Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk

orange sun between parallel green lines of
     trees and gray lines of concrete. Dandelions choked the strips of lawn dividing the
     auto lanes. Penelope was groaning and clanking over the top of a hill in second gear;
     they were moving too slowly to travel in high. Far ahead on the winding Long Island
     parkway Marjorie could see thousands of cars in two thick black streams, writhing
     in a dirty blue haze of exhaust fumes.
    George hit the horn, and Penelope uttered a jerky noise like the laugh of a sick old
     man. “Dear, it doesn’t help to do that,” Marjorie said.
    She shifted uncomfortably, crossing the bandaged ankle over the other leg. A loose
     spring in the seat was pinching her. The decay of Penelope had much advanced in a
     year. The green paint was cracking off in big patches of rust, the upholstery had
     popped open in half a dozen places, and the glass in the windshield was held together
     with surgical tape. Worst of all was the noise from underneath, a queer intermittent
     rasping groan. George said it was a loose transmission, not worth fixing, and nothing
     to worry about. But it worried Marjorie.
    The whole excursion rather worried her. She was beginning to regret she had allowed
     her mother’s objections to stampede her into going. With a ready-made excuse in the
     injured ankle, she could easily have avoided this long drive on the first nice Sunday
     in May, when the parkways were always horrible. But it was almost a matter of honor
     to insist on doing anything that her mother opposed, the more so when George was concerned.
     George himself was acting strangely. He was taking her to dinner at the Villa Marlene,
     he said, the most expensive restaurant on Long Island. How could he afford it, she
     wondered, and why was he doing it? He had evaded her questions with mysterious winks
     and grins.
    To take her mind from the jam, and her headache, and George’s queerness, and Penelope’s
     noise, she suggested a game of Twenty Questions. They played for over an hour, until
     the traffic thinned beyond Mineola and they began running with more speed through
     a charming countryside of green rolling estates and brown potato farms. She beat him
     four times, which irritated him and made her feel better. Twenty Questions had always
     been their favorite pastime on long rides. At first George had always beaten her;
     for a while they had played even; now he rarely won. Marjorie’s college education
     was fresher than his, and he had no time to read. He said at last that he was bored
     with the game, and they rode in silence. The cool fresh country air cleared Marjorie’s
     headache, but her uneasiness deepened as they drove along in a splashing sunset and
     then in blue twilight. She tried to get George to talk, but he wouldn’t; now and then
     he reached over and fondled her knee and winked. She wasn’t pleased by the possessive
     gesture but she didn’t know how to stop it. George had fondled her knee hundreds of
     times in the past with her enthusiastic approval.
    The first view of the famous restaurant was disappointing. Marjorie had expected floodlit
     vistas of garden, avenues of trees, perhaps a pond with white swans. But it was just
     a weathered gray wooden house with a faded gilt sign over the doorway, a patchy little
     lawn, and a few overgrown trees and lilac bushes. The parking lot in the back was
     full of Cadillacs and Chryslers; Penelope, chugging into a space between two sleek
     convertibles and dying with a snort and a backfire, looked strikingly out of place.
     A parking attendant hurried up. With a swift glance at the car, at George’s clothes,
     and at Marjorie’s bandaged ankle, he said in a German accent, “Sorry, restaurant all
     full.”
    “Thanks,” said George, “we have a reservation. Let’s go, Marge.”
    They walked around to the front and mounted the stairs. A big gray-headed man in a
     tuxedo, with a handful of huge brown menus, opened the door under the gilt sign