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Ivy kept her face hidden behind a day-old Houston Chronicle until the bus rumbled out of the station.

The early-morning sky lightened as they crossed into Louisiana.

She lowered the paper and gazed out the window, listened to the conversation of the couple seated in front of her.

They made no attempt to keep their voices low, apparently trusting their unusual French to maintain their privacy as they argued about a dog.

She was getting too fat, said the man. She was overfed.

He would starve her, complained the woman. Just like he had starved the last one.

What fantasyland did she live in, asked the man. Their last one had been thick as a sausage and keeled over from heart failure.

Heart failure brought on by malnutrition, the woman insisted.

Ivy laughed. Then put a hand to her mouth. She didn’t want to draw any attention, but it was too late. A man across the aisle stared at her. He wore a gray linen suit, shapeless and wrinkled. She shook open her newspaper, raised it to cover her face once again.

“You speak Cajun?” the linen suit man inquired. When Ivy didn’t answer, he asked again, more loudly. “Excuse me, do you speak Cajun?”

So that explained the strangeness of their French.

The man cleared his throat, about to ask again, no doubt in an even louder voice.

Nearby, passengers raised their heads from their magazines or stirred from their naps to look.

If she didn’t answer him, they’d soon glare at her with disapproval.

Not at him. She knew from experience that boys were allowed to call attention to themselves.

And ignoring them only aggravated them. It was probably worse with grown men.

“French,” she said.

“Not from Louisiana.” It was a statement, not a question, so Ivy let it lie. She pretended to read. He allowed this for a bit, then pressed: “The accents don’t trouble you?”

The couple with the fat, starving dog had shut up. Ivy wondered if the man’s question offended them.

She shrugged. “I don’t really notice the accents.

” Mme Forrest said her French was excellent.

She’d learned a lot from Madame, not all of it language related.

Like how to choose the correct shade of lipstick, how to walk in a pencil skirt, how to twist her hair into a chignon.

Madame gave Ivy French novels to read, made her discuss the plots in French, made her discuss everything in French.

She did not let pass any errors in grammar or pronunciation.

Ivy had repeated and repeated Madame until her sentences were perfect.

“That’s a pretty strong accent not to notice,” said the linen suit man. Ivy shrugged again. The Cajun man turned and glared at them both.

“Maybe I could pay you to be my translator for some business I have in New Orleans. If that’s your final destination.”

The Cajun woman muttered something about the morals of today’s young women, and the man across the aisle smirked.

“You don’t need a translator,” said Ivy. “You speak French yourself.”

He chuckled. “Smart girl,” he said. “Smart girl. Speaks French. I wonder if she needs a job.”

Ivy raised her Chronicle again, and the two didn’t speak for the rest of the trip.

But as the bus pulled into the New Orleans station, he leaned across the aisle and offered her his card.

“This is a family occasion for me,” he said, waving his hand to encompass, she supposed, the city of New Orleans.

“I’m headed to Arizona from here. To pick up some linguists. For some work in California.”

Ivy took the nondescript beige card. On the front, shiny raised letters spelled out Sam Benson, Associated International Consultants , above a phone number and a PO Box address.

“Work for people who aren’t bothered by accents. If you decide you need a job, give me a call.”

It was shocking how quickly New Orleans depleted her money.

Ivy spent her days walking. In a café window she saw a Waitress Wanted sign.

She didn’t want to pour coffee for the sad men sitting inside, hunched over their racing forms, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.

Checking her reflection in the glass, she put a hand in her skirt pocket to fish out her lipstick.

Her fingers brushed the business card. She ran her thumb over the raised print of Sam Benson’s name, then walked on.

By the end of the week, she had just enough money left for four more nights at her boardinghouse, and that was only if she got by on cigarettes and coffee most of the day.

In the phone booth, she counted out her change and stared at Sam Benson’s card.

She was tired and hungry. Worse, she was lonely.

