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Show 128 "You want to leave? Where to?" "I don't know. Maybe I'll join the WACs." "Naw, don't do that." Didn't she know they had a shady reputation? "I could go to San Francisco and work in the shipyards. Be a welder or something." "Naw, don't do that." Didn't she know those women were rumored to make extra money on the side with the men workers? "Probably what I'll do is go to Seattle. Helen is up there now with her new husband. They have defense plants there too." "Why don't you get a job as a secretary or something?" "Chess, I can't even type. I didn't take it in high school." She asked me to dinner. She was staying with Cathy, now that she couldn't take staying out on the farm with her brother and his family any longer, in a small apartment Cathy had above Cosgrove's Grocery on Main Street. Cathy asked Rex Gilbert, home from college for Christmas vacation. A handsome guy with a great smile, he had been president of our class since the eighth grade. The eighth grade was the first class to elect a president, Rex, and then the Freshman Class, Sophomore Class, Junior Class, but not the Senior Class. That year he was student body president and he couldn't be both. After fall semester he was going to drop school and join the Marines, and I was so used to his assured manner that I was surprised that he worried openly about going into the service. I told him not to worry, his squad would probably elect him president. All of us except Kate drank Seagrams and Coke, and Rex's stories about Boulder and fraternity life were pallid beside mine about all the drinks and bars I'd tried in San Francisco, about men who had died building those great bridges, about how they'd lifted Union Square up and put several levels of |