And from here that seems not at all bad. Here is a great place to be in love; to get a land-grant education; to own a mortgage; to see a game under the lights as the old dusky daylight falls to blue-black, a backdrop of stars and stony buildings, while friendly Negroes and Polacks roll their pants legs up, sit side by side, feeling the cool Canadian breeze off the lake. So much that is explicable in American life is made in Detroit.

And I could be a perfect native if I wasn’t settled in New Jersey. I could move here, join the Michigan alums and buy a new car every year right at the factory door. Nothing would suit me better in middle life than to set up in a little cedar-shake builder’s-design in Royal Oak or Dearborn and have a try at another Michigan girl (or possibly even the same one, since we would have all that ready-made to build on). My magazine could install me as the midwest office. It might even spark me to try my hand at something more adventurous—a guiding service to the northern lakes, for example. A change to pleasant surroundings is always a tonic for creativity.

· · ·

“It’s just like it’s still winter here.” Vicki’s nose is to the bus’s tinted window. We have passed the big tire miles back. She peered at it silently as we drifted by, a tourist seeing a lesser pyramid. “Well,” she said as a big fenced-in Ford plant, flat and wide as Nebraska, hauled next into view, “I got that all behind me.”

“If you don’t like the weather, wait ten minutes. That’s an expression we used to say in college.”

She fattens her cheeks as Walter Reuther Boulevard flashes by, then the Fisher Building and the lumpish Olympia rises in the furred, gray distance. “They say that in Texas all the time. They prob’ly say it everywhere.” She looks back at the cityscape. “You know what my daddy says about Detroit?”

“He must not’ve liked it very much.”

“When I told him I was coming out today with you, he just said, ‘If Detroit was ever a state, it’d be New Jersey.’” She smiles at me cunningly.

“Detroit doesn’t have the diversity, though I really like both places.”

“He likes New Jersey, but he didn’t like this place.” We swerve into the long concrete trench of the Lodge freeway, headed to midtown. “He hasn’t ever liked a place much, which I always thought was kind of a shame. This place doesn’t look so bad, though. Lots of colored, but that’s all right with me. They gotta live, too.” She nods seriously to herself, then takes my hand and squeezes it as we enter a vapor-lit freeway tunnel which takes us to the riverfront and the Pontchartrain.

“This was the first city I ever knew. We used to come into town when I was in college and go to burlesque shows and smoke cigars. It seemed like the first American city to me.”

“That’s the way Dallas is to me. I’m not upset to be gone from it, though. Not a little teensy.” She purses her lips hard and turns loose of my hand. “My life’s lots better now, I’ll tell you that.”

“Where would you rather be?” I ask as the milky light of Jefferson Avenue dawns into our dark bus and passengers begin to murmur and clutch belongings up and down the aisle. Someone asks the driver about another stop farther along the hotel loop. We are all of us itchy to be there.

Vicki looks at me solemnly, as if the gravity of this city had entered her, making all lightheartedness seem sham. She is a girl who knows how to be serious. I had hoped, of course, she’d say there’s no place she’d rather than with m-e me. But I cannot mold all her wishes to my model for them, fulfill her every dream as I do my own.