I lay in my bed trying to feel the right thing for our dead President. But the tears that came up from a deep source inside me were strictly for me

I don’t know how you people do it.” Then directly to me: “Listen. Honey. Eugene doesn’t want to study with you. He is a smart boy. Doesn’t need help. You understand me. I am truly sorry if he told you you could come over. He cannot study with you. It’s nothing personal. You understand? We won’t be in this place much longer, no need for him to get close to people—it’ll just make it harder for him later. Run back home now.

There was an eerie feeling on the streets.

I knew I was his only friend so far, and I liked that, though I felt sad for him sometimes. “Skinny Bones” and the “Hick” was what they called us at school when we were seen together

What I wanted now was to enter that house I had watched for so many years. I wanted to see the other rooms where the old people had lived, and where the boy spent his time. Most of all, I wanted to sit at the kitchen table with Eugene like two adults, like the old man and his wife had done, maybe drink some coffee and talk about books

I began to think of the present more than of the future.

I was going to go to college and become a teacher

me feeling lost in a crowd of strangers all claiming to be my aunts, uncles, and cousins

She kept talking about virtue, morality, and other subjects that did not interest me in the least.

liked my secret sharing of his evenings

dishonest

It was not until Eugene moved into that house that I noticed that El Building blocked most of the sun, and that the only spot that got a little sunlight during the day was the tiny square of earth the old woman had planted with flowers.

rejection, snobbery, the wors

though my stomach was doing somersaults

I liked him right away because he sat at the kitchen table and read books for hours

I knew all this by watching them

I hated the city,

The chill was doing to me what it always did; entering my bones, making me cry, humiliating me.

I felt a burning on my cheeks and then my glasses fogged up

I was miserable

cold gray day

busive tongues of viragoes,3 the cursing of the unemployed, and the screeching of small children had been somehow muted. President Kennedy was a saint to these people

profound silence

Paterson, New Jersey

tokesie's married, with two babies chalked up on his fuselagealready, but as far as I can tell that's the only difference.

n I slid right downher voice into her living room. Her father and the other men were standing around in ice-creamcoats and bow ties and the women were in sandals picking up herring snacks on toothpicks off abig plate and they were all holding drinks the color of water with olives and sprigs of mint inthem. When my parents have somebody over they get lemonade and if it's a real racy affair Schlitzin tall glasses with "They'll Do It Every Time" cartoons stencilled on.

She must have felt in the corner of her eye me and over my shoulder Stokesie in the second slotwatching

A few house-slaves in pin curlers even looked around after pushing their carts past to make surewhat they had seen was correct

"I said I quit.

their unsuspected hero.

"I quit

There wasn't anybody

You know, it's one thing to have a girl in a bathing suit down on the beach, where what withthe glare nobody can look at each other much anyway, and another thing in the cool of the A & P,under the fluorescent lights, against all those stacked packages, with her feet paddling along nakedover our checkerboard green-and-cream rubber-tile floor

Walking into the A & P with your straps down,

What he meant was, our town is five miles from a beach, with a big summer colony out on thePoint, but we're right in the middle of town, and the women generally put on a shirt or shorts orsomething before they get out of the car into the street. And anyway these are usually womenwith six children and varicose veins mapping their legs and nobody, including them, could careless. As I say, we're right in the middle of town, and if you stand at our front doors you can seetwo banks and the Congregational church and the newspaper store and three real-estate offices andabout twenty-seven old free-loaders tearing up Central Street because the sewer broke again. It's notas if we're on the Cape; we're north of Boston and there's people in this town haven't seen theocean for twenty years.

my girls, but they're gone

I felt how hard the world was going to be to mehereafter

, I can follow this up with aclean exi

I don't

You didn't have to embarrass them.

hoping they'll stop and watch me, their unsuspected hero

ith your shoulders covered

We are decent," Queenie says suddenl

fingers icy cold

for the girls

could set off dynamite in an A & P and the people would by and large keep reaching and checkingoatmeal off their lists and muttering "Let me see, there was a third thing, began with A, asparagus,no, ah, yes, applesauce!" or whatever it is they do mutter.

Iwatched them all the way

She held her head so high

she had talked the other two into coming

You never know for sure how girls' minds work (do you really think it's a mind in there or just alittle buzz like a bee in a glassjar?

She came down a little hard on her heels

She was the queen. She kind of led them

I knowit made her day to trip me up

a witch

Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us liftedsomething from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils,we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair

The man himself lay in the bed

VTHE NEGRO met the first of the ladies at the front door and let them in, with their hushed,sibilant voices and their quick, curious glances, and then he disappeared. He walked rightthrough the house and out the back and was not seen again.

He talked to no one

And so she died. Fell ill in the house filled with dust and shadows, with only a dodderingNegro man to wait on her.

Miss Emily alonerefused to let them fasten the metal numbers above her door and attach a mailbox to it.

during which she gave lessons in china-painting.

too virulent and too furious to die

disgrace to the town and a badexample

Homer himself had remarked--he liked men

Miss Emily just stared at him

She carried her head high enough

Being left alone,

her great-aunt, had gone completely crazy

people had begun to feel really sorry for her.

will you accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad

Judge Stevens

Negroman--a young man then--going in and out with a market basket

I have no taxes in Jefferson

She did not ask them to sit. She just stood in the door and listened quietly until thespokesman came to a stumbling halt.

woman could have believed it.

a tradition, a duty, and a care

which no one save an old man-servant--a combined gardener and cook--hadseen in at least ten years

only Miss Emily's house was left