That night in bed, Faith cried so hard that Philip pushed aside the curtain with a screech along the rod and appeared in her side of the room in the street-lamp light. He wasn’t just her brother now; he was a male going off into the world. “Look, our folks are great,” he said. “We couldn’t have asked for a happier family. They’re kind of old-fashioned, but maybe they’re not totally wrong. You’ll get a good education. We both will.”
They were never particularly close after that. When he went off to the University of Minnesota, he wrote her letters describing the different clubs he had joined, and, as an afterthought, the classes he was taking. “This girl I’m dating, Sydelle, she helps me study,” he said. “She’s a smart one. Not as smart as you, though,” he felt he needed to add.
Later on, even into middle age and after, they still spoke every year on their shared birthday, though Philip was always the one to call her, never the other way around. Faith just didn’t ever feel compelled to pick up the phone and speak to him. He had gone away to college but had never become very intellectual. He’d once proudly told her that the last book he’d read was called Chicken Soup for the Realtor’s Soul. They had nothing in common anymore except a birthday.
Faith, forced to live at home when she went to school, became a sociology major at Brooklyn College, and she loved her classes, especially the ones where everyone got to talk. She found herself accepting offers of dates from boys she met at school, though always her mother or father stayed up and made sure she got home by her Cinderella curfew. It was maddening to see one of them waiting up in the living room, yawning like crazy and looking her over when she walked in, as if to check for external signs of an intact virginity. And once, when she stayed too late at a party, her father actually showed up at the house in Flatbush. He waited for her outside under a street lamp in his coat with the collar of his striped pajamas showing underneath. She was aghast to see him, and walked home beside him wordlessly.
In fact Faith held on to her virginity, not wanting something furtive and lurid to happen at a party or in the backseat of a Chevrolet. Sometimes Faith and a girl from her Logic of Inquiry class named Annie Silvestri went out for drinks at a bar near the school, and sat smoking Lucky Strikes and looking good. Within minutes they always received the attention of a table of guys, and there was a power to be found in that, and a power in walking away from it.
But also, the whole idea of sex—of wanting it, wanting intimacy, wanting experiences away from your parents—soon shifted. The world was changing, her parents had said, and it kept changing further. The day President Kennedy was assassinated, Faith and her friend Annie clung together and wept into each other’s wet neck. For months it was all they could think or talk about, and throughout that time, Faith spoke more in class, wrote her college exams with a harder, more furious pen. She wanted something; sex was still part of it, but not only. Finally Faith graduated, and though her parents assumed she would get a job and keep living at home until she found someone to marry, in the spring of 1965 she sat them down in the living room—it was gratifying to be the one with news this time—and announced that she and Annie were going off to Las Vegas together. They had decided on their destination almost arbitrarily—they both wanted experience, and Vegas seemed so different from Brooklyn.
“Absolutely not,” said her father. “We forbid it. We will cut off your funds. I’m serious, Faith.”
“All right, if that’s what you feel you need to do,” Faith said tightly.
Her parents didn’t go through with the threat, but she made sure never to ask them for any money. With savings from different part-time jobs over the years, Faith and Annie traveled on the 20th Century Limited to Chicago that summer, and from there they took a Greyhound bus to Las Vegas, where they were both immediately hired as cocktail waitresses at the Swann Hotel and Casino. Every night the cocktail waitresses walked the floor with their arms upraised, balancing trays, their hair swirled in matching Nefertiti beehives, smiling vaguely at all and none.
Faith Frank at twenty-two was tall and long-waisted but also small-boned. Her face had its own contradictions, the forehead high and the nose unusually strong, nearly beakish, but in all that strength was a great beauty and an unmissable intelligence and sympathy. She had large gray eyes and a cascade of long, dark, curling hair, though the styles of 1965 dictated that female hair often be kept aloft, and that it be sprayed generously and indiscriminately to hold it there. “We should buy stock in Aqua Net,” Annie said once as they got ready for an evening, in the room they shared in the unofficial cocktail waitresses’ barracks, on a side street off the Strip.
As if making up for lost time, Faith got involved with a blackjack dealer at Monty’s. When she finally went to bed with him she was disappointed, for he sprawled upon her sluggishly, his energy so low that she thought: This is sex? This? as she lay beneath him like someone pinned by an overturned car. At work, there was the opposite problem. Faith found herself slapping off men; they didn’t really bother her so much as lightly disgust her. Because how could men who behaved like this think that women would ever like them? How could men like this even hold their heads up? Yet they did.
One night at the casino, making the usual perambulation with her tray amid the bing-bonging and the clash of glass and the drifting web of smoke, Faith saw a smartly put-together man and woman sitting at one of the blackjack tables. They looked older than Faith but younger than almost everyone who came in there. The woman sat very close to him, whispering in his ear. He was a slender man with close-cut black hair and dark eyes. She kept whispering to him, and he nodded but seemed detached. Eventually the woman went to the powder room and the man took that opportunity to glance up at Faith. “I probably should pack it in now,” he said. “I’m down by a lot. But it’s hard to just walk away.”
“You should. The odds are against you,” she said. This was the kind of remark she was expressly forbidden to make, and he regarded her with surprise. “I mean, I’m here every night,” Faith went on. “Basically, there should be a sign up that says ‘Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here.’”
The dealer, a rigid man in a Stetson, regarded Faith with suspicion. “What’s she saying to you?” he asked the man.
“She is quoting literature,” he said, and then he turned back to Faith. “So what do you think I should do?” he asked.
“I’ve already told you.”
He smiled. “I imagine you’re full of opinions on a lot of subjects.”
“You don’t think I’m just another girl bringing you your Scotch?”
“No,” he said. “And you don’t think I’m just another low-level executive in the field of cookies and crackers, here in Vegas for some relaxation?”
“Cookies and crackers are important,” Faith said. “Especially if you’re a starving person.”
He smiled. “Well, if you’re ever starving,” he said, “come to me and I’ll feed you.” At that moment, the woman he was with materialized. He smiled with regret at Faith, then turned away from her, his hand on the small of this woman’s back. Why do they call it the small of a back? Faith suddenly wondered. What a strange word.
Faith spent six months in Las Vegas, getting involved for a while with a trumpet player at the Sands named Harry Bell, who invited her to come see any show she wanted. During the seduction period, he invited her into the main nightclub at the Sands when no one was there; in the chilly, enormous room he took her up onto the stage, and she said, “Won’t we get in trouble?” but he said, “Nah.” Faith stood on the dark stage in this place where all the top acts had stood, and she looked out into the darkness, imagining what it might be like to have people sitting in seats looking up at you with absorption, listening hard. But she wasn’t talented, she couldn’t sing or perform in any way, and so that would never happen.