The Best of Science Fiction 12

The American G.I. abroad puzzled foreigners by endless insistence on having something in his mouth ... gum, candy, cokes... Time's cover (May 15,1950) pictures the globe sucking on a coke. Love that coke, love that American way of life. Robert Winship Woodruff, coke executive, says, "We're playing the world long." That would seem to be a very small gamble, with the globe itself becoming the cokesucker.

(McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride)

Kit Reed's 1967 novel The Better Part (Farrar) was an intense, subjective plunge into the life of the teenage daughter of the supervisor of an institution for troubled girls. As it happens, I was the teenage daughter of an institutional supervisor (in what used to be called an orphanage). I knew how right the novel was.

I also know Kit Reed: a quick — slender — tidy woman; a casual-but-good skirt-and-sweater-type New Englander. A former award-winning newspaperwoman, a recent Guggenheim fellow, the first American to receive an Abraham Woursell five-year grant. Married to a warm, witty, pipe-smoking English Professor: three small children, large house, student lodger, frequent houseguests.

I wrote her a bitter admiring letter: how could anyone in her world know that much about my world? She said institutions were institutions, and she had been to a girls' boarding school.

Inside every thin woman there is a fat woman, screaming ... ?