she remembered putting the plate carefully down on the gravelly ground and then starting to step on it and stopping , remembered taking off her plain cotton panties and putting them into the pocket where the plate had been , and then carefully slipping the first finger of her left hand carefully against the cut in her at the place where old stupid god had joined her and all other girls and women imperfectly , but something about that place must be right , because she remembered the jolt , remembered wanting to press , remembered not pressing , remembered how delicious her vagina had been naked , without the cotton panties in the way of it and the world , and she had not pressed , not until her shoe pressed , her black patent leather shoe , not until her shoe pressed down on the plate , then she pressed on the cut with her finger the way she was pressing on the blue woman 's forspecial china plate with her foot , she remembered the way the black patent leather shoe covered the delicate blue webbing on the edge of the plate , she remembered the press , yes , she remembered pressing in the drawers , pressing with finger and foot , remembered the delicious promise of finger and cut , remembered that when the plate snapped with a bitter brittle snap a similar brittle pleasure had skewered upward from that cut into her guts like an arrow , she remembered the cry which had broken from her lips , an unpleasant cawing like the sound of a crow scared up from a cornpatch , she could remember staring dully at the fragments of the plate and then taking the plain white cotton panties slowly out of her dress pocket and putting them on again , step-ins , so she had heard them called in some time unhoused in memory and drifting loose like turves on a flood-tide , step-ins , good , because first you stepped out to do your business and then you stepped back in , first one shiny patent leather shoe and then the other , good , panties were good , she could remember drawing them up her legs so clearly , drawing them past her knees , a scab on the left one almost ready to fall off and leave clean pink new babyskin , yes , she could remember so clearly it might not have been a week ago or yesterday but only one single moment ago , she could remember how the waistband had reached the hem of her party dress , the clear contrast of white cotton against brown skin , like cream , yes , like that , cream from a pitcher caught suspended over coffee , the texture , the panties disappearing under the hem of the dress , except then the dress was burnt orange and the panties were not going up but down but they were still white but not cotton , they were nylon , cheap see-through nylon panties , cheap in more ways than one , and she remembered stepping out of them , she remembered how they glimmered on the floormat of the '46 dodge desoto , yes , how white they were , how cheap they were , not anything dignified like underwear but cheap panties , the girl was cheap and it was good to be cheap , good to be on sale , to be on the block not even like a whore but like a good breedsow ; she remembered no round china plate but the round white face of a boy , some surprised drunk fraternity boy , he was no china plate but his face was as round as the blue woman 's china plate had been , and there was webbing on his cheeks , and this webbing looked as blue as the webbing on the blue woman 's forspecial china plate had been , but that was only because the neon was red , the neon was garish , in the dark the neon from the roadhouse sign made the spreading blood from the places on his cheeks where she had clawed him look blue , and he had said why did youwhy did you why did you do , and then he unrolled the window so he could get his face outside to puke and she remembered hearing dodie stevens on the jukebox , singing about tan shoes with pink shoelaces and a big panama with a purple hatband , she remembered the sound of his puking was like gravel in a cement mixer , and his penis , which moments before had been a livid exclamation point rising from the tufted tangle of his pubic hair , was collapsing into a weak white question mark ; she remembered the hoarse gravel sounds of his vomiting stopped and then started again and she thought well i guess he ai n't made enough to lay this foundation yet and laughing and pressing her finger ( which now came equipped with a long shaped nail ) against her vagina which was bare but no longer bare because it was overgrown with its own coarse briared tangle , and there had been the same brittle breaking snap inside her , and it was still as much pain as it was pleasure ( but better , far better , than nothing at all ) , and then he was grabbing blindly for her and saying in a hurt breaking tone oh you goddamned nigger cunt and she went on laughing just the same , dodging him easily and snatching up her panties and opening the door on her side of the car , feeling the last blind thud of his fingers on the back of her blouse as she ran into a may night that was redolent of early honeysuckle , red-pink neon light stuttering off the gravel of some postwar parking lot , stuffing her panties , her cheap slick nylon panties not into the pocket of her dress but into a purse jumbled with a teenager 's cheerful conglomeration of cosmetics , she was running , the light was stuttering , and then she was twenty-three and it was not panties but a rayon scarf , and she was casually slipping it into her purse as she walked along a counter in the nice notions section of macy'sda scarf which sold at that time for $ 1.99 .