She missed Ruth. Ruth would like New Orleans—the moss-choked live oaks, the intricate wrought-iron balconies.

Ivy imagined showing her around, telling her where to buy the best pastries, where to hear the best blues, not that Ivy could afford either of those things yet.

She’d never spent more than a day or two apart from Ruth, and the absence of her sister (of Ruth, she instructed herself sternly) made her chest ache.

New Orleans would be so much better if she were there—even if they were both tired and hungry.

But being with Ruth meant calling home. And if she did that, her mother and father (Georgeanne and Tom, she instructed herself) would swoop down to get her.

They’d hug her too tightly, fuss over her, insist that she was theirs, that they were hers.

And if she got hungry enough and tired enough, she’d be desperate to believe them.

She’d return to Enid, and they’d all pretend she’d never left.

She lifted the receiver and dialed the number on the card, but Sam Benson didn’t answer. A crisp-voiced woman said, “This is his answering service. Leave a number, and we’ll have him call you back.”

She touched the phone to its cradle, but she’d already paid for the call. And she didn’t want to wear a pastel uniform and serve coffee to despondent men in cafés. She put the phone back to her ear. “I don’t have a number. He said he had a job for me.”

The woman was silent.

“Translating.”

Still nothing.

“In California?” She was being ridiculous. He was just a man who wanted a quick lay in New Orleans. How many girls did he meet on buses and try to pick up with this line about a job in California? She was such a fool.

“No address, either, I suppose,” said the woman.

“Well, just for a few more days. It’s temporary.”

“Tell me the address. If there’s a job for you, we’ll deliver a train ticket tomorrow. You must be there to sign for it. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” said Ivy.

“Tomorrow,” repeated the woman. “If you’re not there to sign, don’t bother calling again.”

In California, Ivy was surrounded by recent Ivy League graduates who spent their breaks discussing their deferment potential.

They snickered at her accent, both her French (it seemed Madame’s pronunciation hadn’t been quite so refined after all) and her English.

But she had no trouble translating the French of the Viet and Lao speakers, while some of the Ivy Leaguers, with their perfect accents, were shuffled into other jobs.

“Something more consonant with their abilities,” said Sam Benson.

She learned to keep a weather eye on the fullness of the ashtrays, on the emptiness of the coffeepot.

Whenever either approached its extreme, she made herself scarce.

She was the only woman there, and in her presence, the college boys became incompetent.

I will not be my mother, she vowed, picturing George trailing Tom as he dropped his travel case, his hat, his tie—gathering them up, brushing off the imaginary dust, tucking them away in their respective places.

But one afternoon she was so captivated by a conversation on the tapes, she neglected to pay attention.

Carlyle, who wore his Princeton tie every day, despite how incredibly square that looked even in their staid government office building, thrust the percolator under her nose.

She jumped. Then took her time stopping the tape.

“Oh, no thank you,” she said, indicating her half-full cup. “I have plenty still.”

Carlyle had pale, almost translucent skin that pinked up when he was excited or upset, and rabbity little eyes that narrowed at her. “No, dummy,” he said. “Pot’s empty.”

Usually the “dummy” remained unspoken. Though she knew it was how they thought of her.

Her accent, her education, her three skirts and three blouses that she mixed and matched in as many combinations as possible (which never disguised the fact that she had only three skirts and three blouses), and, more than anything, her being female, all pegged her as not quite a person in their eyes.

She was their dancing bear, their horse that could count.

If he hadn’t called her a dummy, she might have accepted the pot from him, rinsed it out, and set it up to perk again.

But he had said it out loud. And everyone in the room had heard. She felt them assuming her submission, their smug confidence that she’d do their bidding.

“Oh,” she replied, putting a hand to her throat. “Oh.” She allowed herself a giggle. “Oh, you wouldn’t want me to do that. I’m completely hopeless at that sort of thing.” She giggled again, just to watch his face turn vermilion.