up a similar corps of boobies with binoculars. Or maybe the objective is merely public relations, getting as many citizens as possible fired up about the Soviet threat so they’ll support more money for the military. The one thing she knows for sure, it isn’t for what they say it’s for. But no matter. She just wanted one night a week on her own.

In between plane sightings, she gazes out at the darkness, at the ghostly streetlights of Park Forest, the yellow postage stamps of bedroom windows, the stacked blinking red lights of radio and television towers, the as-yet-nonradioactive glow of Chicago on the north horizon. She spends a lot of time looking at the stars, and after her first three weeks of wondering why she had never taken the time to learn any constellations other than the Big Dipper and Orion, she bought a star chart. Tonight’s full moon doesn’t make for good stargazing, but on other nights she’s found Hercules, Draco, Cassiopeia, Libra, Boötes, the Little Dipper. She’s seen lots of shooting stars, and gets a little thrill every time. Meteor flash!

The cool air, the quiet night sounds of wind in the trees, rustling nocturnal ground animals, flitting bats—it reminds her of camping out in the Poconos with the dear trusting adolescent girls when she taught them horseback riding during her college summers. And it reminds her, way way back, of summer nights lying in the back field with her cousins on the Alabama farm, telling jokes and having simple fun, when her mother wanted her to come in and she wanted to stay out.

There’s a percolator in the corner (Sarge has taped a sheet of paper above it: “An alert spotter is a reliable spotter”) and she fills a cup, sits again, hugs her wool coat close. Eyes and ears of the Air Force—that’s what they call the gallant G.O.C. “Look to the sky!” the posters say. She sips her coffee. Imogen is having a great Cold War.

She and Vernon never got a honeymoon. Three days after the wedding, Imogen was due to start work at Victor and Vernon had to prep for his teaching.

She remembers sitting in the last row for the lectures in graduate school. She wouldn’t have admitted it, but she felt intimidated. All those entitled men in front of her. And among them Vernon, whom she first noticed because he had the broadest shoulders. He was so broken up when his fiancée returned the ring. It touched her to see this big man, so capable and confident, who’d come from a family of nincompoops and was making something of himself, it really touched her to see him cry like a little boy. And she was realizing at the time that she didn’t much like physics. What had she been thinking? Her real love at Mount Holyoke had been horses, but what kind of future was in that unless she snagged a man with a heap of money, the way Mac did? (Mac has her own horse farm now, the lucky duck.)

To be honest, she’s having some trouble getting used to the idea that now she needs to be responsible. This is where her mother would make that tight little prim little mouth and say, I told you so. Imogen thinks sometimes with great longing of the carefree days when Mac and she used to take off for the National Horse Show in New York City. They’d stay in Madison Square Garden fifteen hours a day because they couldn’t afford to leave and then have to pay another admission fee, and they’d eat nothing but hot dogs because they didn’t have enough money to eat anything else. She tried talking about this once to Vernon, but he didn’t understand. Having extricated himself from his hopeless family, he couldn’t afford not to be sensible. She guesses she admires him for that.

Her mother gave her such a hard time when she got engaged. She knew it meant Imogen slipping out of her control. Typical for her, she dragooned Imogen’s dad into mounting the assault, and typical for him, he went along like a mouse. Vernon seems a fine fellow, etc, he wrote to her, but why not wait a year to make certain the feelings will last, you’re still young blather blather. They were always standing in her way, always second-guessing her. But she was almost twenty-two, and guess what, dear folks, she could do whatever she damned well pleased. She picked out for herself a new plaid dress to celebrate and brought her eighteen hands of blue-ribbon manhood to DC and for once she was the one who asked her father to get out his stupid camera. And in every photo she’s beaming.

She hears another plane, approaching from the west. Locates it, makes a stab at identification, calls it in, logs it. Even if this is pointless, there’s something satisfying about the orderliness. It’s like filing things away, all in the right place, who gives a shit if you never look at it again.

Her mother really started to give her a hard time in her adolescence, criticizing her attitudes, her opinions. Especially her looks. Imogen understands now that when she was fifteen, her mother, who’d always been considered the beauty of her family, was fifty-two. Something going on there.

Half an hour of nothing goes by. Imogen identifies Cygnus and Lyra. Is that Corona Borealis, near the horizon? Thinking of when she was fifteen, she remembers her first civil defense gig, riding horses through Rock Creek Park. Was it Marx who said that history repeats itself? In her case, she gets two farces. Fifteen more minutes. Still nothing. The night air smells damp and earthy and good. A whiff of cigarette smoke rising from below. Smoke ’em if you got ’em, Sarge.

Sometimes on very quiet nights she puts on the light for a minute and has fun perusing the G.O.C.’s monthly magazine, Aircraft Flash. It turns out the biggest problem in more-rural areas is that whole

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