But it is simpler to take on the cold glaze of sophistication than to
remain simple. When the eyelids become weary, it is as if little
red dancing shoes were being wrapped away forever, or a very tight
heartstring had suddenly sagged, and when plucked at could no longer
plong.

To Marylin, whose neck very often ached clear down into her shoulder
blade and up into a bandeau around her brow, and to whom city walls
were sometimes like slaps confronting her whichever way she turned, her
enjoyment of Coney Island was as uncomplex as A B C. Untortured by any
awarenesses of relative values, too simple to strive to keep simple,
unself-conscious, and with a hungry heart, she was not a spectator, half
ashamed of being amused. She _was_ Coney Island! Her heart a shoot the
chutes for sheer swoops of joy, her eyes full of confetti points, the
surf creaming no higher than her vitality.

And it was so the evening following, as she came dancing down the
kicked-up sand of the beach, in a little bright-blue frock, mercerized
silk, if you please, with very brief sleeves that ended right up in the
jolliest part of her arm, with a half moon of vaccination winking out
roguishly beneath a finish of ribbon bow, and a white-canvas sport hat
with a jockey rosette to cap the little climax of her, and by no means
least, a metal coin purse, with springy insides designed to hold exactly
fifty cents in nickels.

Once on the sand, which ran away, tickling each step she took, her
spirits, it must be admitted, went just a little crazily off. The
window, you see, where Marylin sewed her buttonholes six days the week,
faced a brick wall that peeled with an old scrofula of white paint.
Coney Island faced a world of sky. So that when she pinched Getaway's
nose in between the lips of her coin purse and he, turning a double
somersault right in his checked suit, landed seated in a sprawl of mock
daze, off she went into peals of laughter only too ready to be released.

He bought her a wooden whirring machine, an instrument of noise that,
because it was not utilitarian, became a toy of delicious sound.

They rode imitation ocean waves at five cents a voyage, their only _mal
de mer_, regret when it was over. He bought her salt-water taffy, and
when the little red cave of her mouth became too ludicrously full of the
pully stuff he tried to kiss its state of candy paralysis, and instantly
she became sober and would have no more of his nonsense.

"Getaway," sh