The Progress of Love

scarred by fresh and old skate marks and darkened with smoke and dirt. The room where the men sat was hot and smoky and it was assumed they drank liquor in there, though perhaps it was only coffee out of the stained enamel mugs. Of course, there was a story that boys had once got in before the men arrived, and had peed in the coffeepot. Another story was that one of his friends had done that when Blinker went to scoop up the admission money.
    The rinkie-dinks could be busy or idle around parts of the rink, climbing the wall ladders, walking along the benches, even running along the platform, which had no guardrail, under the roof openings. Sometimes they would wiggle through these openings onto the roof, and get back in the same way. Some of the time, of course, they skated. They got in for nothing.
    So did Sam and Edgar and Callie, soon enough. They came along when the skating was well under way and the rink full and noisy. Close to one corner of the building were some cherry trees, and a very light person could climb one of these trees and drop onto the roof. Then this very light, bold, and agile person could scramble along the roof and crawl through one of the openings and jump to the platform underneath, risking a fall to the ice below and broken bones or even death. But boys risked that all the time. From the platform you could climb down a wall ladder, then work your way around the benches and slip over the wall of the passage made for shovelling out snow. Then it was a matter of crouching in the shadow, watching for the right moment, unhooking the snow door, and letting in the two who were waiting outside: Sam and Edgar, who lost no time putting on their skates and taking to the ice.
    Why did others not manage the same trick, Sam might be asked on those occasions, years and years later, when he chose to tell the story, and he always said maybe they did, he wouldn’t know about it. The rinkie-dinks of course could have opened the door to any number of friends, but they were not disposed to do so, being quite jealous of their own privileges. And few of the night skaters were small enough and light and quick and brave enough to get in through the roof. Children might have tried it, but they skated on Saturday afternoons and didn’t have the advantage of darkness. And why was Callie not noticed? Well, she was very quick, and she was never careless; she waited her time. She wore a ragged, ill-fitting set of clothes—breeches, windbreaker, cloth cap. There were always boys around who were dressed in cast-off raggedy clothes. And the town was just big enough that not every face could be placed instantly. There were two public schools, and a boy from one, noticing her, would just think she went to the other.
    Sam’s wife once asked, “How did you persuade her?” Callie—what was in it for Callie, who never owned a pair of skates?
    “Callie’s life was work,” Sam said. “So anything that wasn’t work—that was a thrill for her.” But he wondered—how did they persuade her? It must have been a dare. Making friends with Callie at first had been something like making friends with a testy and suspicious little dog, and later on it had been like making friendswith the twelve-year-old she looked to be. At first she wouldn’t stop work to look at them. They admired the needlework picture she was making, of green hills and a round blue pond and a large sailboat, and she pulled it to her chest as if they were making fun of her. “Do you make the pictures up yourself?” said Sam, meaning it as a compliment, but she was incensed.
    “You send away for them,” she said. “You send to Cincinnati.”
    They persisted. Why? Because she was a little slavey, forever out of things, queer-looking, undersized, and compared to her they were in the mainstream, they were fortunate. They could be mean or kind to her as they pleased, and it pleased them to be kind. Also, it was a challenge. Jokes and dares were what finally disarmed her. They brought her tiny lumps of coal wrapped in chocolate papers. She put dried thistles under their sheets. She told them she had never refused a dare. That was the secret of Callie—she would never say that anything was too much for her. Far from being oppressed by all the work she had to do, she gloried in it. One night, when Sam was doing his accounting at the dining-room table, she thrust a school notebook under his nose.
    “What’s this, Callie?”
    “I don’t know!”
    It was her