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wondering what happened to me.”
    ***
    He let her out of the car in front of her house but made no move to get out of the car himself.
    “Good night, Walt,” she said.
    “Good night,” he said abruptly. Then he put the car into gear and drove off, leaving her on the sidewalk. Slowly she went into the house.
    Her father looked up from the television set as she came in. She kissed his cheek. “Where’s Mom?”
    “She was tired and went up to bed,” he said. “You’re home early. Who brought you?”
    “A boy named Walt. He’s one of the members.”
    “Is he nice?”
    “Yes.” She started from the room, then stopped. “Dad.”
    “Yes?”
    “Is there such a thing as being too honest?”
    “That’s a strange question, darling. Why do you ask?”
    “I don’t know. It seems to me that whenever I answer a question truthfully my friends get upset with me.”
    He looked at her thoughtfully. “Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth. They would rather live with illusion.”
    “Is it always like that?”
    “In a way I guess it is. I try to be as honest as I can with people. But there are times when it’s not always possible.”
    “Are you honest with me?”
    “I hope I am.”
    “Do you love me?”
    He reached over and turned off the television set. Then he turned and held out his arms to her. “I think you know I do.”
    She knelt in front of his chair and laid her head on his chest. He closed his arms around her and held her quietly against him. For a long while they did not speak.
    Finally in a tight small voice of hurt she said, “You know, Dad, it’s not easy growing up to be a woman.”
    He kissed her cheek and tasted the salty wetness of the tears on her cheeks. A curious sadness came over him. “I know, darling,” he said gently. “But then I think that it’s not easy to grow up to be anything.”

Chapter 9
    It was like a storm that had passed. For weeks the pressure of having to know and understand the nature of her sexual being had been tearing her apart. Then one morning she awakened and the urgency was over.
    She knew what she did not know. But she was no longer driven by the need to force the knowledge. The things she felt were part of her expanding consciousness and somehow she knew she would experience them all in their own time. She became more herself, more relaxed, more able to enjoy the simple exchange of being with other people.
    Once again she and Bernie could be friends. Now when they parked and petted at the Point she was able to respond without having to push further and further into her desires. Sex no longer permeated her every thought. She knew that it would come in time. But it would come when she was equipped to deal with it as a part of her total being.
    And it was not with Bernie alone that she had dates. Martin too was a good friend. They would sit on her porch for hours talking about the books they had read and discussing different people in town. Often they shared laughter at the ridiculous postures that some people assumed in order to seem important. Once she even let Martin read a short story she had written.
    It was about a mayor of a small town who during the war became depressed because all the towns around him had war heroes and his small town did not. So he made up his mind to make a hero out of the first returning veteran. It happened to be a man who had gotten a medical discharge and had never been near the front. Nevertheless he was given a welcoming ceremony at which everything went wrong. In a way it was very much like the story of her real father but with a twist. In the midst of the proceedings, two M.P.s appeared and took the hero away, because it seemed that he had faked his discharge from a psycho ward.
    “It’s great, JeriLee,” he told her enthusiastically after he’d finished it. “I recognize almost everybody. You should send it away to a magazine.”
    She shook her head. “I’m not ready yet. I still feel there are too many things