Dancing Girls and Other Stories

“He’s real nice, not like some you get,” she said to A

“He’s from one of them Arabian countries. Though I thought they wore turbans, or not turbans, those white things, like. He just has this fu

A

“I’m glad it was you took the room,” she’d said to A

A

The awful thing, as she told Lelah later, was that she was the only one who’d gone. “She had all this food ready, and not a single other person was there. She was really upset, and I was so embarrassed for her. It was some Friends of Foreign Students thing, just for women: students and the wives of students. She obviously didn’t think I was foreign enough, and she couldn’t figure out why no one else came.” Neither could A

Lelah smiled, showing her wise tooth. “Don’t they know any better than to throw those things at night?” she said. “Those men aren’t going to let their wives go out by themselves at night. And the single ones are afraid to walk on the streets alone, I know I am.”

“I’m not,” A

“Then you’re a fool,” Lelah said. “Don’t you know there was a girl murdered three blocks from here? Left her bathroom window unlocked. Some man climbed through the window and cut her throat.”

“I always carry my umbrella,” A

“You shouldn’t worry,” she said. “You’re well off. At least your family doesn’t almost disown you for doing what you want to do.” Lelah’s father kept writing her letters, urging her to return to Turkey, where the family had decided on the perfect husband for her. Lelah had stalled them for one year, and maybe she could stall them for one more, but that would be her limit. She couldn’t possibly finish her thesis in that time.

A

No one wrote her letters urging her to come home, no one had picked out the perfect husband for her. On the contrary. She could imagine her mother’s defeated look, the greying and sinking of her face, if she were suddenly to a

Not that Mrs. Nolan’s back room was any step up. Out one window there was a view of the funeral home next door; out the other was the yard, which the Nolan kids had scraped clean of grass and which was now a bog of half-frozen mud. Their dog, a mongrelized German shepherd, was kept tied there, where the kids alternately hugged and tormented it. (“Jimmy! Do