Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk

period after classes was like
     a birthday party that came every day. In a word, she was stage-struck.
    One evening rehearsals stopped early for costume fitting. The players came up one
     by one, giggling and squealing, to be measured under a bright light in the center
     of the stage, supervised by a fat girl with thick braided black hair. Marjorie had
     been wondering for days who this girl was. She had seen her sitting by herself in
     a back row of the auditorium, coming and going as she pleased at these closed rehearsals,
     sometimes strolling forward to whisper to the director, Miss Kimble, who always listened
     carefully. Miss Kimble in her youth had sung in the chorus of a real Shubert road
     company of
Blossom Time
; so although she was now just a skittish old maid in baggy tweeds, teaching music
     at Hunter, Marjorie was inclined to respect anyone she respected.
    When Miss Kimble called, “All right, the Mikado next, please,” Marjorie came up the
     steps of the stage to the stout girl with mixed curiosity and shyness.
    “Ah, the star herself.” The girl’s voice was husky and grown-up. She wore a flaring
     maroon skirt, a blouse of coarse brown linen with garish embroidery, and a wide tooled-leather
     belt spiked with copper ornaments. She said to her assistant, a spindly girl with
     a tape measure, “Chest and hips, that’s all. We’ll have to hire her costume from Brooks.”
    Miss Kimble said, or rather whined, “Marsha, we’re over the budget already—”
    “You can fake a lot with cheesecloth and crepe paper, Dora,” said the stout girl,
     “and I’m doing what I can, but you can’t fake a Mikado.”
    “Well, if you’re sure you can’t—”
    “Thanks,” Marjorie muttered in the girl’s ear.
    Marsha turned her back on Miss Kimble, and said in a tone too low even for the spindly
     girl to hear, “Don’t mention it. You
are
the star, you know, dear.” Thereafter she ignored Marjorie.
    Next evening she was at the rehearsal again. When it was over she came to Marjorie
     and made a couple of comments on her performance which were penetrating and useful,
     more so than any of Miss Kimble’s directions. “Let’s go out and have a cup of coffee
     and talk,” she said. As they walked arm in arm along Lexington Avenue, bending their
     heads before the cutting dank wind which swayed signs and flapped scraps of newspaper
     by, Marsha suddenly said, “Say, I’m starved. Let’s have dinner together. I know a
     wonderful place—”
    “I’m expected home for dinner, I’m sorry—”
    “Oh. Of course. Well, then, come and have coffee and watch me eat until you have to
     go home. Yes?”
    They went to an old brownstone house on a side street, and up a flight of stairs to
     a doorway framed by a huge grinning gilt dragon mouth;
Mi Fong’s Jade Garden
, the sign over the dragon’s ears read. They passed through the fanged jaws into a
     crimson-lit room smelling of incense and strange cookery. Marjorie was very glad she
     had not committed herself to eat. She half believed that cats, dogs, and mice were
     cooked in Chinese restaurants. The pervading odor seemed more or less to confirm the
     idea. Here and there in the gloom a few diners with odd faces were eating odd-looking
     things out of oddly shaped dishes. Near the door one fat woman with a mustache was
     using chopsticks to lift a morsel of meat out of a tureen, from which there protruded
     a big horribly white bone. Marsha sniffed the air. “God, these places destroy my figure
     but I’m mad about them—Hi, Mi Fong. How’s your wife? Better?”
    “Rittle better, thank you, Missa Masha.” A short Chinaman in a white coat bowed them
     to a latticed booth lit by red paper lanterns. “Same boot? Quiet, peaceful? Rittle
     drink first, maybe?”
    “I guess so. Marjorie, how about trying a Singapore sling? Mi Fong makes the best
     slings in town.”
    Marjorie faltered, “I don’t know if I want a drink. Coffee—”
    “Oh, God, it’s