My story lay on the table. I pushed it forward an inch.
   "What is it about?" she asked.
   I said, "Hazel."
   "Shit," she said. "Read it."

   "Done figured it out," Benjamin heard someone call out...."Your problem's with me being a garbage man, right? I mean, if I was some kind of lawyer, some doctor type, you wouldn't give a poop whether I was wearing your cap. Hey, you'd probably be proud as pink. But a garbage man...."

   Because you will arrive first, you will spend at least ten minutes worrying that he is not going to show up. And even though he will eventually show up, the fact that you have had to entertain the thought of being humiliatingly stood up will lodge in your consciousness next to the vows you made in college about sisterhood and not sleeping with men in relationships.

   Winter, 1960. Pickerington, Ohio. Dixie Cover's basement. Sixteen of us, a carefully balanced eight boys and eight girls, one third of our ninth-grade class, crowded in a tight circle between the clothes washer and the hot water tank. On the floor, a Coke bottle spun in a green blur, its neck going around and around like the hand of some cosmic clock.