Angels Go Naked. Cornelia Nixon

you aren’t cute, of course,” she said, and tousled Margy’s hair.

      Margy assumed that Ann knew nothing of Rachel’s other life, and that it would be best to keep it to herself. Then one Sunday she called Ann’s, and Ann’s mother said that she and Rachel had gone out. Another time she stopped by, on her way home from music school, and found Rachel cooking in the kitchen with Ann’s mother. Ann’s mother was formal and remote and tall, a suntanned woman in yachting clothes who smoked and watched you without smiling while you spoke. Margy was afraid to say a word to her, and she had always called her Mrs. Church. But in the kitchen she was laughing, deep and slow, stabbing a spoon into a pot, while Rachel watched her, hands on hips.

      “Betsy! Not like that!” Rachel cried, and tried to wrestle the spoon away from her, both of them laughing like maniacs.

      Margy stood chuckling in the kitchen doorway. Mrs. Church whirled at the sound, face sobering at once.

      “Oh, hello, Margaret. Annie’s in her room, I think.”

      Margy stood on one foot, smiling, but they did not go on. Dutifully, she went to look for Ann as peals of giggles echoed from the kitchen walls.

      That spring, Margy fell in love. Yale was taking women now, and her father’d asked her to apply, since he had gone there, and to try it for at least a year instead of Juilliard. To help convince her, he arranged for her to meet the son of a new partner in his firm, who was finishing at Yale and would be entering the law school in the fall. Henry Bergstrom was handsome and sandy-haired like Gary Slade, but soft-spoken and grown-up and kind, with broad shoulders and a narrow waist and one chipped tooth that gave his grin a boyish charm. He was from New York City, had lived in Texas and Brazil, his family having only recently relocated to Boston, and he was a fan of carnaval and soccer as well as football and World War II. His voice thrilled her, deep and faintly drawling, but abrupt and furtive when he was moved.

      “Where have you been?” he would say quickly on the phone, as if in pain, when she’d been practicing too long. But in person he might hold an ice-cream cone out too high, focus his eyes above her head, and gravely search for her. The Brazilians had a dozen words for “shorty” and “little kid,” along with maybe a hundred each for “pester,” “scram,” and anything to do with sex, though he wouldn’t tell her what they were.

      “Hey, pixote, what’s it to you?” he would say when she asked, or call her tico-tico, catatau.

      He took her to the symphony, where he listened with shining eyes, turning at the end to say he’d rather hear her play. She gave a solo recital in June, and he sat up straight and rapt beside her dad.

      “Pretty good for a pixote,” he whispered in her ear, standing by protectively as Ann and Elizabeth and Rachel all surged up to kiss her cheek. He drove a powder-blue MG, and Rachel called him Ken, after the boyfriend of the Barbie doll.

      “Is Ken coming up this weekend again?” she’d say, staring with outraged onyx eyes.

      Margy got into Yale, and agreed to give it a try. Henry came home to Boston for the summer, worked for his dad, and she saw him almost every night. They went to hear the Pops, and to restaurants a few times, then settled into eating with her father or his parents, and after dinner going for a walk. Henry didn’t really like to go out at night.

      “When I’m married, I won’t go anywhere at all,” he said, blue eyes warm. “I’ll have my own fun at home.”

      The last thing every night before he left, in the car or on her porch or in her living room, he’d lean close and kiss her a few times, always stopping before she wanted to. Once he pulled her down onto his parents’ couch, stopped as if switched off, and apologized. On the way home he talked about the beauty of carnaval, how all rules were suspended there (“Don’t you ever go to one,” he said, grinning hard, gripping her hand). But a few nights later in the car he slid one hand up her side, where he could feel a little of her breast—stinging her so unexpectedly with want that tears spilled from the corners of her eyes.

      “I may have to sign up for a nose job soon,” she said one sultry afternoon, twirling on a swing in a park near Rachel’s house. Ann was at the Vineyard with her family, and Rachel moped on the next swing, rolling a joint in her lap. “That is, if things go on this way.”

      Pulling down her heavy black sunglasses, Rachel regarded her with some alarm. “You wouldn’t. Not with Ken?”

      Margy tipped her head back toward the ground, viewing the world upside down. “That’s who it’s done with,” she pointed out. “By virgin straights. The Kens of this world.”

      Rachel pushed her sunglasses back up over her eyes and looked inscrutable.

      “Not necessarily,” she finally said, and gave one fleeting grin, though she would not explain.

      In August Henry’s parents left for their summer place down on Long Island, and Henry lingered on alone. At first they pretended nothing had changed, eating at Margy’s, taking walks. Then one night he made dinner for some friends from Yale, at his parents’ house in Brookline, and invited Margy too. The friends were a couple, tall gazellelike blonds who almost looked alike, both living with their parents for the summer, and happy to be out of their sight.

      They all drank gin and tonic before Henry’s manly fare (steak and potatoes and oversalted salad), and then the gazelles disappeared, into Henry’s bedroom, it turned out, with his war books and his model planes. Margy and Henry climbed up to the widow’s walk on the third floor, where they could watch the city lights reflected on the river in the summer dusk, Margy in a dress that tied behind the neck and almost nothing else, Henry in a seersucker jacket. She was quivering lightly, not from cold, and when he ran his fingers down the bare skin of her back, she turned and started kissing him.

      Startled, he opened his eyes wide and seized her like a tortured man. Moments later they were in his parents’ bed, pressing together through their clothes until she lost all sense of being in a room, or even in a body of her own, apart from his. Then he stopped. Fingers in the tight curls at her scalp, he shook her face from side to side.

      “Negativo, pixote,” he said, and left the room.

      Henry left to join his parents in Wading River, and suddenly her life went blank. She called her friends, but already they seemed remote. She hadn’t seen them often over the summer, and Elizabeth and Ann had had a fight, though neither would say why. (“It’s me,” Rachel explained. “Elizabeth is jealous of the time I spend with Ann.”) Margy saw Ann a few times, but never alone, no matter what they planned: when Ann arrived, Rachel would be with her, grinning and relaxed and full of little jokes. They were both staying home, Ann to go to Radcliffe and Rachel to B.U., and Rachel seemed almost to live at Ann’s place now. Her clothes were hung on chairs in Ann’s room, and once Margy found her lying on the canopy bed, an arm across her eyes.

      “Ann needs support right now,” Rachel explained when Margy asked her what was going on. Since they’d left Huntington, Ann’s mother had started a campaign against Ann, telling her she was spoiled and self-centered, and other cruel, unnecessary remarks.

      “Last year, when your friends found you so charming,” Betsy had lately said in reference to the winter festival. Ann’s eyes were always shining with leashed tears, and Rachel hovered close to her, one hand on her shoulder, staring at anyone who came near.

      “Oh, for God’s sake,” Margy said one hot night in Cambridge as they were walking toward a party full of Rachel’s friends. “People’s mothers say things like that. It’s just the ordinary coin of mother-daughter economics. You’re lucky that you have a mom at all.”

      Rachel’s mouth fell open as if Margy’d fired a gun. Clutching Ann’s shoulders, she steered her away. Later she cornered Margy at the party, in a