didn’t want to be alone.
    â€œOkay,” she said.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    A NTHONY WAS TWO years younger than she was, but a lot had happened to him. Only two years before, he had been a senior in a parochial high school in Pittsburgh. Something had boiled up in him that last year, a delinquency of books and violence. “I hadn’t read anything till then,” he told Susan. “ Ivanhoe , Dickens, Popular Mechanics and the Bible—nothing! I played basketball.” Somehow he began to stumble across other books—Thomas Wolfe, Rimbaud, Huxley, D. H. Lawrence. “I read some of Ulysses and thought Joyce was nutty. And of course I was reading a lot of crap too.” He wrote two notebooks of poetry and hid them in his locker. At the same time, he was terribly bored; he found himself provoking fights all the time and not even knowing why. In one of his classes he announced dramatically that he would no longer go to chapel because he could not believe in “the myth of God.” He was expelled. His father had beaten him. “Just because he believes that people should be beaten,” Anthony said, suddenly furious. “He didn’t care. He never went to school, that hypocritical old bastard.” His fists clenched; he eyed all the people in Schulte’s as if he were looking for someone to hit.
    â€œOkay,” Susan laughed. “It’s all right.”
    â€œHe said he’d get me a job in the steel mill. Big deal! That’s where I’d end up if I went home now. I said the hell with that. Then the school said they’d take me back if I promised to go to chapel—I was a good student or something. So I went back. There’s an anticlimax! But I decided to have a good time. I went to town on some of the papers I wrote, almost caused a couple of riots. But anyway they gave me honors in a lot of crap when I graduated, and I got the scholarship I just bitched up… . By that time I was completely cynical.”
    â€œAre you still completely cynical?” Susan teased him.
    â€œYeah.” He grinned.
    â€œWhat’s your poetry about?”
    â€œAbout? I don’t know—whatever hits me. It’s good. Listen—I wrote this one a week ago… . ” He recited the poem too rapidly, as if he wanted to say all of it at once.
    Somehow she could not really