When She Was Good by Philip Roth Page B

she brought no one to her home, and did not offer explanations for her behavior either. So, from the age of ten, though she had no friend who was her confidante, nobody she cared about ever saw her mother taking from her students the little envelopes of money (and saying, “Thank you very much,” so very, very sweetly), or what was far worse, the dread of dreads, saw her father coming through the front door and falling down drunk in the hall.
    Not even Kitty Egan, whom she discovered in her second year of high school, and who for four months was as intimate a companion as Lucy had ever had. Kitty didn’t go to Liberty Center High, but to the parish school of St. Mary’s. Lucy had just started working four nights a week at the Dairy Bar, and she met Kitty because of the scandal: Kitty’s older sister, Babs, who was only seventeen, had run away from home. She hadn’t even waited until Friday, when the girls at the Dairy Bar were paid, but had taken flight after work on a rainy Tuesday night, probably still in her waitress uniform. Her accomplice was an eighteen-year-old boy who swept up at the packing company and came from Selkirk. A post card addressed to “The Slaves at Dale’s Dairy Bar” and mailed from Aurora, Illinois, had arrived in town at the end of the week. “Headed for West Virginia. Keep up the good work, KIDS.” And signed, “Mrs. Homer ‘Babs’ Cook.”
    Kitty was sent around to the Dairy Bar by her father to pick up Babs’ wages for Monday and Tuesday. She was a tall,skinny girl whose most striking feature was the absence of any complexion; she had no more coloring than the inside of a potato, even when she came in out of the cold. At first she seemed as unlike Babs as she could be, until Lucy learned that Babs had dyed her hair black so as to look like Linda Darnell (it had originally been orange like Kitty’s); as for her skin, Babs caked it in so much mud, Kitty said, you would never know that actually she was part anemic.
    The family had always had their troubles with Babs. The only satisfaction she gave them was to wear crucifix earrings in her pierced ears and a cross around her neck, and
that
, Kitty said, was only to draw attention to the space between her breasts—which was the only real thing there anyway, the space. The breasts were things like toilet paper or her brother Francis’ socks that she stuffed into her brassiere. Babs wasn’t five minutes away from St. Mary’s—a dark brick building just by the Winnisaw Bridge—when she would duck into some alleyway to cover herself with pancake make-up, from the roots of her dyed hair to the tops of her homemade breasts, all the while puffing a Lucky Strike cigarette. Kitty told Lucy about the terrible thing she had once found in her sister’s purse—“Then I found this terrible thing once in her purse”—and when Babs discovered that Kitty had flushed it down the toilet, she screamed and yelled and struck her in the face. Kitty never told anyone—except the priest—for fear that her parents would severely punish her older sister, who, she said, needed mercy and forgiveness and love. Babs was a sinner and knew not what she was doing, and Kitty loved her, and every morning and every night she prayed for her sister living down there in West Virginia with a boy who Kitty believed was not even her husband.
    There were three more children at home, all younger than Kitty, and she prayed for them too, especially for Francis Jr., who was soon to have an operation for his “mastoidistis.” The Egans lived out near the Maurer Dairy Farm, where Mr. Egan worked, in a house that was nothing more than a dilapidated old shack. There were nails poking out of the timbers, and flypaper dangling, though it was already fall, and every unpaintedtwo-by-four seemed to have its decoration of exposed wire. Lucy, upon entering, was afraid to move for fear of brushing up against something that would cause her to feel even more nausea and more despair