The Progress of Love

read. I had read it through the night in the cold of the back bedroom, in my haste and greed skipping a lot of the Grand Inquisitor and other parts where I had got bogged down.
    “Which is your favorite brother?” said Mr. Cryderman, smiling as if he had got me into a corner.
    “Mitya,” I said. By this time, I wasn’t so nervous and would have liked to go on, explaining why this was so—that Alyosha was too angelic and Ivan too intellectual, and so on. On the way home, I imagined that I had done this, and that while I spoke, the expression on Mr. Cryderman’s face had changed to one of respect and delicate chagrin. Then I realized the mistake I had made, in pronunciation.
    I didn’t get a chance to go on, because Mrs. Cryderman cried out from the sofa, “Favorites, favorites! Who is everybody’s favorite big old bloated old pregnant lady? That’s what I want to know!”
    However much I mocked the Crydermans to MaryBeth, I wanted something from them. Attention. Recognition. I liked Mrs. Cryderman’s saying I was a genius at history, even though I knew it was a silly thing to say. I would have valued what he said more. I thought that he looked down on this town and everybody in it. He didn’t care what they thought of him for not shovelling his walk. I wanted to snip one little hole in his contempt.
    Just the same, he had to be called honey-boy, and submit to those kisses.
    MaryBeth had new things to tell me, too. Beatrice had a boyfriend, and hoped to be engaged. MaryBeth said they were going at it hot and heavy.
    Beatrice’s boyfriend was an apprentice barber. He visited her in the afternoons, when she got home from her shift at the hospital and there was a lull in barbershop business. The other girls who lived in the house were at work then, and MaryBeth and I wouldnot have been there, either, if we had been tactful enough to loiter around the school, or go for Cokes, or spend time looking in store windows. But MaryBeth insisted on making a beeline for the rooming house.
    We would find Beatrice making up the bed. She took all the covers off and tucked in the sheet with a professional briskness. Then she laid an absorbent cotton pad across the sheet at a strategic place. I was reminded of the days when I used to sleep shamefully over rubber, being an occasional bed wetter.
    Now she replaced the top covers, smoothed and tidied them, hiding the secret. She plumped up the pillows, turned a corner of the top sheet down over the quilt. A queasy feeling of childhood lust came back to me, a recollection of bedclothes intimacies. Rough blankets, comforting flannelette sheets, secrets.
    Down the hall to the bathroom went Beatrice, having to fix up the appropriate part of herself as she had fixed the bed. She had a serious, dutiful look on her face, a look of housewifely preoccupation. She still had not spoken one word to us.
    “I wouldn’t be surprised if she went ahead and did it right in front of us,” said MaryBeth loudly as we passed the bathroom door on our way downstairs. The water was running. What exactly did Beatrice do? I thought it involved sponges.
    We sat on the veranda steps. The swing had been taken down for the winter and not been put back yet.
    “She has no shame,” MaryBeth said. “And I have to sleep in the same bed. She thinks if she puts the pad over the sheet it’s all right. She stole that pad from the hospital. You could never trust her, even when she was little. Once, we had a fight and she said, ‘Let’s make up, shake hands,’ and when I took her hand to shake, she had a baby toad in it and the toad had gone to the bathroom on her.”
    The snow was not quite gone; a nippy wind was blowing the smell of swamps and creeks and floodwaters into town. But the barber’s apprentice hadn’t bothered to put on a coat. He came hurrying along the alley in his white smock, head down, purposefully. He wasn’t prepared to see us.
    “Hi there!” he said with false assurance, nervous jocularity.
    MaryBeth wouldn’t answer him, and I couldn’t, either, out of loyalty. We didn’t get up, but shifted apart, giving him just enough room to go up the steps. I listened for, but couldn’t hear, the opening and closing of the bedroom door.
    “They might as well be two dogs,” MaryBeth said. “Two dogs doing it.”
    I thought about what was going on at that very moment. The greeting, the look exchanged, the removal of clothing. In what order? Accompanied by what words and caresses? Would