“Tell me....” She talks in this low, intense kind of voice. “Are you in
school with Mary?”
So I tell her I live in Manhattan, and how I ran into Mary when I had Cat
on the beach, because that makes it sound sort of respectable, not like a
pickup. But she doesn’t seem to be interested in Cat and the beach.
“What do you _read_? In your school?” she asks, launching each question
like a torpedo.
I remember Mary saying something about her mother and poetry, so I say,
“Well, uh—last week we read ‘The Highwayman’ and ‘The Wreck of the
Hesperus.’ They’re about—I mean, we were studying metaphors and similes.
Looking at the ocean today, I sure can see what Longfellow meant about the
icy....”